Summertime. Times and Cultures of Coexistence in Public Spaces

Abstract

This paper presents a case study the Estate Romana (Roman Summer), an initiative promoted between 1977 and 1985 by Rome’s city councilor for culture, Renato Nicolini. Starting from the alternative reuse of archaeological sites, decayed places and abandoned territories, through the interaction with cinema, dance, theatre and poetry performances, the events of the Estate Romana are elements of an “immaterial urbanism” that revived the economic and overall destiny of the Italian capital. In a period characterized by great social and political crisis, the rediscovery of ephemeral practices introduced urban governance tools particularly aimed at rebuilding spaces for collective life. In discussing the Estate Romana, the aim is to investigate the ability of festival architectures, or non-architectures, to shape the city, rediscovering extant heritage not only in cultural terms but also in its innovative values.

Keywords:

• temporary architecture
• ephemeral practices
• heritage
• participation
• urban innovation

Notes

1 In the 1970s, some of Italy’s principal cities, among them Rome, Milan, Venice and Naples, were governed by the Communist Party.

2 Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco and Silvia Carandini, eds., L’effimero Barocco: strutture della festa nella Roma del ’600, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1977–78), 5–12.

3 Ibid., lvi.

4 Renato Nicolini, “Il meraviglioso urbano,” in L’effimero teatrale. Parco centrale, meraviglioso urbano, ed. Renato Nicolini and Franco Purini (Florence: La casa Usher, 1981), 67.

5 Stravros Stravrides, Common Space. The City as Commons (London: Zed Books, 2016).

6 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

7 As Nicolini stated, the opening of the A line underground and the improvement of public transport in the city in general was strongly linked to the development of the festival itself; Renato Nicolini, Estate romana. 1976–85: un effimero lungo nove anni (Reggio Calabria: Città del Sole, 2011 [1991]), 29.

8 Renato Nicolini, “L’architettura dell’immateriale.” In Massenzio ’77–97. Tendenze urbane. Il programma completo della manifestazione (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997), 23–35.

9 Even though it has lost the experimental features that characterized its early years, the Estate Romana is still one of the most important cultural tools of the Municipality of Rome; see http://www.estateromana.comune.roma.it/.

10 Giulio Carlo Argan and Christian Norberg-Schulz, eds., Roma interrotta: Piero Sartogo, Costantino Dardi, Antoine Grumbach, James Stirling, Paolo Portoghesi, Romaldo Giurgola, Robert Venturi, Colin Rowe, Michael Graves, Leon Krier, Aldo Rossi, Robert Krier (Rome: Incontri internazionali d’arte and Officina, 1978).

11 Francesco Pettarin and Stefano Cristante, eds., Progettare gli eventi: introduzione all’operatore culturale (Ancona and Milano: Costa and Nolan-Editori Associati, 1999).

12 They were: Filmstudio, Politecnico, L’occhio, l’orecchio e la bocca and l’Associazione Italiana Cinema d’Essai (Aiace).

13 In his book-biography Estate romana. 1976–85: un effimero lungo nove anni (first published in 1991), Nicolini recalls his relations with Jack Lang, Councillor for Culture of Paris, and a lecture he gave in Los Angeles, where he was invited to report on the Estate Romana, entitled “The Los Angeles City Centre after Sunset: Dream or Reality?”

14 It has been estimated that three thousand participants attended the first Maxentius film festival; see the documentary Meraviglioso Urbano – 1977–2007: trent’anni di Estate Romana, dir. Giovanni Minoli for Rai Educational: La Storia siamo noi (2007), available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDpfzHGaaFs&t=16s (accessed September 5, 2017).

15 Francesco Pettarin, “L’operatore culturale”, in Pettarin and Cristante, Progettare gli eventi, 40–60.

16 Nicolini, beyond his political and institutional commitment, was an architect who had graduated at Sapienza University of Rome in 1969 with an exhibition design as his final project.

17 Fagiolo Dell’Arco and Carandini, L’effimero Barocco, lvi; Renato Nicolini, “Un effimero lungo nove anni,” in Lo spazio inquieto. L’effimero come rappresentazione e conoscenza, ed. Luciano Testa (Venice: Il Cardo, 1993), 18.

18 Fagioli Dell’Arco and Carandini, L’effimero barocco.

19 Léa-Catherine Szacka, Exhibiting the Postmodern. The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice: Marsilio, 2016).

20 After 1982, the Estate Romana went through a process of reorganization, necessary because of the excessive expenditure of the previous year. Nicolini and his team continued to promote urban and cultural research as the basis of the festival, but in several interviews held with the author between 2014 and 2016, members of the team recognize a general “formalization” of the later events.

21 Nicolini, “Il meraviglioso urbano,” 70.

22 Federica Fava, Estate romana, tempi e pratiche della città effimera (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017), 87.

23 As Minoli’s documentary Meraviglioso Urbano – 1977–2007 shows, the destruction of the stage was an “epilogue” of anti-democratic and sometime aggressive public behavior.

24 Umberto Eco, “The Frame of Comic ‘Freedom,’” in Carnival!, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), 8. “We smile because we feel sad for having discovered, only for a moment, the truth”; 8. The title of one of the festivals promoted by Beat ’72 in the Estate Romana of 1981 is explicit about their approach to social themes: Miseria 81. Festa dei nuovi poveri (“Poverty ’81. Festival of the New Poor”).

25 Interview with Franco Purini, in Fava, Estate romana, 156–166.

26 Including ARCI’s members and experts in the cinematographic field, the group was formed by Laura Thermes, Duccio Staderini, Giuseppe De Boni and Ugo Colombari.

27 Several structures are occupied by the Faculty of Architecture, University of Roma Tre, while some of the perimeter buildings of the site host a division of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, MACRO.

28 Raffaele Panella, Roma la città dei Fori. Progetto di sistemazione dell’area archeologica tra piazza Venezia e il Colosseo (Rome: Prospettive, 2013).

29 On the importance of “atmosphere” in the Baroque, see Erika Fisher-Lichte, “Transforming spectators into viri perculsi: Baroque theatre as machinery for producing affects,” in Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome, ed. Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 91. “Effimero: or the Postmodern Italian Condition” is the title of the research presented by Léa Catherin Szacka at the 14th Architecture Biennale of Venice; see http://leacatherineszacka.com/EffimeroBiennaleVenise/effimero.php/.

30 Interview with Bruno Restuccia, in Fava, Estate romana, 149–155.

31 Manfredo Tafuri, La dignità dell’attimo (Venice: Grafiche Veneziane, 1994).

32 Sara Bonnemaison and Christine Macy, eds., Festival Architecture (London: Routledge, 2008).

33 Giorgio Agamben, L’uso dei corpi (Vicenza: Neri Pozzi, 2014), 264–272; repr. in English as The Use of Bodies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Federica Fava

Federica Fava is an Italian researcher. In 2017 she published the book Estate Romana. Tempi e pratiche della città effimera and was a team member of the “Future Architecture Platform” project, promoted by the Italian Museum of Arts MAXXI. In 2015, she received a Ph.D. from the Sapienza University of Rome, where she worked as a teaching assistant and collaborated on several research projects. In 2014, she worked on the project “Effimero, or the Postmodern Italian Condition,” curated by Léa-Catherine Szacka for the Venice Biennale of Architecture.