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