‘Not Progress but Degradation’ : Burgers, Boutiques Rout Artisans in Central Rome

Around the corner from the tourist jostle at the Trevi Fountain, Luigi Cataldo has been making shoes, one at a time, for more than 40 years.

When Cataldo opened his tiny shop after World War II, he says he was one of several hundred master boot makers in central Rome. Today, semi-retired and nearly 70, he is one of six survivors.

“By the end of the century, who knows if there will be any at all?” he asks, lovingly buffing a $350 pair of black brogues that took 16 hours to build.

The old-timers are leaving downtown Rome, victims of a two-edged wave of national prosperity that is remaking the face of the Eternal City.

Cookie-Cutter Boom

Upscale modernization, on the one hand, is transforming stores and apartments where Roman families have lived for centuries into high-tech offices, expensive designer boutiques and corporate outposts. At the same time, the growth of homogenized mass culture and expectations is supplanting traditional businesses with cookie-cutter replacements of foreign inspiration.

“Fast food,” “computer” and “hamburger” are Italian words now, shorthand for swiftly changing times. The language that gave the world “pizzeria” has even invented a new word, jeanseria, to describe the explosion of new downtown shops that sell cheap, mass-produced goods, like jeans, to tourists and young Italians.

There is no shortage of Romans to lament the exchange of weathered wood for bright plastic that is occurring in old cities nationwide.

“This is not progress but degradation,” says Antonio Cederna, a newspaper columnist and politician who has been publicly defending Roman traditions for 35 years. But, Cederna concedes, “I have won a few battles and lost all the wars.”

Historic Backbone

Principal victims of the changing times are the old-line family businesses and artisans whose crafts and workplaces, historically the backbone of Roman daily life, have lent an ancient city its singular character.

Fading as fast as Rome’s boot makers are its furniture restorers and barbers, its sundry stores and tailor shops, its printers, booksellers and framers and its masters of straw, metal and wood.

According to Cederna, a member of the national Chamber of Deputies, the population of Rome’s 2,500-acre historic center has dropped by half over the past 30 years, to about 120,000.

Suburban Speculation

“About 8,000 residences have been metaphorically destroyed, turned into offices, banks, studios,” he complained. “This has provoked building speculation in the suburbs, which are the worst in Western Europe, without adequate green spaces, public services, transport or shops.”

Unlike Americans, Italians live in all parts of their cities, and in all of them there is the same challenge to old from free-spending new. Wherever there are cobblestoned streets with vest-pocket traders’ niches in ground-floor caverns of old buildings, there is pressure for change.

Mass tourism fuels this change. Many have learned that there is easier profit in selling “Italians Do It Better” T-shirts to some of the country’s 27 million visitors than in repairing old chairs.

“Tourism has helped make Italian cities look the same as any other world resorts,” Cederna growls. “Our cities are losing their character; their social thread is unraveling. They are becoming low-level bazaars.”

“In cities medieval or older, the changes in the past 15 years have been breathtaking,” said Antonio Longo, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Rome.

He added: “In Palermo, Bari, Naples and Venice, the change has been catastrophic. In Rome, Florence and Turin, the situation is bad and getting worse.”

Milan’s historic center has kept its character, as far as the eye can see, but there is awesome change beneath the surface: Unmarried adults now occupy more than one third of all apartments, twice as many as a generation ago, according to government figures.

Still, Bologna, Ferrara, Assisi, Siena and Perugia have so far successfully preserved the character of their centers, Longo said.

Rise of Services

Modernization rides on the wings of unprecedented prosperity that has made Italy one of the world’s most developed nations.

Service industries that did not exist a few years ago, from photocopying to electronics, now competes for space in city centers where facades are sacrosanct and no construction is allowed.

“You can’t teach people they should consume and then ask why they are consuming more. The face of Rome has always changed to reflect changing life styles,” says Enrico De Nepi, a former shopkeeper who represents the central city on Rome’s city council.

In Rome today, the demand for space is such that nearly everyone has a friend who is facing eviction from an old apartment or store. Near the Piazza Campitelli, for example, a metal worker’s shop and a housewares store, each a few paces wide, face uncertain futures on the ground floor of a 16th Century cardinal’s palace where apartments now rent to foreigners for $3,000 a month.

‘Artisans at Risk’

“In Rome alone, there are about 40,000 artisans at risk,” Longo said.

Artisans are increasingly scrambling to keep going: Tailors and jewelry makers who have lost their shops work at home. And Rome’s dwindling barbers have taken to making house calls. Young Italians would rather be police officers than learn how to restore old paintings.

Rome’s transformation has quickened dramatically since the completion a decade ago of its first subway line.

“Tens of thousands of people flock into the center every day by Metro from southern suburbs,” council member De Nepi explained. “Most of them are young. They are not looking for books or jewelry, but jeans, hamburgers and excitement.”

Solutions Are Elusive

Amid conflicting priorities, there are no easy solutions. The city now has embarked on a belated artisans’ census with the idea of protecting as “trade archeology” all shops over 60 years old.

But artisans are skeptical about the city’s efforts, staging strikes and demonstrations against restrictions that prohibit all but local traffic in downtown streets.

“The city councilors only remember us at election time. Closing the center to traffic simply means that clients stop coming to shop,” said Ettore Brandizzi, proprietor of a 101-year-old jewelry shop on the Via dei Coronari and vice president of the 63,000-member Roman Artisans’ Assn.

“I’d say 95% of all artisans’ shops in Rome are rented. They are all in danger of eviction in favor of more places selling pizza, jeans and the like,” he said.

But since Rome’s first McDonald’s opened in controversy at the Piazza di Spagna two years ago, quickly gaining the reputation of being the city’s busiest restaurant, officials have rebuffed an onslaught of subsequent applications from fast-food businesses.

A landmark cafe and some distinguished bookstores have been spared by municipal edict, but other Roman landmarks have vanished: a shop that sold old jewelry and antiques from a city-owned palace on the Via del Corso was reborn as a high-class jeanseria that violated so many building codes that it was closed.

Amid the consternation, pathos and the search for solutions, the set of this tide of development seems clear: In Rome’s historic Piazza Navona, an historic art gallery is being replaced by yet another ice cream parlor. And applications are pending from more than 500 shop owners in the old city that want to change their line of business from old to new.