Roman holiday at art museum squat
BY BILL WEINBERG
In an outlying industrial area of the Eternal City, along
the Via Prenestina, is one of Rome’s most public
and eccentric squats, or occupazioni — the
Metropoliz.
This won fame on the underground fi lm circuit
with its 2011 cinematic project “Space
Metropoliz,” about squatters colonizing the
moon (a nod, if not an intentional one,
to Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel “The Dispossessed”).
Filmed in the cavernous
ex-factory, the fl ick is on YouTube, and
has screened at fi lm festivals in Italy
and elsewhere.
On a recent trip to Italy, I visited
Metropoliz to see it for myself.
Every vast room in the rambling former
salami plant was fi lled with bizarre
artwork — murals on walls, huge sculptures
hanging from the ceilings, surreal,
menacing or idealistic. Many were crafted
from found industrial debris.
But the upper fl oors were inhabited
by mostly migrant families, their laundry
hung to dry in the corridors. In the
canteen, where a big circle-“A” anarchist
symbol hung above the kitchen door, a
family of Peruvians was cooking up
lunch fare: the typical Italian proletarian
dish pasta fazool, and the traditional Peruvian
specialty, papas a la Huancaína.
Giorgio de Finis, who directed the
fi lm and co-founded the squat, sat down
with me over coffee in the canteen.
“Many squats in Europe are inhabited
by artists,” he said. “But this one is
inhabited by families. Artists initiated
it, but with the political intention to advance
what we call the diritto a la città
— the right to housing.” (Literally, “the
right to the city.”)
The salami factory was abandoned in
the ’80s, and the space was taken over in
2009 by a squatter movement called the
Blocchi Precari Metropolitani (the Precarious
Metropolitan Blocs), a reference
to the uncertain social status of the disenfranchised.
The year after the fi lm came
out, the place was opened to the public
as the Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove di
Metropoliz, or MAAM (the Museum of
the Other and the Elsewhere).
Amid the droves of alterno-tourists
groking on the artwork live some
200 migrants — from Peru,
Morocco, Sudan, Ethiopia,
Eritrea — as
well as some
I t a l i a n
PHOTO BY BILL WEINBERG
The Metropoliz, an “art museum” squat in Rome.
PHOTO BY BILL WEINBERG
Art festoons the walls of the
Metropoliz in Rome.
PHOTO BY BILL WEINBERG
The squat’s cofounders, Giorgio de Finis, left, and Irene di Noto, third
from left.
families left unemployed and homeless
in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis,
and several Romani families, otherwise
forced to live in camps under what de Finis
called a “policy of ghettoization.”
But by the time the squatters moved
in, the ex-factory had already been
bought by the Salini Impregilo construction
fi rm, which wants to build an
apartment complex on the site. De Finis
emphasized that this development would
not serve the communities now living in
the Metropoliz.
Irene di Noto, another Metropoliz cofounder,
sees the project as an experiment
in a new form of social organization.
“We want to go beyond the dichotomy
between public and private,” she said.
“What we call ‘public’ today is space not
yet appropriated by the private. We want
to establish space outside that dynamic
— a space managed by citizens, as well
as accessible to citizens.”
Acknowledging that Metropoliz has a
weak claim to the space under the law,
she said, “We speak not of legality but
legitimacy — serving the bene comune
common good.”
Di Noto believes there are some 6,000
people living in some 100 squats across
Rome, and that criminalizing them will
not address the social pressures that
brought about this reality.
“Rent control was abolished throughout
Italy in the ’90s, and public housing
has been sold off since then; there is less
each year,” she said. “Salvini’s ‘Italians
fi rst’ rhetoric and security law facilitate
evictions.”
She was referring to the draconian Security
Decree instated by Italy’s far-right
Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, explicitly
aimed at two broadly overlapping
groups: immigrants and squatters.
In addition to restricting the rights of
migrants and refugees to asylum and government
aid, the decree also imposes a
fi ve-year prison term for squatting. Italy’s
thousands of squatters — many of them
displaced from their homelands in the
Middle East, Africa and South America
— are now in a precarious position.
Schneps Media TVG June 20, 2019 21