ABSTRACT
In this chapter I discuss the changing representation of Piazza Vittorio, the largest Roman piazza, in four post-war films, one from the period of neoRealism, De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948), and three from the last 15 years, Amelio’s Il ladro di bambini (1992), Bertolucci’s L’assedio (1998) and Scola’s Gente di Roma (2003). The piazza is a large porticoed space (Figure 8.1), 180m by 300m, containing a road around a central garden with ruins. Since the early 1980s, it has also housed the structures of the metro. Until 2003, it was home to Rome’s largest market and the paraphernalia of market stallholders, legal and illegal. Piazza Vittorio displays features common to all contemporary cities – markets, mixed itinerant populations, shops and stalls, dirt, traffic – but here, these metropolitan aspects are linked with an almost casual presence of antiquity, a feature, which, while not confined to Rome, is insistently associated with it, historically and imaginatively. I suggest that both the post-1870 history of the Esquiline, the area in which the square is located, and the images of its central square as shown in these films, illustrate the distinctiveness of Rome as a modern city whose past always forms part of the immediate experience of its inhabitants and of any representation of it. In this sense any encounter with the modern city is simultaneously an encounter with a past city that continues to shape and embody the present one.
