Porta Portese at risk: let's save it from pretentiousness

How can we restore the festive human mission of Porta Portese, the Roman market of our Sunday mornings? Arrive there very early, certain that with the rising sun, finally high and victorious above the Trastevere sky, every "treasure," every desired object will have already found its buyer, arrived there before us; there is the lucky one, the usurper of the merchandise we wanted, returning home, the heirloom under his arm, or so a friend, Alberto Becchetti, a ferret among the ferrets of that market, suggested to me years ago. He was now searching for fine art photographs, whether by Luxardo or Ghitta Carel, now for signed ceramics, somewhere between Art Deco and Viennese Secession. Even an acquaintance, pardon the digression, managed to unearth a drawing by Carlo Carrà from the so-called “Mycenaean” period: a violin player, even on infirmary graph paper, it was in fact from 1915, when the artist was in the army, the same days as Ungaretti 's verses from his “Fiumi”.

But, mind you, a stop, a visit to our market can also involve the search for a simple pair of pedals, a fleece blanket, a cell phone cover, a refill pack of Folletto bags, even the most ordinary object: among the market's regular customers, Lamberto Dini comes to mind: "Good morning, Mr. President, what are you looking for today?", I say to him, spotting him in front of a stall selling old shoulder bags. Our colorful tale, however, would be meaningless if I didn't mention that Porta Portese is now in serious danger, almost a genocide of its historic mission: a redefinition project, hatched by the City of Rome, on the verge of returning to the bureaucratic and administrative pomp of the fascist-era Governorate, concerns the entire market area, something that risks distorting its essence. And, let's be clear, folklore has nothing to do with this story, which threatens the local "resident" vendors. Rather, it involves the story of a market that arose in the postwar period to support the unemployed, the poor, yes, the "ragamuffins" —what else would you call them?

The images from Bicycle Thieves, where postman Lamberto Maggiorani and his son Bruno try to find the two wheels of salvation, are exemplary in this case, serving to exemplify the place's very name. Porta Portese, as Roberto Creti explains, standing in front of his stall selling records and CDs, accompanied by his collaborator Gustavo Tagliaferri , an expert who truly knows everything about music, explains that the market was born specifically with the poor Jewish people in mind, so that they could go there to sell their equally poor belongings and thus earn a living, albeit meager, a means of survival… Here, another cinematic reference is necessary: the extraordinary Alberto Sordi who in Fortunella, directed by Eduardo De Filippo, plays a mean vendor in our market.

What's happening now at Porta Portese?

If a neutral word were appropriate, it would be a restyling or perhaps a redesign, erasing the memory of the "poor" market by replacing each stall with numbered gazebos, thus obliterating the initial memory of the souk, and with it the equally "picturesque" memory of the commercial koiné that the place imposes: "Shall we do the block?" , an expression that suggests the buyer will take away the entire stall. Something similar has already happened in Rome, consider the Testaccio market, transfigured from its "working-class" roots into a sort of " Covent Garden " designed for a post-Pasolinian clientele: a hip attitude for the new emerging youth classes, somewhere between shabby chic and sandwich shops, so to speak, post-modern.

Now, beyond the objective fact that regulation has never occurred, despite the repeated requests of those who live in Porta Portese, it would be precisely, as we mentioned a moment ago, a distortion of the reality of the market itself. And let's not think of the sugar-coated image of Claudio Baglioni's famous hit, a basic example of Roman folklore. In this case, the overwhelming feeling is that they want to transform Porta Portese into living Sunday proof of the city's definitive anthropological decline, making the market similar to any other place that offers its goods in the "post-history" era, as the poet Pasolini would say, of a city forgetful of the commercial epic of the humble. Who knows if the only salvation for the market could come from the so-called "curse of Porta Portese " (sic) that some historical exhibitors told me about, that is, that anyone who from the Capitoline seat attempted to "bring order " among their stalls met a political fate of failure in the shadow of the She-Wolf.

FROM

Fulvio Abbate