The rumbling Roman road
Peter Nichols
Rome About all that compares nowadays with Mussolini's vision of Roman crowds pressing through triumphal highways to do honour to their leader is the human mass which moves along the broad road from the river to St Peter's to pay its respects to the newly imperial style of the papacy.
This was not what Mussolini intended at all when he built that road. To know what he envisaged means looking at another road — on the other side of the Tiber. His fundamental idea of straight roads leading in the right direction produced the proudest of his highways, the one which cut across the remains of the imperial forums, from the Colosseum right to his own office in Piazza Venezia. That Via dei Fori Imperiali faces the worst threat of all: not jtist destruction but also oblivion, What must worry the shade of the dictator is that a serious public debate is taking place, certainly crucial to Rome's future, which has little or nothing to do with his qualities as a town-planner.
The real enemy of the campaigners intent on destroying the road is not the dictator's memory but the motorcar. It is worth saying so early because the fact that the present mayor, Luigi Petroselli, is the first communist ever to hold that post and the superintendent of the antiquities, Adrian() La Regina, is rather left too, might give an entirely political dimension to the controversy. In fact, the mayor took quite a long time to come round to the superintendent's point of view. And no wonder.
The Via dei Fori Imperiali is the only road in the heart of old Rome which functions. It is practically as wide as a motorway. It handles practically all the traffic approaching the centre from the south and the coast. It is open in both directions to private traffic, unlike the Corse. It used traditionally to be shut every 2 June for the annual military parade in celebration of the post-war republic. Austerity meant no more parades and now there is not even that temporary hindrance to some really fast moving traffic between the Roman Forum, and what remains on the surface of Trajan's Forum, as buses, motorcars, coaches, motorcycles speed down to the Colosseum or up to Piazza Venezia which is the most daunting of all nodal points of Rome's traffic.
The Colosseum was the first of the ancient monuments to show the effects of the folly of such traffic. Pieces began to fall off it, and for a time it was closed to visitors. Now the broad road encircling it is partly free of traffic and this closure is shortly to be extended so that the whole area around the Colosseum will be for pedestrians only. Once the danger to the Colosseum had been established, La Regina began his campaign on a much wider front. He pointed out that motor exhausts and oil-fired heating systems had polluted the atmosphere of Rome with poisonous substances deadly to the marble of the city's monuments.
He then introduced another element into his argument: the Via dei Fori Imperiali not only brought pollution and vibration to the world's richest archaeological zone, but covered a great part of the Imperial forums, most of Trajan's Forum, of Augustus's, of the Forum of Caesar and of Nerva. The speed with which Mussolini wanted the road completed meant that only a partial and cursory exploration could be carried out at the time when the Via dei Fori Imperiali was under construction.
The paving of what was then called Via dell' Impero meant covering up 97 per cent of Trajan's Forum and 85 per cent of Nerva's, with the same sort of proportions for the others. The road obliterates so much partly because it runs obliquely across the Forums rather than dividing one from the other and because of the gardens with which it was lined. Hence, to the idea of a solution to the problem of exhaust fumes, another was added of re-opening and, to some extent, opening for the first time, an area practically unknown to modern archaeologists. If the road is removed, nothing much is likely to be found standing or intact: most of these monuments — including the huge arch of Trajan — must have been thoroughly pilfered in the middle ages for the building materials they provided.
Nevertheless, a ground plan ought to be revealed. This prospect prompted one of the more cheerfully crazy ideas so far to emerge from the whole controversy: two young architects have designed a moving rubber conveyor built for pedestrians which would pass across the whole route of the Via dei Fori Imperiali, once the offending highway itself had been removed, offering an alternative way to reach the centre than by motorcar and at the same time providing a splendid view of the layout of the ancient monuments. In order to protect the gliding pedestrians from bad weather the whole contraption would pass through a plexiglass tube.
There have been no takers so far for this delightful idea. At the moment the whole future of Mussolini's highway is under study by a commission of municipal councillors, archaeologists and architects who are due to report to the mayor within three months. Petroselli himself is undoubtedly open to conviction and is probably nearly convinced that the road must be closed sooner rather than later. His early perplexity was due to the confusion around him provided by the immense weight of argument for one side or another that the controversy has engendered. He also has a curious conflict within the council. The majority seems set oil closure as soon as possible. The councillor responsible for traffic however seems to have taken his responsibilities towards the motorists with great seriousness and publicly states that two decades will have to pass before alternative routes can replace the Via dei Fori Imperiali.
Certainly permanent closure now or in the near future would be a harrowing experience. A huge amount of traffic would have to be routed elsewhere. Already the old centre beginning at Piazza Venezia is closed to traffic except for residents and those who have managed to obtain permits to drive into the closed sectors. The experiment has been made of closing the road on Sundays but this is no fair test. In fact a move of this kind would be so traumatic that it would have to be presented — and quite genuinely could be seen — as a re-thinking of the whole nature of the city. The shift would then have to be away from a city which has suffocated its own centre by allowing an unplanned suburbia to be built around it. Mussolini did himself start the process by shifting the inhabitants of the small streets which once stood where his Via dei Fori Imperiali passes, into an enforced suburban existence. It is a fascinating moment because Rome faces local government elections in June. A few years ago, any plan intended to interfere with a Roman's right of passage with his motorcar would have meant disaster at the polls. That is now changing. The shopkeepers who fought to prevent the old centre from being largely closed to private traffic — and some of the most famous shopping streets turned into pedestrian islands — have now found that people,buy more in an atmosphere of greater tranquillity. That issue was a much smaller one than what removal of the Via dei Fori Imperiahl means: a revolution in Rome's attitude towards its antiquities, towards its motor traffic and, as an intellectual folder in which to place the whole project — a new way of looking at urban life in what is, after all, an eccentric old place with a great deal wrong with it, but nevertheless the foremost city ln the world.
Previous page
