The Gangsters of the Appian Way

by NICCOLO TUCCI

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THE Roman Via Appia or Appian Way is the way of all flesh, all history, and all culture. Built in the year 312 B.C. as an improvement on an existing road (nature as such had not been seen in Italy since before history began), it was named after Appius Claudius, author of the project.

A real commercial-military highway connecting Rome with Brindisi and the Orient, the Appia became known as the Queen of Roads, Regina Viarum. As a curator of the Appia, Caesar paid for its maintenance out of his private funds. The Vanderbilts and Astors of the day built their mansions and tombs along the Appia. In other words, if we keep well in mind that people in those days had better taste than we have now, we might compare the Roman Appia to our American Fifth Avenue.

But there was more to it than there is even to our Easter Parade. In the year of our Lord til, the Apostle Paul walked the Appia, all the way from Pozzuoli to Rome (a good hundred miles) to preach Christianity downtown. Peter before him, sneaking out of 1 he city, had walked il uptown, in an attempt to wash his hands (in good Roman tradition) of the whole Christian business, after it had gone wrong. And on the Appia Jesus chose to appear to him, walking downtown, and when asked by the fisherman where on earth he was going, his reply was uncomfortably clear: back to be crucified again. This Peter understood, and back downtown he went, to be honored with martyrdom. The church of Domine Quo Yadis marks the siteof that meet ing.

Then came the decadence, the pillages, the Dark Ages, the Lighter Ones, until in recent years — that is, around 1750 — the world of archaeologists and tourists became aware that traffic on the Appia had come to a standstill. Outgoing history had met incoming nature; the weeds had stopped the tombs from dying out completely; whatever had not lasted as an expression of sheer wealth, vanity, and violence was sure to last forever as a ruin: an expression of beauty pure and simple, free from functions and logic. And yet. we know today that nothing is more easily ruined than a ruin.

A white wall, a red roof, or a factory chimney in the same field of vision with four cracked columns is sufficient to shout into silence voices that have spoken for centuries, in the rain, in the wind, by day, by night, in Greek, in Latin, in Etruscan, to scholars, shepherds, cows, stray dogs, and lovers. Modern structures in a landscape of ruins are like the breath of air that pulverises the dead and their beautiful robes the moment the sarcophagus is opened in which they had remained intact since the burning of Troy or the founding of Rome. How many millions of generations of worms attempted in vain what a mere glimpse of light, a touch of oxygen, can do in one second. And how long the all-powerful forces of nature must work to polish into shapelessness what the slow hands of 1111meehanized bricklayers put together stone by stone in great fear of all Gods.

But let a Gangster come, a New Barbarian, a modern Roman real-estate speculator, with bulldozers and tanks, and in a moment the whole culture of Italy, this greatest, noblest of all cultures in Europe since the Greeks, is erased forever.

The land on the two sides of the Appian May belonged (and still belongs in part) to the city of Rome; it was for the governors under the Fascist regime and for the mayors after the liberation to prohibit all sales of t hese grounds for purposes of real-estate speculations. There are laws protecting every inch of the countryside around Rome from being defaced by the enemies of culture. But those grounds have been sold and are still being sold with the official consent of the Township of Rome.

To give an idea of what this means, it will suffice to imagine Williamsburg or Mount Vernon sold by the local city government in lots. Needless to say, while Williamsburg or Mount Vernon belongs to a. purely American tradition, the. Appian Way belongs to the whole world. The Oklahoma fanner has the same right to walk the Via Appia as the Heidelberg scholar or the Oxford professor; they are, by the supreme right of culture, the citizens of Rome like any Romanaccio de Roma. They are also citizens of Florence, Venice, Mantova, Ravenna, Urbino, Siena, Gubbio; they have Etruscan passports to enter the domains of King Porsenna in Ohiusi, Pompeian residence papers to occupy Pompeii for the space of twenty-five centuries compressed into ten minutes; they can go to Ravenna and look indifferently upon the future Renaissance from there; and if a modern Italian policeman tells them by looking at their papers that they are not Italians, this diminishes Italy, even though it augments the policeman’s importance.

Next to the Township of Rome the worst offender is the Societa Immobiliare Romana, whose architectural abortions have been permitted to rise higher than the strictest laws allow, even after a formal injunction from the Court of Appeals that ils horrible buildings be demolished at once. Another great offender is Silvana Mangano, owner of a combination Swiss cot Inge and Roman farmhouse on the Via Appia, and also of a swimming pool dug in defiance of the laws in a huge crater oidy a few stops from the tombs of the Appia — which swimming pool looks very much like a bidet for prehistoric monsters. She paid her tribute to the past, only she went too far, smack into paleontology.

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BUT let us begin with the gasoline station across from the church of Domine Quo Vadis. It is a small “museum,” and my friend Antonio Cederna, the first and for some time the only one in Italy to speak and write against the murder of his country, insisted that I visit this museum in his company and interview its founders and curators. As we were walking toward the museum, I asked Cederna why most Italian archaeologists had not seen fit to holler bloody murder as he had.

“Some did protest,” he said, “but there are huge financial interests on the side of the Gangsters. Culture is never strong against the newcomers to wealth, who are as ignorant as they are rich. Most men of culture are slate employees, poorly paid, with no hope for a better future; they have jobs to defend, children to feed, and if they speak the truth they will find themselves pantless on the cold floor the following day. So they sit back and say nothing.

“Others, who are financially independent, also sit back and say nothing, or dig in on the valid excuse that the Barbarians are too strong. They are; this is quite true. But it does not take an excessive amount of strength for us to speak the truth or write it down and send it to a paper that might print it. The curse of Italy is not so much the New Barbarian as the Old Civilized Italian who will work for him or refuse to work against him because “Who ami to get myself into trouble?’ (Chi me lo fa fare?) Thus the connivance of the Old Italian gives the Barbarian an air of respectability and a reputation of courage to which he is not entitled.

“If all Italians worthy of the name shouted the truth in the face of these Gangsters instead of whispering it among themselves behind closed doors, they would score their first major victory.”

“Not only at home, I said, “but also abroad, where we cannot afford to he identified with those who are defiling the graves of our great ancestors. Some contend that by opposing the destruction of monuments and landscape we are destroying the tourist trade. As if those things were not the rawmaterial for that trade. With the monuments gone, the landscape gone, even the tourist will know better than to come here and see this barren land. Same old principle: ‘Whatever was not mentioned has not happened.’”

“From which descends that other principle: ‘Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public.’ Which is all right for your personal laundry: nothing is more disgusting than the public display of private problems. But the personal body is not the body politic. All political laundry can only be washed in public, universal waters.”

At first I was reluctant to look al the gasoline station closely. But Cederna insisted, “This is part of your study”; so I looked at the showcase in which antifreeze and antiquity were presented together. There were three shelves. On each of them heads of statues, hits of Latin inscriptions, and other minor ruins of ruins were separated from one another by cans of Essolube and Esso Extra Motor Oil. The owner of these treasures asked whether wo needed any service. “None for the moment,” said I. “I was just admiring your collection of Roman treasures. Where did you get them?”

“On the Via Appia,” he said. “We all do our private excavating.”

“At night mostly,”said Cederna.

“Well, you know how It is,” said the man. “These things belong to no one.”

“This gentleman comes from America,” said Oedema, pointing at me.

The service man seemed envious. “Lucky you arc,” ho said. Then, without waiting for my comment, “Where in America,” he asked, “could you find art. works in a gas station?”

“Nowhere,” said I.

“Well,” he said. “That’s how it is. They have no culture, those Barbarians.”

We moved further, trying not to look at the ruins, the Roman ruins, so as to avoid the sad sight of rubbish left there probably for months, as the Township of Rome does not employ enough street cleaners to keep the ViA Appia tidy. “Look at that house up there,” said Cederna. On top of an old hill there were an oak tree and a farmhouse, one of those typical Roman casali that have been taken, architecturally, in vain by the Babbitts. The house-wrecking machine was swinging in The air and hammering those poor walls into dust. “That house,” said Cederna, “can be admired in many old prints, in many of the mediocre paintings of German scholars, English spinsters, and young American art students of the nineteenth century. The hill on which it stood was filled with ancient structures — layer after layer. One of the walls of that house, in fact, was obviously a Roman wall. But as a parasite, that house was innocent, if not frankly beneficial. It must have been built in the Renaissance. Now its tiles are being sold by the Babbitts to cover up the Swiss cottages that go under the name of ‘high-class residences in the style of the Roman farmhouse.’ We shall see many of those as we proceed along the Appian A ay. But now look at that house; in a few minutes there will be nothing left of it.”

He had barely finished speaking when the shape of the farmhouse and the oak tree still bent over its last wall crumbled under the blow of the wrecking machine. A cloud of dust hid the scene from us for a few minutes; then the sky appeared empty, almost ready to fall, like the vault of a church after its best support, an elegant but strong stone pillar, has been removed from under it. What now supported the blue vault was foreign to the Appian Way: one saw right through the air until the eye was stopped by a gigantic slice of yellowish Swiss cheese, all big round holes, looking at a wasteland of shacks, telephone wires, concrete highways, and billboards, one after the other, like a revival of American landscapes in the thirties.

“What is that yellow horror with all the holes;” I asked.

“Oh, that,” said Cederna. “That is called the Palace of Civilizalion. It is the masterpiece of one La Padula; has no function, no meaning, no real windows, just the holes and the structure. At night, it is illuminated, so that you can see it from any roof in Rome. And it bears huge inscriptions all around it, quotations from Mussolini’s best speeches, such as ‘We are a race of artists, saints, heroes, scholars, poets . . .’ I forget the rest. In other words, it’s a description of the Babbitts. Their decalogue, the thing they repeat all the time.”

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WE WENT back to our car, drove halt a mile, then came to a stop. A truck loaded with bricks, bits of statues, and cobblestones obviously lifted from some bit of Roman pavement, the real backbone of the Appian Way itself, was trying to enter a gate on our left. “Let’s go see where these things are to be used,” said Cederna. We drove into the private ground behind the truck and found ourselves between a crater and a row of small, cheap houses the like of which 1 have never seen anywhere, not even in Atlantic City. A few bricklayers were finishing a wall in which many fragments of statues had been used to decorate a funny little arch of semi-Gothie, semi-Moorish intentions. A man came toward us and asked us who we were.

“This gentleman,” said Cederna, “is an American who wants to buy a house on the Via Appia. Who is the owner of this house?”

“Mr. R.,” said the man, and gave us a calling card with the name, address, and telephone number of the Babbitt in question.

I put the card into my pocket, then followed Cederna in the direction of a tall, rather timidlooking castle, with thin towers, large windows, and a few strangely modernistic appendices of cryptic architectural significance, to make it all look more absurd. “Beautiful building,” said I to a huge apelike man.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

“All my invention,” said he.

“Nice,” I said. “How did you get permission to build so close to the Appian Way?”

“I have my regular permit from the Township of Rome,” said he, winking and smiling.

We looked at some of the other new houses facing the Appia; they looked like Steinberg drawings of late-nineteenth-century villas on the Riviera, except that the colors here were more disturbing. Purple and orange seem to be the Babbitts’ choice for this year’s architecture, and all their houses are surrounded by small gardens with the usual cheap garden decorations that are so dear to the hearts of suburban cave dwellers: tiny white fountains in plaster, tiny statues, tiny pillars supporting heavy gates and fences in wrought iron, through which the Roman ruins look very much entangled in a web of bad taste.

“Look at that Chinese pagoda there,”said Cederna. “Its tiles were stolen from Renaissance and baroque farmhouses that have been destroyed to make room for these horrors. I should not say stolen, for this is done by law. As a tribute to the sacredness of the Appia and to the past in general, the law provides that all modern villas along the Appia must be built ‘in style of respect,’ by which they mean that they must ape the old structures (interpretation free) and use the ancient tiles for their roofing. Which is more than ridiculous: it ts an outright insult to the majesty of the past. It is exactly as if people were allowed to rewrite. Shakespeare or to add notes in their scribbling to the earliest Shakespeare editions, provided they did so in blank verse — except for the detail that there are many copies of Shakespeare and there is only one Via Appia.

“It makes mo fume with rage when these hypocrites sav to me: ‘Do not worry. We will build in style of respect, pure imitations of the Roman farmhouse. Everything will be in harmony with the old ruins.’ In vain have 1 tried to explain to them that the only thing that can share the same landscape with these ruins is grass, and the only way to show respect, for the classical past is to leave it alone. ‘Put we must live,’ they say. ‘Rome must expand. Rome is by now a great modern metropolis, and we should all be proud of it.’ So they have both: the past of which they are so proud, and the present destruction of that past, of which they are equally proud. It is an orgy of pride, as you can see.

“Now look at that huge building out there, whose proportions alone dwarf the whole Appian Way. That is the Bia Casa Santa Rosa, a charitable institution, which is famous because it gave origin to a major scandal two years ago. 1 have nothing against charitable institutions, but I don’t see why one should be built here, right in the heart of a unique museum. Is that charitable, when there are hundreds of square miles of uninhabited lands beyond these grounds? Not all of Italy is archaeological, after all. You will be surprised to know that the Consiglio Superiore del Ministero della Publics Istruzione — that is, the highest authority in charge of education in our country, and therefore also a competent authority on the defense of our cultural heritage — authorized the construction of that building right in that place, ‘as a form of deference to its charitable character.”Nice principle for a town planner or a curator of monuments.

“But this is not all. Not only did the Board of Higher Education issue such an idiotic permit: it closed both eyes when the architect in charge of the Pia Casa, a man named Alberto Spina, built a fourth floor to the structure, in defiance of all tow nplanning regulations. In vain did the Commissions Provinciale per le Bellezze Naturali (Committee for the Protection of the Landscape) rise in pro test; in vain did the National Council for the Protection ol Monuments unleash a major scandal; and in vain did the Board of Higher Education acknowledge its lirst mistake and order the immediate demolition of the fourth floor, as it was much too late to order the demolition of the whole building. Nothing happened for a while; the whole issue seemed never to have existed at all. Rumors were circulated to the effect that the charitable institution had run out of funds altogether, and could neither demolish nor complete the construction.

“Well, one nice day the funds were found again, and of course they were not used for destructive purposes. What is a court injunction, after all? So the fourth floor was finished, the whole thing covered up with stolen tiles from earlier and more modest buildings, and there it stands, the highest, most imposing (also, alas, the ugliesl) monument on the Via Appia. And it might interest you to know that the architect of that horror, Alberto Spina, defended his misdeeds by comparing them to the Abbey of Monte Cassino, to all the greatest monuments of Italy, and ended his self-glorification by saying that the Appian Way had been greatly improved by t hat building.”

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AND the government?” I asked.

“The government?” said Cederna. “The government builds housing projects for the employees of the Department of Fine Arts which deface the Appian Way almost ns much as this building here. See down there those white barracks that conceal the once beautiful line of the walls of Rome? If these had not been built, you would still recognize the view that served as a model to Piranesi for some of his best prints. Now you can’t, because the bureaucrats in charge of protecting that, view obstruct it with their families, their laundry. But as a tribute to the nobility of that site, the housing project has been named ‘The Fine Arts Corporation.’ Nice, isn’t it? The ‘American skyway* that will connect the housing project with the airport and with the shopping centers (all chromium and glass) is a government-financed project, which of course serves the purpose of some big speculators, but is under the auspices of the Department of Public Works, therefore untouchable.

“The Curator of Antiquity, or Sovrintcadenza, claims that not a fragment of archaeological value has ever been removed from the Appia, but this is not true. You see those fragments being loaded on trucks and used as building materials right here under our eyes by all these Gangsters. With thousands of perfectly useless people in the pay of the government, the Department of Monuments — I mean the Sovrintendenza — has one man, I say one man, to guard the whole Appia from day or night thieves — one man who is a poor bricklayer and probably does not make enough money on his government job to feed his family. The Via Appia is really no man’s land. You and I come here and could steal from it. right, now; no one would stop us.”

As we were thus discussing the fate of this last page in the history of Ancient Rome, doomed by the Romans themselves, we came upon a sign that read; —

FOR SALE

42,000 square meters to be sold in small lots. For information on this property ask Bank of Commercial and Industrial Credit, Via dei Crociteri 44, Rome.

Behind barbed wire stood the properly to be .auctioned: the Villa dei Quintilii, one of the greatest and most famous villas on the Appia. “This, said Cederna, “was supposed to become a High Class Living Cnits Project. But they lost this one case; the offense here would have been much too great, even for the curators of our national monuments; so, risking all their necks, they stood fast and won this one battle. Which of course did nol teach them to try and win another one. So now the Immobiliare Itomana will build its horrors near-by, with the result that the poor Villa dei Quintilii, instead of being sentenced to death, will be sentenced to life in solitary confinement. Across the Appia from here you may notice a wall that separates the ruins from the road itself. This is unheard-of; it is a form of arbitrary occupation of a public and monumental road by private citizens. But in this case the citizen is Prince Del Drago, whose villa (authorization granted by the Township of Home October 27, 1953) is about to fence in, or rather immure, the Villa dei Quintilii from this side of the horizon.

“These are official data, you may quote them, they have all appeared in print, I myself am responsible for launching every one of these small and big scandals, with the result that the various departments of the government have blamed it on one another. There is now a government-sponsored project for the const ruction of a public swimming pool along the Appia, no one knows where as yet. It will be a surprise. Especially (or those who have their houses on the Appia. They will have traffic problems to cope with. Already there are live or six traffic policemen here on Sundays, who have a hard time keeping the cars from running into one another or into some old remnant of a Homan ruin. These damn ruins are always in the way. Blast them to bits, eh? And to think that in 1833 Carlo Fea, Curator of Antiquity under the Pope, had a realestate speculator imprisoned for building a farmhouse where high government officials now have their apartment houses.”

And here we came upon a headless Homan statue of a woman. She was surrounded by tall grass and wild flowers, and stood near an old Roman tomb. “Who mutilated my old friend?" I asked. “This Roman lady taught me patience. She taught me that it is very unwise to make a scene when the girl you are waiting for arrives a couple of hours late. ‘Never transform a place of love into a court of law,’ she said. But that was long ago, before this place for love had been transformed into a vacant lot. See what they did to my old friend. She lost her head, and even her arms are missing. Who treated her that way?”

“Love,” said Cederna. “Love of culture. To defend her from someone else s love of t he same culture, an unknown German soldier beheaded her during the war. He must have been an archaeologist (those unknown German soldiers were never too unknowing), and now he probably keeps your friend’s head neatly displayed in his neat German house, and lectures twice a week on its cultural meaning. Then, lately, other unknown admirers — Homans this time and probably civilians, because this is peacetime destruction — took quite a fancy to her arms and simply chopped them off, using a hammer, as you can see from the rough job they performed on your friend’s shoulders. So now she cannot lift those arms in accusation, and we shall never know in what direction we must look for the thieves. In my modest opinion those arms must have been sold and we might see them soon, encrusted on the walls of a garage, under a cute Swiss roof, and under the best zoning laws, right here on the Via Appia.

“Let’s go hack,” I said. “I do not want to see the Via Appia again, ever.” We drove back to the Eternal City and saw it from afar, under the ghastly light of a green moon. The sky was the same purple Homan sky that nothing, anywhere, can match, but that moon seemed so motionless, it seemed in fact to shine from the top of a building. It did. And we could even read the words across it —cultural words, of course, as would befit a Homan moon: MARTINI & ROSSI.