Tor Bella Monaca

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Tor Bella Monaca. Rome, 22 May 2021

There are some places in Rome full of prejudices and suggestions, such as Tor Bella Monaca or San Basilio (near my house).

They are areas marked in black, with stories of drug dealing and crime.

It seems like nothing else exists. It reminds me of when my friends in Jakarta or Dhaka advised me not to go to slums which were dangerous.

But if one manages to reset the brain, clean up any previous thoughts, with eyes clear of a bombardment of negative images to which we are addicted, one can see that – after all – they are places like others, with their beauty.

Where a lady donates money to a group of tattooed writers to reward them for their effort in giving color to the gray walls; rides with children; elderly women who have fought degradation by collecting over two thousand books at home; grandparents who reclaim the barren land to make a vegetable garden.

Maria Grazia and part of her large library

Agostino and his garden

Nobody denies that there is degradation, but that is present in every place in Rome and in the world. What we need to remember is that the eyes look at things according to what we have stuffed into the brain.

Sometimes, it would be better to turn everything off and walk like pure eyes seeing everything for the first time.

 

Thanks to Fabio Moscatelli for giving me this chance.

Gioele

 

From Wikipedia:

The area takes its name from a tower, mentioned for the first time in a document of 1317 and owned by a certain “Pietro Monaca”; from another member of the family, it takes the name of “Paolo Monaco's tower”. In the sixteenth century it was in possession of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and the name changed to “Pala Manacha tower”, while in the following century “Torre Bella Monica” or "Torre Belle Monache” are attested. From this transformation originated the legend of a stop of Saint Rita da Cascia, during her trip to Rome for the jubilee of 1450.
In 1869 the estate became the property of the Borghese family and was reunited with that of Torrenova. In 1923 the estate was sold to Count Romolo Vaselli, who incorporated the ancient tower into a private villa.
The village was built between the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, following immigration from the province and the southern regions of Italy and for the transfer of the inhabitants of the historic center to peripheral areas after numerous evictions. Initially the main attractions were the “Breda” factory (particularly active during the Second World War) and the duty station at “Castello di Torrenova”. The large existing landed properties were divided and the first houses with vegetable gardens were born to replace the shacks.

In 1934 the settlement was officially recognized. With the land use plan of 1962, it was declared an “expansion zone”. The detailed plan is then drawn up (“Tor Bella Monaca” area plan), while some of the areas subject to environmental protection have undergone illegal building interventions which were subsequently regularized in 1978 by the municipality with a specific urban variant (area 22 plan). The development was implemented with economic and popular building plans in the eighties: in particular the fifteen-story “towers”, identified with the letters M or R followed by a number. The lack of services and public works connected to these buildings has led to a situation of degradation and infiltration of organized crime. Rehabilitation and enhancement interventions have been carried out since the nineties (“Tor Bella Monaca urban recovery program”).

Italian version