Rome Journal IX: Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis

photograph by Hallie Cohen

In one of the most moving scenes from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, Anna Magnani and Ettore Garofolo, who plays her son, stand perched on the edge of opportunity, of a new life which manifests itself in the form of better housing. The scene takes place in front of a dramatic archway leading to a housing unit on the Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis. We’re on the outskirts of Rome, near the Porta Maggiore—which is one of the ancient entrances to the city. Pasolini’s shots are like tableau vivants which exude a profound sense of place. Antonioni's setups have a similar sense of place, but his movies end up looking like Di Chirico paintings. By contrast, Pasolini’s style, his esthetics, which were as immersed in art history (he studied with art historian Roberto Longhi), also drew their power from the director's left-wing politics. When Pasolini filmed Mamma Roma the area was poor and not far from a church on a long street, Via Casal Bertone. Here he shot the iconic opening scene in which Mamma Roma leads three pigs she calls the “Fratelli d’Italia" into the wedding reception of her pimp, Carmine (Franco Citti). The scene is modeled on da Vinci’s Last Supper, which itself is painted on the wall of Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie and records a niche similar to the one which Pasolini created for his movie. Though Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis is still an outer borough, there’s now a majesty to the location. The apartment house is gated, presided over by a guard and is reminiscent of grand old Upper West Side buildings in Manhattan like the Apthorp, with its courtyard and auspicious entranceway. How times have changed! If you walk from Piazza Tommaso di Cristoforis to Via Casal Bertone you will come to Favole di Pizza at Via Cesare Ricotti, 8. They have sublime slices.

Let My People Go

“Departure of the Israelites" by David Roberts (1829)

About half way through the Passover holiday you start thinking about bagels. You crave bagels because you can’t have them. It’s not the same as wanting a matzah on Chanukah. The craving is not so bad since you know you can have it. The matzah is supposed to remind one of the Exodus. But now you don’t feel free. When will your liberation from matzah come? There is a concoction called the matzah bagel, but that just doesn’t cut it. Living without bagels becomes like one of those indignities you suffer when you can’t do something for one reason or another. Your knee blows out and you have to forego the workout regimen. Your wireless internet connection is down. Your beloved corner coffee nook relocates five blocks away. You console yourself with the thought of loyally traipsing the extra distance in the rain, knowing full well that you’re going to have to find a new and nearer place to have those meaningful talks. You can’t sleep in Sunday morning because a water main has burst and they’re opening up the street. The neighborhood bowling alley where you  spent so many rainy and joyous Saturday afternoons with your kids finally closes for good. The local library where you read the paper is closing for renovations. After all these years freeloading you will actually have to  buy your Times. How can you survive without those things that are a source of comfort—like the bagel? Passover is a celebratory holiday, but the theme of sacrifice runs through the liturgy (and let us not forget that a Seder was probably Jesus’ Last Supper). Could it be that learning to live without a bagel is telling us something about what it means to be free?

Die Hard Without a Vengeance

What if you were told you had 24 hours to live? You could have swallowed a poison capsule by accident or perhaps you had recondite knowledge of Armageddon. What would you do? Empty the bank account and go on a hedonistic odyssey in which you gratify all your as yet unfulfilled fetishes and desires? Would you purchase the high priced hooker (s) or gigolo(s)? Would you fly to Thailand and have the soapy massage or massage sandwich with two lovelies? Probably not, it’s too long a flight and if there were delays, you could be DOA. Under the theory that money can buy anything, you’d probably decide you can find what you are looking for closer to home. What if food rather than sex was the ultimate pleasure as far as you were concerned? Would you construct an elaborate Last Supper composed of foie gras, chateaubriand, cold lobster, naturally caviar and say no holds bar the world’s greatest dessert? Would you finally fork out for those Teuscher champagne truffles that had previously seemed wastefully expensive. This is the theme of Kurosawa’s Ikiru. In that case Kurosawa’s character, Watanabe, learns he has a year to live. He embarks on a Walpurgisnacht in which he attempts to gratify his desires in the seedy side of town, but materialistic pleasures soon prove wanting and he finally devotes himself to helping children by creating a playground. There’s a wonderful scene at the end of the film when with little time left, Watanabe sits on a swing, in the playground he has built, as the snow begins to fall.

Mamma Roma

Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, currently in revival at Film Forum, begins with Da Vinci’s Last Supper, ends with a reference to El Greco, in a desolate shot of burned-out ruins, and nods to Mantegna’s famous painting Lamentation over the Dead Christ. Actually, from the beginning, Pasolini’s second film establishes two of the director’s central obsessions—the low life of Rome’s pimps and prostitutes and Christianity, if not the passion of Christ himself, which puts the director in good company when you think of Augustine and Dante’s Divine Comedy, also mesmerizingly evoked in a tragic prison sequence. But the really great art historical reference is Anna Magnani (she, like the Madonna, will likely go down as one of the great subjects for all the artists—in this case filmmakers—who tried to embody her), who plays a majestic whore and lush who wants the best for her son Ettore (Ettore Garofolo). In the first scene she leads pigs into her pimp’s wedding while celebrating her freedom by swinging her then little boy in the air. It’s the bags under Magnani’s eyes—with their world weariness, their lust, their rapture and compassion—that leave such an indelible imprint. Guilietta Massina played a prostitute in Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria with an almost Chaplinesque mixture of humor and pathos, and years later there was Sigmone Signoret’s Madame Rosa. But Magnani is the ultimate whore, strolling through Rome’s underworld in a series of literally death-defying soliloquies—only why did she have to shave her armpits?