Centri Sociali e Bici

Social centers. When I heard this name in the past I thought of that part in West Side Story when they go to the dance. Or old people playing bingo. Or the type of people that can't socialize without an organized center around which they can centralize their activities. You know the type, I'm sure of it.
 In Rome Social Centers are, well, centers around which to center social activities for local communities and sprung up initially during the recession of the 1980s as spaces for political and social dissent. Now many of them provide spaces for culture as well, due to a concern about lack of public money for cultural endeavors. First you should know what they are up against.

I know you're saying, "but Italy is the capital of culture!" But here is where you're dead wrong, silly reader. Picture Wayne Campbell correcting you, saying "Chyeah, right, that's like ancient history!" Wayne has a good point: there is a lot ancient stuff for tourists to see but it's just that: for tourists and not citizens. A lot of the housing around the city center is now rented out by the week to tourists thus detracting from a real, local community. The shops and restaurants in those neighborhoods cater to transient visitors instead of permanent residents, thus creating a sort of more-than-real Baudrillardian Disneyland where monuments are preserved the way tourists want them to be instead of integrating into the current social and geographical landscape. The Colosseum, for example, serves as an object of imposed desire.

Less-than-capitalist citizens of Rome are also not very psyched on the fact that the current minister of culture, Sandro Bondi, hired the former head of McDonald's Italia to lead a new "ministry directorate" that develops museums and ancient sites. This snippet from an oldish New York Times article sums up fears well:

But the deepest concern in art circles centers on the government’s apparent shift from a constitutional mandate to protect Italy’s cultural heritage toward an entrepreneurial model that exploits it. It is lost on no one that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who assumed his office for the third time in May, is a megawealthy businessman and proud of it.

“What’s at stake is the conservation and transmission of millenary values that one government must not be allowed to undersell or demolish,” said Marisa Dalai Emiliani, president of the Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli Association, a cultural research institute. On Monday the association organized a daylong seminar on the arts in Italy ominously titled “Cultural Heritage Emergency.”

The 2011 Province of Rome Budget allots nearly double to Tourism than to Culture.

(data from provincia.roma.it)

I live in a kind of revived working-class hipster, artist neighborhood in Rome called Pigneto (think Bushwick) and there are a good deal of these dissenting social centers around me. Some of them host squatters and all of them have parties. There's one that even has a theater series that runs weekly like a television show would. The idea is to provide a place for people to go and hang out and exist and partake in whatever kind of art and culture they want. It's a space in which to create and exist outside the margins of the budget or the government. While social centers aren't technically legal, many of them (especially the more established ones) have basic agreements with the carabinieri and as long as they stay quiet enough their presence won't be disturbed. Social centers are often located in abandoned warehouses and many of them have big, grassy areas, which are usually hard to come by in Rome.

One of the social centers near me, called Ex Snia, has a ciclofficina, or bike office. I knew I wanted to get a bike when I came to Rome (that was before I got to Rome, but then I saw the drivers. I still want a bike but I think I'm going to stick to areas with few cars. Sidewalks and the middle of certain roads won't be an option because cars park there). So I started to ask around about cheap places to get a bike. My roommate Simone told me about this secret anarchist bike office with very limited hours that was hard to find that was recommended to him by his friend/my ex-potential roommate Maurizio even though neither of them had ever been there or knew exactly where it was. He also told me that either he or one of my roommates should go with me because if not they might rip me off. Whew.

The smell of danger tempted me and the challenge of finding a place never before found by anyone I knew was too tantalizing to pass up. A few weeks went by of me searching (not very thoroughly, I'll admit) yet reaping zero fruit. But just as I was about to retire from my quest, I was in the market of Pigneto and noticed stand with some guys selling shirts with bike designs on them. A brilliant thought descended down from the heavens that went something along the lines of: "I bet these guys know where the anarchist bikes are." So I schmoozed a little (you have to careful when schmoozing with anarchists though, because if they know you're a'schmoozin' they might take you for a capitalist) and then as casually and charmingly as I could in accented and imperfect Italian I brought up this ciclofficina, like it was a code word that should be spoken about in hushed tones. He was impressed that I knew about it and drew a little me a map showing me the way.

So when I got to this place they explained to me how it usually works. You pick out frame from their bike junkyard, and, well, then you build it. They have volunteers there who know about bikes, many of whom had built bikes there in the past and then stayed on to learn and help. I got really lucky because my new friend Giovanni (Gianni) showed me a nice cruiser that's basically complete, about my size, and also lavender. Can't beat that combo. So I just really have to go back probably two more times and adjust it. I don't know though, I might end up going back more often because it's just a pretty cool place to hang out.

Did I mention it's basically free? You pay as much or as little as you feel like donating to the centro.

 Bike junkyard

Food Particularities

Be prepared to not be shocked: food is a big deal in Italy. Cappuccino has its time (before 11:00 am), colazione (breakfast) has its fastidious rules, and you should probably not drink wine with pizza. In the States, I've noticed, people will eat large quantities of mediocre food and be perfectly content with that. If it's cheap and not bad, it will suffice. With some Italians, on the other hand, I've noticed them not finishing their food if it's not quality, and even going into detailed analyses of the food they are consuming and the ways in which it could be better. If I'd cooked a dish for my friends in the States, I would hear a chorus of "yum, this is great, thanks!" even if it was only okay. Not even my closest friends would be honest with me. Here, Frank is their middle name.

Case in point: last week my friend Katrina was visiting from Aarhus, Denmark. We made homemade ravioli with ricotta and spinach filling in some and squash and ricotta filling in the other. I'd made this dish back at Hampshire, and people had (I'm pretty positive) genuinely appreciated it. Here, my roommates told me it was fine, but not particularly good, and that my dough could have been more elastic and thin and that it was aesthetically unpleasing and that while my red sauce is decent, I still have some "segreti" to learn. Understandable: I was cooking Italian food for real Italians, and my ravioli were far from pretty.

However, the next weekend, when Marco and Chiara made Chinese food, there was an even greater level of analysis. They made rice noodles (spaghetti di riso) and dim sum (which they called ravioli). Marco and Chiara came into the living room before dinner was served and warned us that it was awful and that we could try it, but if we didn't like it we could go get pizza. I think he was serious about the pizza part. Yes, the noodles were a tad sticky and the dim sum wasn't like they made it in Chinatown, but it wasn't bad! Yet there came a serious of detailed analysis: they should not have put in two types of rice noodles: both spaghetti di riso and linguine di riso were used; some noodles were overcooked, some were undercooked; the ravioli, while aesthetically pleasing, tasted like foam (they said mine were better, though I don't know how one can compare Italian ravioli with Chinese dim sum); maybe the noodles should have been used in a broth instead. Someone even gave a step-by-step description of how he would have cooked the dish instead.

My roommates also have their opinions on the food I eat for breakfast. Usually in the states I eat muesli or granola with milk for breakfast, but I can't find cereal that I dig here. As far as cereal goes, they're all about the rice krispies and cornflakes and light muesli. Usually when I buy cereal in the States (which is often. I'm a granola fiend) I buy it either from Mixed Nuts (holla!) or Cornucopia where I can get good, filling granola and muesli in bulk. Here they don't have the same hippie co-ops or bourgie health stores and don't have bulk sections in their grocery stores so I've been getting creative. I started out doing the Italian bar breakfast. I'd go to this famous, kitschy bar called Necci and get either a cappucino or caffe' (shot of espresso) and a cornetto with nutella filling.

However, those were the days when I didn't know how to use our stove-top espresso machine and I was embarrassed that I didn't know how to use it, so I didn't ask my roommates to teach me (that was kind of a vicious cycle, because the longer I stayed here, the more dumb I felt at not knowing how to use it and the less I wanted to ask). Anyway, bar breakfast started to get too expensive, and, more importantly, too early. So out of desperation and the need for cheap caffeine, I asked Sasa' to teach me how to use the espresso machine and ever since then I've been happily making (and burning) my own caffe' each morning.

Also, I started to get hungry because they don't each lunch until 13:00 or 14:00, and I totally buy into the theory that you should eat a big and nutritious breakfast to start your day right, as bogus or as unscientific as it may be. So instead of buying cornetti, I started making eggs and toast, pancakes, french toast, yogurt (not all in one day, mind you), breakfast potatoes, etc. This led to discussions with my roommates about the breakfast foods one eats in Italy. Italians eat light, light, light food for breakfast and often they eat just a few cookies (biscotti) and caffe latte for breakfast. You'll be hard-pressed to find an Italian who would prefer a savory to a sweet breakfast. Sasa' was the only one who wanted to try my breakfast potatoes and that's only because he'd lived in Scotland and can dig a savory breakfast. They all liked my pancakes though, but upon finding out that I'd been a vegan for a year, Simone asked if I could make them without eggs so they'd be lighter.

Making ravioli

What To Expect

This is going to be my blog about my study abroad experience in Rome. I know, I know, barf. Everybody studies abroad in Rome and everybody loves it and blah blah blah pizza and pasta and vespas and leather. Whatever. This blog will likely include blah and mozzarella and wine and blah, But it will also include (drumroll) My Philosophical Musings (!!!), Immigrants (double "!!!"), Anarchists (can I get a "woo-hoo"), and um, Whatever Else I Want (Eff Yeah). Not that I have to plug this blog to you or anything. You're obviously already reading it and hooked.

Allora, I'm kind of late to arrive on this semester's blogging train, so I'll try to post pretty often because, as the business students in my program know, quantity is always better than quality. And I'm tryna start me an empire (that's right, who wants a tee-shirt?).

Furthermore, I am impatiently learning the lingua franca, and in an effort to supplement my countless hours spent on this blog in English, I am going to translate it into Italian as well. This will allow me to practice my written skills, as well as track the progress of the flow of my prose throughout the semester. Consider this an official warning to all who are quite proficient in Italian. Also! Feel free to correct me if you see glaring errors.

A wise woman once sang: "Let's start at the very beginning: a very good place to start." Even though I generally avoid following imperative commands of singing nuns, I shall make an exception in this case.

I arrived in Rome on January 12th, 2011 at 15:15 in a confused state of anxiety, exhaustion and excitement. I had decided to opt out of the housing offered by my program (Arcadia) in favor of living with Italians and had gone through hoops and what-have-you trying to find people to live with. I'd been searching since about October and my endeavors had all come to various dead-ends. Finally, on January 9th, two days before I left Minneapolis, I reply from an apartment that seemed cool. I had dodged other scams as I'd been searching for apartments, so I paid the deposit and prayed to whatever would listen that this was the real deal. The first thing I did upon touchdown was to contact the padroni, who seemed real on the phone, and even gave me perfect and seemingly legitimate directions, but I was still skeptical. Could they have been giving me directions to a dark alleyway where they were going to beat me up and steal my belongings? Being the daring soul that I am, I decided to risk it.

I arrived in the apartment building at around 20:00 and met my new roommates. Far from being serial murderers, they are great and dynamic people. Marco, the aforementioned, is a web designer; Simone is finishing his dissertation in musicology; Salvatore (otherwise known as Sasa') is a contemporary Heideggerian philosophe; and Alex (the other non-American-- she is German) works at a photography agency. Marco and Simone are also in a tight underground Italian band called Klippa Kloppa that you should check out). This first night we ate casatiello, a Neapolitan bread with pork lard in it, along with some vegetables and wine. This was quite the re-introduction of meat into my life after almost 5 years of vegetarianism--it was very salty, but all in all not bad. After a couple of glasses of wine I started telling them about the American perception of Italian-Americans... er... in short, I started talking about the Jersey Shore, which I later found out is filming their fourth season in Italy! I went to bed early that night and woke up early enough to see the sunrise over the antennae of the apartment buildings near my window.

Casatiello

My apartment has a HUGE balcony. You can't see most of it in this picture.

The kitchen. My apartment used to be a hostel, hence many of the decorations.