Rome, c. 1955: Architecture and representation at the margins of the city

Abstract

During the Italian reconstruction after the Second World War, Rome’s periphery was the topic of several discussions on architecture and urbanism. Some voices, permeated by the cultural environment of neorealism, looked at the everyday life and the problem of dwelling and captured those human relationships that took part at the margins of the city. Rome’s north-east side, near to the Aniene River, especially attracted their attention as a threshold between the countryside and the city, between the shacks and the urbanization. There were built the Quartiere Tiburtino and the Towers in Viale Etiopia, two housing projects that have been widely discussed by the history and theory of architecture and have been linked to each other as the most representative works of neorealism in architecture. This article delves in the environment of Rome’s periphery of that moment and aims to reveal whether photographic representation intervened in the perception of both projects and added meanings to them. On the one hand, it examines how photography contributed both to the critical association between both neighbourhoods in spite of their remarkable divergences and to their connection to neorealism. On the other, it analyses how photography depicted the periphery where both projects were built. This contribution is supported by the study of primary sources –photographs from private archives and journals, literary descriptions, documentaries and films– that reveal a shared narrative between both projects, as well as not obvious links between them and their surroundings. In doing so, the article approaches a moment of the history of Rome in which its margins were represented by images as sensitive as divergent.