The fifth chapter of L’orologio is dedicated to the description of Garbatella, a ‘borgata’ built during the 1920s and 1930s and located to the South of the historical city centre of Rome. With this description Carlo captures the ur-form of that process of modernization which in the following decades will transfigure once and for all the topography of the traditional city, leading to the crystallization of the historical centre on the one hand, and to the uncontrolled growth of the periphery on the other. It is in L’orologio that the Roman ‘borgata’ is described for the first time in a literary text as such a vivid reality. At the beginning of the chapter Carlo is convinced by his friend Marco82 to accompany him to the Garbatella in order to look for Fanny, a girl with whom Marco has fallen in love. After leaving central Rome in Marco’s jeep, they drive through the expanded and discontinuous urbanscape of Rome, passing by new peripheries and fragments of countryside. Garbatella makes its appearance as a space completely detached from the rest of the city: ‘[u]na collinetta, una gobba del terreno, coperta di case, appariva in distanza. La strada portava giù. Era la Garbatella’.83 Already from its first description, the Garbatella appears as a dystopic other-space located outside the limits of the old city. According to Carlo:
c’erano […] grossi e alti palazzi pretenziosi; dipinti di giallo, e costruiti in quello stile indefinibile che univa un po’ di barocco e un po’ di ‘razionale’, mescolava colonne e balconi fatti a scatola, finestrelle orizzontali e pinnacoli borrominiani; l’architettura che si usava chiamare imperiale, e che è, piuttosto, coloniale, fatta, con boria e disprezzo, per un popolo considerato inferiore, a cui si vuol dare, perché ci viva dentro tutte le sue povere ore, nel modo più scomodo e doloroso, case ornate dai segni esteriori della potenza e della grandezza. Costruite nel centro della città, nei vecchi quartieri pieni di movimento, questa specie di case vengono presto, in parte, assorbite dalla vita circostante […] Alla periferia, nei recenti sobborghi, esse si impongono, e pesano, dànno un senso di falso al costume […] Ma quando esse sorgono assurde in mezzo alla campagna deserta, tra le sterpaglie, i mucchi di detriti […] esse appaiono mostruose e sudicie.84
82 Marco is in fact the author Mario Soldati. 83 Levi, L’orologio, p. 111.
Here, the stylistic description of the Garbatella as ‘coloniale’ rather than ‘imperiale’, signals people’s subordination to a condition of marginality, both spatial and social, imposed by the political power. The process of moving the popular classes outside the limits of the city – a process which had started during the 1910s and which had strongly intensified during the Fascist ventennio with the creation of the offical ‘borgate’ – seems to be symptomatic not only of the will to remove Rome’s inhabitants from the centre to the outskirt of the city, but also of the complete disinterest of the Italian government towards the living situation of these citizens. The cold anonymity of these buildings, named Lotto 40, 41, 42 and so forth; the impossibility for their inhabitants to access any services or to move around the city, as a consequence of their isolation; and the lack of any hygienic conditions in which these people live, are all factors which suggest their total abandonment on the part of the Italian institutions.
As soon as Marco and Carlo enter Lotto 42 they are ‘assailed’ by a request made by local people: ‘guardate dove viviamo!’.85 This almost desperate cry is the result of their desire for someone coming from the ‘external’ world to bear witness to the dramatic situation in which they live. The courtyard of the Lotto is a ‘terreno […] tutto coperto da uno strato, spesso forse qualche metro, di rifiuti, di sterco, diventato solido e grigio’,86 whereas the houses where people live are described as ‘stanze nude, con poche e vecchie suppellettili, piene di bambini […] sporche, disordinate, ingombre di stracci e di rimasugli’.87 In this scenery of extreme poverty and privation of basic needs, Carlo and Marco encounter two women, Rosa la Giudia and the Viterbese, who embody the paradigmatic figures of the abject condition of life in a ‘borgata’. Rosa la Giudia is a Jewish woman whose life was turned upside down after the Nazi troops deported her
85 Levi, L’orologio, p. 116. 86 Ibid.
husband, daughter and son from their house in the Jewish Ghetto of Rome to the concentration camps, where they eventually died. Now, Rosa has decided to spend her time praying in the temple while waiting for her death to come: ‘[a]spettava la morte, che la liberasse. Che le restava da fare, ora che i suoi non c’erano più?’88 Similar to Rosa, the Viterbese is also a victim of the war. While trying to escape from the German troops, her husband had thrown himself out of a window breaking his legs, which had then had to be amputated. Now, neither herself nor her husband work anymore, despite the fact that they have five children to take care of. The Viterbese’s family is in fact forced to live in a tiny room, sleeping in the same bed and relying on the nearby parish for food: ‘[a]ndavano a prendere la minestra e il pane, tutti i giorni, alla parrocchia: con questo vivevano’.89 Her face looks like the picture of hopelessness, of someone who has stopped believing in the possibility of a better future: ‘[g]li occhi, li aveva insieme lucidi e spenti: ci guardò, quando entrammo, senza altra espressione se non quella di una infinita stanchezza’.90
Rosa and the Viterbese, together with Teresa, are the most representative female figures of the entire novel, and provide us with a portrait of the social marginality common to many people during the immediate post-war period. Through the individual experiences of these three women, Levi’s novel seems to re-inscribe in its text the collective trauma of the war. In this respect, Nancy Harrowitz has talked of L’orologio
as a text which gives voice to issues of memory and post-occupation trauma, during the difficult period which followed the liberation.91 However, the condition of marginality which these three woman share appears asymmetrical: while Teresa’s eyes express ambivalent feelings of fear and vital energy, Rosa and the Viterbese are apathetic
88 Levi, L’orologio, p. 118. 89 Levi, L’orologio, p. 120. 90 Levi, L’orologio, p. 119.
91 See Nancy Harrowitz, ‘Carlo Levi: Watching the Future of Holocaust Representation’, in The Voices of
figures who transmit pure annihilation. In their faces there is nothing that expresses a sense of liberation from the dramatic years of the war and of the Fascist ventennio. They live in a sort of parallel temporal dimension of sorrow and privation which traces a line of continuity between the pre-war and the postwar period. In this sense they inhabit another space – on the other side of the fracture produced by the fall of Carlo’s watch - and are representatives of an undifferentiated and circular temporal dimension.
This lack of hope is a feeling that seems to have something to do also with the women’s geographical displacement. Rosa and the Viterbese inhabit a ‘space of exception’, that of the ‘borgata’, which was constructed specifically to erase the most marginal social groups from the city-centre.92 While this topic will be treated in more depth in the following chapter in regard to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s representation of Rome, here it seems important to mark how the ‘borgata’, this Fascist device created to contain a sector of population which was considered to be surplus to requirements, became, immediately after the liberation, the paradigmatic place from which to witness the trajectory of Rome’s modernity.
Carlo’s description suggests a reading of the city which not only opposes centre to periphery, but also the periphery to the ‘borgata’. His description could indeed be considered a snapshot of an ‘exceptional’ space situated beyond the limits of the city. In Carlo’s description, Garbatella does not participate in the dispersive cityscape of postwar Rome but in another, almost infernal space, located at the threshold of what he considers to be Rome’s city-limits. In a city characterized by the cohabitation of different urban blocs – central, semi-peripheral and peripheral ones, finished and unfinished ones, destroyed, semi-destroyed and undamaged ones – Garbatella represents a sort of cancerous metastasis. The severance between the city-centre and the periphery
92 Here I am referring to Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the ‘state of exception’ in Homo sacer, il
potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), and Giorgio Agamben, Stato di eccezione (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003). The interpretation of the borgata as a ‘space of exception’ will be further investigated in fifth chapter of this thesis in relation to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work.
appears here problematized by an additional external layer of the city – that of the ‘borgata’ – which opens up a new, ‘exceptional’ space within Rome which breaches the unitary wholeness of the traditional city.
Although Garbatella will progressively lose not only its extra-peripheral but also its peripheral status, becoming an integral part of the city’s central area during the 1980s, Carlo’s description of the borgata precociously detects a symptom which will mark Rome’s modernization in the following decades which will be characterized by the sudden sprouting of huge areas completely detached from the map of the traditional city. This disturbing dynamic, which will be masterfully captured by many films and novels set in Rome during the 1950s and 1960s and documented by urbanists like Italo Insolera and Leonardo Benevolo, will constitute an important focus in the following chapters.
What it seems important to highlight here, is Carlo Levi’s capacity to detect the early traces of a paradigm of modernization which will transform the topography of the Italian capital for the rest of the twentieth century. While Levi’s representation of central Rome emphasized concepts of dilation and dispersion, as well as the reconfiguration of spatial-temporal linkages, his depiction of the ‘borgata’ captures the opening of a deep fracture within the surface of Rome. Thus, the process of stretching out and of tensive dilation recorded by Levi’s L’orologio appears as the starting point of a centrifugal urban and cultural movement which, within the following three decades, will lead to the dismemberment of the map of Rome, until its complete explosion, emblematically registered by Pasolini in Petrolio.