As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly CrumblesAbroad
As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly Crumbles
Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times
ROME — The Eternal City is anything but.
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Rome's Modern Architecture, Crumbling Ruins
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Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times
A view of the Maxxi, Rome’s new national museum of contemporary art, designed by the architect Zaha Hadid. More Photos »
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Collapses this spring at a couple of ancient sites here caused weary archaeologists to warn, yet again, about other imminent calamities threatening Rome’s precarious architectural birthright.
Meanwhile, the smart set went gaga when an ostentatious national museum for contemporary art, Maxxi, opened recently, along with an expansion to the city-run new-art museum, Macro. That was just after Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, convened a conference for planners and architects to mull a bid for the 2020 Olympics as an incentive to update Italy’s capital. Contemporary architecture now promises to be the engine and symbol of a new creative identity for Rome that, if development is done right for a change, would complement the city’s glorious past.
“What does Rome want to be when it grows up?” is how Richard Burdett, a planner from London with Italian roots, put the situation the other day. He meant the situation of Rome at a crossroads, struggling ahead, falling behind.
Change is never easy here. When a museum designed by Richard Meier, a glass and marble building to house the Ara Pacis, opened a few years ago, Romans howled. But then, it resembles a clunky, fascist mausoleum. Maxxi, whose style presents a whole other set of problems, has fared much better in terms of public approval, attracting some 74,000 visitors in its first month and accelerating talk by leaders like Mr. Alemanno about Rome in the 21st century.
But it’s one thing for politicians to support a new headline-grabbing museum. The art crowd rolls into town, bestows its blessing, then rolls out. It’s another to take on grittier challenges like immigration, transportation and sprawl.
Even culture: a nation whose identity and fiscal survival rests on it now devotes .21 percent of its state budget (and that figure has been dropping), which is about one-fifth of the percentage that France devotes, to theater, film, exhibitions, music and museums, not to mention the upkeep of all those thousands of historical sites for which there is still no master conservation plan.
And there’s nothing close to a thought-out approach to shaping this city’s new identity, either, just a burst of mixed architecture creating facts on the ground and a fresh hunger for something better. The problems facing Rome are not going to be solved by a few big stars designing buildings but by a larger effort to rethink a city that has swiftly grown to 3.7 million inhabitants, almost all of them outside the historic center, where its past is crumbling.
How to balance old and new? It’s a familiar quandary. The Roman architect Massimiliano Fuksas is now conceiving an immense congress center on a highway built by Mussolini to connect center and sea. To one side of that center, the Luigi Pigorini Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography, a 1930s glory of limestone, stained glass, light and air, epitomizes the modernizing aspirations of an earlier day.
To the other side, new apartment blocks are to be designed by Renzo Piano, whose Parco della Musica performing arts complex, inoffensive and pragmatic, opened a few years ago just outside the city center, to general satisfaction.
This area where the Pigorini is, by contrast, never took off as it was meant to before the war. Most Romans don’t venture to the ethnography museum after grade school, although they’ll wax nostalgic when reminded of it. Mr. Fuksas’s building adds a giant bauble in what’s still the middle of nowhere, albeit it’s too early to say for sure what this stretch of suburb will become when the congress hall opens, and housing arrives. What’s clear is only that the effort to push Rome’s livable, cultural space outward from the center is a step in the right direction. Just a step.
Or, as Mr. Fuksas phrased it, “Architecture is interesting, but by itself it means nothing.”
Especially when some of the best of it is falling down. Exhibit A: the Domus Aurea, the Golden Villa that Nero built near the Colosseum, where a vaulted gallery fell this spring. Nobody was hurt, fortunately. That’s because the place has been closed since 2008, plagued by structural problems and humidity, which threatens the frescoes. To much fanfare, the city opened part of the site for tourists in 1999. Then heavy rain collapsed a section of roof, the site was closed, reopened a while later, then closed again.
A commission assigned to address the problem spent millions but didn’t forestall the latest mishap. Construction workers were fussing with earthmovers, bits and pieces of ancient columns, broken pots and scaffolding one recent morning. Fedora Filippi, a veteran archaeologist lately put in charge, pointed out where the roof gave way in what is actually an adjacent gallery built under Trajan, after Nero. Rain seeped from a park above, she said. Everybody has known about the leaking for ages. But the park is city-owned, and the Domus Aurea is national property, so the problem is no one’s to solve.
“Everyone is paralyzed,” Ms. Filippi said. “We have problems specific to this site and, yes, we have Italian problems, too.”
Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting to this column.