Keti Lelo, Salvatore Monni, Federico Tomassi
The seven Rome
Donzelli, 124 pages, 19 euros
After publishing in 2019 The maps of inequalitythe group made up of an economic historian, a statistician and a public executive who animates the mapparoma.info site is back in the bookstore. It does so with a text that, like the previous one, clearly explains Rome through maps that graphically represent its social characteristics and contradictions.
The thesis is that there is not just one Rome, but seven, geographically distinguishable even if mostly composed of discontinuous areas. They are the historical city, that is the center, the best known by non-Romans, more and more empty; the rich city, which occupies the northern offshoots and a part of the south, inhabited for the most part by men with prestigious jobs; the compact city, the most populated and alive, in the process of gentrification; the city of hardship, made up of official and abusive villages and speculation complexes; the city of the automobile, arranged around the Grande Raccordo Anulare, little known but representative; the city-countryside, far away and scarcely dense; and, finally, the “city of the invisible”: homeless, prisoners, asylum seekers, Roma, of whom little is said and which instead has its own dramatic consistency. For each of the cities, data, trends are offered, potentials and problems are identified. This is followed by an analysis of the complex Roman economy and an interesting account of what the pandemic reveals about the capital.
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