Italy Debates a Capital Idea--Down With Rome!

Was the decision to make Rome the capital of Italy, taken in the last century, a mistake even bigger than the Colosseum itself?

Yes, says Luigi Firpo, a history professor at Turin University and one of the luminaries among Italian intelligentsia. His opinion has probably been held by millions of other Italians since Rome actually became the Italian capital in 1870. It is an opinion likely to gain adherents in the next century.

Many Romans, or those who call themselves Romans, agree that the Eternal City seems each day less likely to hold on to that defiant label much longer. For them, Rome entered an alarming new chapter around AD 1950, the year when everyone who could switched from bicycles to cars, and folks flocked in from the hills to join the Roman circus.

Firpo, who now also sits in Parliament, has said that the degradation of Rome is total. The Romans are vulgar, arrogant and ignorant, he claims, and the city “does not deserve to be the capital.” For him, Rome is “the only Levantine city without a European quarter.”

His remarks, uttered first in Parliament then repeated and expanded in interviews, brought a denial from his political party that he was speaking for them, and then angry words from the city’s political bosses. Some of their responses were impoverished, falling back on the line that Rome was the natural capital because it once had been the capital of the Western World.

This, Firpo said, was “imperial rhetoric.” Harking back to the empire was also one of Benito Mussolini’s gambits, when the Italian dictator was playing from his balcony to cheering Roman crowds. Mussolini spoke of his Rome as being the city’s third incarnation. First, the Rome of the Caesars, then the Rome of the Popes and finally the Rome of his glorious new Fascist regime.

Prince Metternich, the 19th-Century Austrian statesman, dismissed the Italy of his time as being “more a geographical expression than a country.” A little later, Firpo’s native Piedmont, the northwestern Italian region that borders Switzerland and France, produced a handful of noblemen who thought that Italy should become a unified nation for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. In 1861 the Piedmontese Parliament declared that one day Rome would be the new Italian capital. The rest of the country was then under foreign domination; Rome and other parts of Italy were ruled by the Pope.

When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in Turin, one unification supporter, the Marquis Massimo D’Azeglio, said, “We’ve created an Italy--now we must create the Italians.” A strong argument could be made that his second goal is still a long way off.

To relieve the Pope of his temporal powers, the Piedmontese entered Rome on Sept. 20, 1870, set up their king in what until the day before had been the Pope’s residence and found themselves in possession of a city of fewer than 200,000 people, living in a poverty unknown elsewhere on the Italian peninsula.

Today Rome’s official population is 3 million, but each day it continues to attract migrants from hill towns and farms, drawn like moths to the bright lights. They soon find themselves living in shantytowns on the outskirts, without electricity or even plumbing. The arches of Roman aqueducts, built 2,000 years ago to supply water for Nero’s baths, are now bricked up by migrants and serve as dwellings.

A cover story on a feisty Italian weekly, Espresso, some time ago was titled, “When the Capital Is Corrupt--the Nation Is Infected.” That was, and probably is, the attitude of Milan or any other modern metropolitan area in northern Italy toward the nation’s capital. Each year the northern regions see their tax payments shipped to Rome for distribution in favor of southern Italy, an area just as rich in natural resources as the north and with double the unemployment.

Alberto Moravia, the dean of Italian novelists, now a spry 83, is a Rome native. He was one of the first to jump on Firpo for his remarks, reminding him that when the Piedmontese entered Rome, they demolished many splendid buildings and private gardens to make Rome “more modern.” A few days later, Moravia recalled that he himself had written against Rome a few years back and offered proof that Firpo was not all that original in his thoughts.

Moravia had said: “Rome is not worthy of the name of being a European capital, like Paris or London. It is not a model for the nation to follow, but a sterile bureaucratic sponge that absorbs everything and gives nothing. Though the center of the church, it is the world’s least spiritual city. Religion is present more with its bureaucracy than with its sentiment . . . . There is no circulation of ideas and persons in Rome, meaning there is no society of either.”

When Firpo was asked where he would prefer to have the Italian capital, he said, “Somewhere near Chiusi, but in open country.” Both he and Moravia agree that Chiusi--an old Etruscan town midway between Rome and Florence--is only their utopian dream. It is too late for an Italian Pretoria, Canberra, Brasilia or Washington, even though with their cars, Italy’s central government and the entire elephantine bureaucracy are destroying the remains of both ancient and modern Rome with a wanton thoroughness that would give pause to Attila the Hun.

If it had not been deemed necessary to dislodge the Pope from his temporal control over Rome, some of the Piedmontese were touting Naples as the nation’s capital. It was, after all, the largest Italian city and still a major cultural influence in Europe. However, the Sicilians said they would never again accept Naples as a sovereign seat.

What a pity. The Neapolitans have been living by their wits for centuries. They are clever about inventing jobs and pulling rabbits out of other peoples’ hats. They are nimble, too, as people who choose to live under a smoldering volcano need to be. They have produced great painters, poets, composers, writers, architects--while Rome has failed to produce even one.

Had Naples become the Italian capital 100 years ago, it would have tilted the scale in favor of the Italian peninsula becoming a Mediterranean country, not what it is now--an angry mix, half-European and half-Mediterranean.

That is what Luigi Firpo’s rage against Rome is all about. He spoke for millions of Italians who consider themselves European, and, incidentally, probably spoke also for foreign Europeans who must do business in Italy and who find themselves beating their heads against the city’s bureaucratic rubber wall.

The only way out of this Italian dilemma is for the north to secede from the union. Both sides would be winners.