Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too by Claire Berlinski

Author:Claire Berlinski
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Europe, Politics, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780307421289
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2007-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

THE LOSS OF A VISION

Something else about Italy immediately strikes the visitor as odd. Again take Perugia: The city center is an ancient, melancholy maze of arched caverns and twisting alleys, built on a jutting hill that dominates the Tiber Valley. In the winter, fog snakes over the rooftop gardens and pours into the narrow streets. Perugia was the capital of the Etruscan empire, and an imaginative spectator can inspect the original Etruscan gates, thousands of years old, and for a flicker of a moment see ghostly Etruscans passing below, then scuttling off through the misty, narrow streets, fretting about the prospect of imminent obliteration by the Romans.

But if you descend that hill to the outskirts of the city, you will see housing projects made of clapboard and cheap, cracking cement. The buildings are tall and unornamented. They are not made of local stone and they do not use local colors. They look like giant tomb-stones. The squat concrete shopping malls on the outer rings of the city are sprawling, unplanned developments completely antithetical in spirit to traditional Italian architecture and civic design. If historically the Italian city was contrived to draw city dwellers into the streets in a kind of daily communal celebration, these suburbs seem designed to foster anomie and indifference to civic life. All the suburbs around Italy’s great cities—Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples— look like this.

These gloomy suburbs are where Italians live now, not the picturesque city centers, which have become too costly for all but the most successful urban elites and the handful of ancient families who pass their apartments from one generation to the next. Ordinary Italians visit the city center as an outing, or to shop, then return to their modern neighborhoods. They no longer live on charmingly haphazard streets scaled to a pedestrian size—they live on streets laid out in rectangular grids, where the traffic and pollution are nearly overwhelming. In the winter, when it rains, the oppressive concrete buildings turn dark and glowering. The long concrete blocks form wind tunnels. In the summer, there are no shady alleyways. To save heat or to keep out the sun, the windows are always shuttered, and the shutters are made of ugly metal, giving the impression that the buildings have no windows at all—they appear to be nothing more than concrete and metal walls.

The streets are decorated not with frescoes but with trash cans and billboards featuring vaguely pornographic advertisements for Italy’s three competing cell phone companies, or for competing funeral homes (funerals with honor, or funerals at the lowest prices, guaranteed). There are few trees in the suburbs, no public spaces—and where there are public spaces, they are nearly empty, with no cafés, no churches. The piazza is no longer the center of civic life. And while the architecture in the historic city centers is carefully preserved by diligent curators, their streets and walls are covered with graffiti. No one cleans it off.26

Italy’s coastlines, too, have been desecrated from end to end with urban sprawl, industrial parks, landfills, and unremittingly ugly tourist resorts.

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