night from window in Rome

Last night, on the first of three nights of the Ottobrata Monticiana, a union organised festival in Monti, 12, 13 and 14 October 2018, I held the camera out or window for two minutes and recorded this... life below and live music floating from the Piazza di Santa Maria ai Monti.

A festival to discuss and celebrate the role of women, with photo exhibitions of the Roman actresses Anna Magnani and Monica Vitti and the singer Gabriella Ferri. With children's entertainments during the day and films featuring those women at the Monti Seniors Centre in the evening. 

Anna Magnani flew Italian neorealist cinema to the sky with her 1945 performance in Roberto Rosselini's Roma: Città Aperta [Rome: Open City]. When Italian cinema went in a completely different direction from Hollywood or British cinema, into portrayal of the realities of life for ordinary people. This book review in The Guardian provides context. This is not without relevance to the present state of Italian-German relations.

Here is Wikipedia's account of Roma: Città Aperta. We are staying 2km on foot from the Museum of the Liberation of Rome, in a small building used by the SS for torture in 1944. The middle aged Germans sitting drinking around the fountain of the Piazza (live performance floating again in the window tonight 13 October) are likely uncomprehending. As a woman in impromptu political essay in the rain two nights ago said: "The Germans are strong, organised and rich. They come here but they don't love us. Merkel brings her husband to Italy for summer holidays, but she does not love us. They will not help us recover. They resent us now as they resented us 500 years ago (Luther)."

This three minute fragment of Roma Città Aperta has no subtitles. The quote in the film title says that it seems this winter can never end. Read the Wikipedia entry at link above to need no translation. Use YouTube to find more by Anna Magnani. There is despair in Italy now that the winter of the past decade, of entrapment in non-recovery and decline from the Global Financial Crisis, is an unending winter. 

Monica Vitti, a generation later, made serious films with Michelangelo Antonioni, turning afterwards to performance in comedy. Her performances in either direction leave a permanent imprint.

and in Teresa the Thief

The music floating in the window tonight is of the same cloth, or the same musicality, as of Gabriella Ferri and her era. This bunch of movies/musical recordings begins with photos from Rome street scenes in 2009, just the same today. This is the city of our affections.

Before we stop the movies we have to offer this tribute to his home district, Monti, by the late Mario Monicelli, leading Italian film director, in his 93rd year:

This afternoon after a lunch in Trastevere at a trattoria with a menu that has not changed in fifty years, so totally Roman, we came home on the 75 bus and so had a very privileged run through army's barriers enclosing at either end the crowds who know Rome consists of things 2000 years old, to be seen in three days, max.

Esercito = Army

.... but the story of Italy is far from finished.