photographs
of rome today

The best of timeless Italian design - Super hi-tech modern public telephone booths in the centre of this Trastevere piazza contrast with surrounding near-mediaeval housing. Some ten years ago, property developers systematically bought out or evicted low-income families who's ancestors had lived in these ancient buildings for generations. There were fights, demonstrations, squats, sit-ins. But that's progress.
Yuppies, doctors, lawyers, movie starlets, and yes, expatriates, quickly moved in to take their place.
It's a harsh world. Rome may look like an ancient city with everything just as it's been for centuries, but in truth, it's really the new money that's propping everything up behind the ancient facades. Without it, Rome would simply be one huge slum or sprawling casbah market, unrecognisable and unmanageable to modern Western or North European eyes and tastes.

Italians from wealthier northern cities such as Milan or Turin snobbishly look down on citizens of Rome and southern Italy as poor, uneducated peasants. There are even proposals mooted by right-wing northern politicians to actually partition Italy into two independent states, north and south. The seat of Italian government in Rome would move to Milan, and Rome itself would be cut off and cast away as worthless with the southern state.

Such political ideology is harmful and racist, yet on visible evidence alone, were you to hire a car and drive south of Rome, and onwards, south of Naples, you would soon see with your own eyes that much of southern Italy is poor, technologically undeveloped, superstitious, crime and mafia-oriented, and in ethnic character is much more akin to southern and eastern mediterranean cultures such as Egypt, Palestine and Turkey. In the modern sense, it's barely European at all, having much less in common with nations such as France, Switzerland, Austria and Germany, with whom the far-right northern Italians identify themselves much more strongly.

Rome then, sits precisely on this geographical and cultural borderline between Europe and more eastern cultures, between rich and poor, between the new way of doing things, and the old. And if you come to Rome and look carefully around you, you can see it, and sense the undercurrent of distinctly Non-European behaviour, a culture faintly hostile towards progress and the commercial and religious enlightenment of the new world that we are more used to.

And in this pocket of southern mediterranean and Eastern 'Old-World' culture that is Rome, and with Rome itself being the historical seat of power of the Catholic church, not surprisingly, the popularity of Roman Catholicism is still great, and growing greater. Open displays of veneration such as that made by this girl in Rome's St Peter's Cathedral are commonplace. (Taller 'pilgrims' can reach higher and will actually kiss the toe of this statue, and the toe itself is worn thin and shiny by the attentions of so many worshipping in this fashion).

Because so much of the curious architectural and political power and glory of Rome that you can see today exists precisely and only because the Catholic church has historically and traditionally held 'head-office' in Rome, it's worth dwelling a moment to explain the current religious climate that will confront the tourist or expatriate in Rome:

Since losing its political grip on Italy and Europe the century before last, through successive popes, the Vatican has nevertheless moved carefully according to a longer view than many observers give it credit for. The selection of a Polish pope in the 1980's enabled it to gain and strengthen much ground in oppressed and impoverished Eastern European nations, while in Third-World countries and South America, an aggressive policy of charitable projects has re-cemented the at one time fading loyalties of the old mediaeval Italian colonies. (On the climactic day of the huge, thronging street celebrations of the Church's 'Jubilee' in 2000, most of the crowd of pilgrims who had journeyed to Rome for this event were either east-European (chiefly Polish), African, or from the poorer South American nations such as Colombia and Panama. Significantly, few Italians joined in these celebrations, and many Italian citizens of Rome actually left town for the weekend to avoid the chaotic influx of foreigners. Perhaps this was not so much a rejection of Catholic religion by Roman citizens, as a self affirmation that being 'the home team', the Romans considering themselves faithful and good enough Catholics already, decided they didn't need to prove anything by attending the Jubilee and rubbing shoulders with the 'colonial' riff-raff. The only Romans who stayed in town that hot weekend were those who could gain by it, ie, restauranteurs and ice-cream vendors.

Thus, at home in Italy, and abroad in the rich and more sophisticated liberal West, in the last forty years, the Roman church has played a more subtle but continual strategic game of cat and mouse, sometimes Mr Nice Guy, adding crowd-pleasing dispensations, approving visions, visitations and relics quite willy-nilly, and canonising new saints, while at other times reeling the liberties of religious conscience back in to please the conservatives, to prove that it still has teeth, and to keep the party faithful in line.

In 2002, following massive upbeat and laid-back Jubilee celebrations in 2000, and hard on the heels of the canonisation of the famed stigmatic 'Padre Pio', the new popular saint of the people of Italy, as the rapidly ageing Pope Paul II nears his own last days and right-wing ideology increasingly stalks the corridors of power in Italian government, we are perhaps at the zenith of post-war Catholic liberality before a new swing begins towards greater authoritarian control by the Vatican, and it will soon be No More Mr Nice Guy again.
Protestant and non-conformist evangelicals in Italy, conned into receiving tax-breaks from government, have in exchange already signed away most of their rights to public expression of an alternative religion. Here in Italy there is in fact no genuine separation of church and state, and the so-called 'free' churches are only tolerated, and technically not free at all.

Thus, unlike in America, there is now no mechanism remaining in place to safeguard the people of Italy from a resurgence of totalitarian state religion.
The mystical eastern superstitious heart which beats within so many Romans and southern Italians, and is so characteristic of a culture long past in the rest of the modern world, may not be strong enough to resist the awesome charming power which we know from history the Vatican is capable of wielding.

If the right-wing ideologists of Italy get their way and Italy is partitioned into north and south, we could see the wholesale falling away of the city of Rome back into the hands of the Vatican and into pre-Reformation cultural (and perhaps even economic) darkness, mafia-centered feudalism and superstition. Many Romans alive today would probably be quite comfortable with such a regress, and sadly, bathroom towels for tourists in Rome hotels would again start getting smaller, instead of larger.

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