Global Rome proposes a different emphasis for how Rome's contemporaneity is to be understood. Its editors argue that Rome's particularity can be used to further conceptions of globalization and global cities while also offering a perspective on the city that avoids fruitless debates about its ‘premodern’, ‘unmodern,’ ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ status. Apart from chapter 12, which questions whether preservation of the past is won at the expense of the city's present liveability, their emphasis bypasses the fabric of the historic city and its impact on today's political and strategic choices. They do link Rome's global existence with its pre-eminent place in the western imaginary as a way of exploring the divergences between an overly familiar tourist destination invoking tired overused images (ironically, the Colosseum is their cover image) and the city lived in by its own citizens, legal and illegal. The book's real interest however, lies in its making available to an Anglophone urban studies readership an informed approach to the impact of recent migrations, of the strategies of specific migrant groups in their daily encounters with the city and of the city's responses.
Global Rome is focused intensely on the city of today and its instantiation of more universal trends. Its major interest is Rome as multiethnic city and the problems that have arisen with the speed of transformation. This is approached through ethnographic studies of districts with concentrations of particular migrant groups and the response to them of those regarding themselves as proper Romans (though they too may be comparatively recent arrivals). The Bangladeshis and the Roma are each the subject of two chapters. The first is Broccolini's research on Torpignattara, an inner district previously associated with degradation and crime, deserted by many of its inhabitants since the seventies, but still with a core of the old, very poor or infirm, has been much improved by the arrival of Bangladeshis from the late eighties. Her detailed account of this area, part of the earliest peripheral settlements, locates its recent changes in responsible new residents (Bangaldeshis) keen to improve their area in line with their own values and dignity. Carlo Vereni's chapter on the local primary school there, with its very high proportion of ‘foreign pupils’ and its current good standards adds to Broccolini's account through its description of the media presentations of a conflict between old dispossessed residents and new migrants.
The studies of the Roma present different, equally valuable perspectives. Clough Marinaro describes municipal and national policies which, despite frequently changing objectives, always seem intent on consolidating these groups’ nomadic, alien status. Solimene's research on the strategies of the Roma themselves in making themselves invisible when necessary while continuing to frequent the areas, notably Trastevere, where they have traditionally worked, extends the more general account. Chapter 9, on Bufalotta, the area surrounding the first major shopping centre, Porta di Roma, on the north-east outskirts, underlines the unsatisfactory amenities of the district itself. It achieves this while disputing Auge's approach to the shopping centre, here seen as a place of family sociability and weekend activity. There is work on the Senegalese and frequent references to the Chinese, one of the most established groups, who are settled in the central area of Esquilino but also have a significant presence in Torpignattara.
Herzfeld offers some general characterizations of the Romans as a specific instance of the localism of all Italians, while Trabalzi's study of Idroscalo is a fascinating ethnography of an illegally built small district near the mouth of the Tiber and the sea. Trabalzi's is almost certainly the first English reference to Idroscalo not to mention it as the place of Pasolini's death. He explores the daily life of people eking out a living in an area they have made their own, an area now threatened by possible redevelopment. Unauthorized settlements are part of a long history in modern Rome, linked both with people rapidly building their own homes (30 per cent of Rome was built illegally) and with official housing policies. Cellamare's study of the Self-Made city draws out the continuing collusion of the local authorities in this well-established activity, an activity by no means confined to the poor or to the periphery. A complementary chapter on urban agriculture explores the modern expansion of another distinctive, related aspect of the spatial layout of inner Rome. These chapters benefit from being read together with Mudu's two carefully researched chapters, especially his invaluable account of housing and homelessness.
A historical overview of the solidary bonds developed through sport (chapter 10) proves to be far more than such a description would suggest, and a study of football and its local dimensions records fascinating interviews with fans from the now middle-class district of Monteverde, which convey a moving sense of the way individual Romans feel themselves to be dispossessed by the crowds of tourism and then by immigrants.
In proposing Rome as a particularly interesting site for exploration of the multiple forms, globalization has assumed in the quality of life of its inhabitants and their use of their city that this is a decidedly welcome addition to the growing body of Anglophone work on Rome. My only quibble is that for a readership unfamiliar with Rome and even for those who know the city well, this book would have benefited from the inclusion of maps to orient the reader geographically and indicate the distance between peripheral districts themselves and their links with the city centre.
