I started this analysis of Rome as a project for an architecture theory class my first semester of grad school. When Peter Lang, the class professor, told me we would be choosing a city and piecing together a morphology of it I knew this would be a difficult task, but I hadn’t yet come to the realization that such an ambition is fairly impossible. In retrospect, I now know that no single person or object or idea can encapsulate the identity of a place, and I revel at the naïvety of my ambition to do so.
Because I am somewhat of a romantic I chose to spend my semester studying Rome. I believe the choice was also a result of my not-so subconscious desire to return to Italy, where I spent three long months in 2009 evading a not-so-perfect stateside reality. I also undertook the eternal city knowing that Peter was practically an expert on the place and that I could never hope to know even half as much about it as he does.
As I began this project I come across an issue: what I had been compiling all semester about Rome and politics does not seamlessly come together with the Trieste/Ex-Mattorio story which I also analyze in depth later on. The topics seem to be two completely disparate topics, and I was having a hard time finding a way to convincingly place them in the same publication together. On one hand I had the rich bits and pieces of Rome that I had been collecting all semester long and which tell a story about how politics have made the city what it is today. On the other hand I had a very compelling narrative about war, gypsies and a slaughter house which I had only barely begun to investigate.
The pieces about politics and such lacked focus but I did not want to throw away all the time and effort I had put into collecting them. While typing up a disheartened e-mail to Peter I had a revelation: I finally saw how the disparate political intrigues and the story of Trieste and Ex-Mattorio are one and the same.
Rome 