Isabella Clough Marinaro, Bjørn Thomassen, eds. Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 310 pp. $32.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-01295-1; $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-01288-3.
Reviewed by Francesco Ricatti (University of the Sunshine Coast)
Published on H-Italy (February, 2015)
Commissioned by Matteo Pretelli (University of Naples "L'Orientale")
A Global City
Global Rome is an important collection of essays that will prove influential in reshaping the urban study of the eternal city. It offers a refreshing and welcome approach to the study of this complex, ever-shifting, contradictory, and ambiguous city, through ethnographic and multidisciplinary approaches. It explores different yet interrelated urban contexts, including housing, schools, sporting arenas, markets and shopping centers, social centers and cultural venues, and urban agricultural fields. It looks at different ethnic groups, including migrants from Senegal and Bangladesh, and the community of Xoraxané Roma. It considers the devastating effects on neoliberal policies on the social fabric of the city. And it calls into questions established dichotomies such as local and global, center and periphery, and past and present, to argue for a recognition of the complex, ambiguous, and at times paradoxical nature of Rome’s urban fabric. Overall, the book offers an innovative and multilayered perspective, bringing to the forefront of academic discourse and research those groups, urban areas, and themes that often have been superficially perceived as marginal, and that to date have been largely overlooked in academic research. It therefore offers an important counterbalance to the prevailing, and in fact almost exclusive, scholarly focus on the center of Rome as the historical, religious, and political core of the Italian nation.
Consistently with another important edited volume of recent publication (Dom Holdaway and Filippo Trentin, eds., Rome: Postmodern Narratives of a Cityscape, 2013), Global Rome recognizes the complex historical stratifications that make Rome a uniquely postmodern city. A postmodernity ante-litteram, in a city that has always struggled with the imperatives of modernity; a city that in a sense was “postmodern” already before modernity. Rome has in fact never succeeded in becoming a paragon of modernity, to the likes of Paris or New York. Yet its postmodern character can be easily recognized in the palimpsestic nature of its urban and social fabric. Importantly, the volume is also structured around other important shifts in our understanding of the eternal city. First of all, it moves away from the prevailing focus on Rome as the capital of the Italian nation, to recognize its peculiarity as a city that is at once deeply parochial and profoundly influenced by globalization. As the editors recognize in their introduction, Rome offers a different and fruitful model for our understanding of the complex relationship between the local and the global in contemporary metropolis. Secondly, this volume also moves away from the prevailing focus on the historical center of the city, and its political, religious, cultural, and symbolic importance, to recognize the somehow paradoxical centrality of Roman peripheries in the life, identity, and history of the city. Importantly, this also means a refocusing on the people who have been at the margins of the city socially, geographically, and also in academic studies: the migrants, the evicted, the homeless, the undesirable, and even the farmers of the too often forgotten agricultural Rome. The recognition of the productive, complex, and culturally rich role that these groups have played in the development of contemporary Rome, makes this book an important contribution not only to the academic study of Rome, but to the more general public debate on the past, present, and future of this global city.
If a minor criticism can be moved to this collection, it is that the editors and most contributors seem to have overlooked the fundamental work that many Italian historians have conducted on similar themes and from complementary perspectives. It is surprising, for instance, that in the introduction the editors only refer to books about Rome’s history written in English, by scholars such as Christopher Hibbert, John Agnew, and Richard J. B. Bosworth, when in fact Global Rome is in my opinion closer to the work of many Italian scholars, for instance oral historians such as Alessandro Portelli and Bruno Bonomo, who have already researched and written about the peripheries of Rome, its inhabitants, and their memories. Similarly surprising is the overlooking, by the editors and I believe all authors, of the 2010 special issue of Annali d’Italianistica, “Capital City: Rome 1870-2010.” While focusing mostly on cultural history, that collection of essays would have offered many important suggestions to the editors and authors of Global Rome, as many of the articles in that volume attempted to connect the modern political history of Rome to its global and postmodern declinations.
Notwithstanding this limitation, which can be in part explained by the different disciplinary focus, Global Rome is to be praised as an original, rich, and important contribution to the study of Rome. In a time in which the response to globalization and to the dominant neoliberal ideology too often takes the shape of reactionary, xenophobic, and essentialist ideologies, this volume is a timely reminder that la Roma popolare is not made of imaginary romani de Roma from seven or more generations, but rather by the non-romani de Roma, those men and women who most profoundly belong to this global city, precisely because they were born elsewhere.
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Citation:
Francesco Ricatti. Review of Clough Marinaro, Isabella; Thomassen, Bjørn, eds., Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City.
H-Italy, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43407
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