THE WOLF'S DEN - Tana dei Lupi I

[pocari_fenrir]

[stefano]

[Italiamia]

[marco]

[maro]

[Italiamia]

[Italiamia]

[SPqR]

[pocari_fenrir]

[aba_bab]

[Italiamia]

[marco]

[vtec]

[Italiamia]

[marco]

[maro]

[marco]

[Italiamia]

I think you are trying to provoke me glad. Come on, you can tell me. We are old friends and italians right?


"This is how countries die. Culture preserved in aspic is culture lost. Italy needs to rediscover the confidence that has kept it at the vanguard of style for most of recorded history."

"Culture preserved in aspic is culture lost..." Aspic huh. Wow, what an illuminating statement. I never heard such absolute horseshit in all my life. glad, I would like to have a discussion about this ridiculous statement at a later time on a specially created thread. May I be so bold as to ask the following question: Why do people from every corner of the earth come to Roma? I suppose books have been written on the subject but I want to hear from the lads. Why? Why you are all thinking of a response, why do people go to Italy for that matter? They ain't looking for the next Andy fucking Warhol.

"Prices have certainly shot up since I was last here. I don't know what the official figure for inflation is, but on the ground, or in the trattoria, it's high. A quick lunch of two slices of pizza and a dollop of pasta, with a glass of wine, set me back €56."

Maybe the man should discover places where the locals go to eat and not a typical tourist trap that this giabroni claims to have consumed his pizza and pasta lunch. Who the hell eats pizza and pasta at the same time during the same meal. I'll tell you who; idiot McAmericans who only eat pasta from a tin can and a smashed potatoe on the side. Bunch of fucking Philistines. In this case we have a northern Irishman who moonlights as an American but ignorant none the less. No offense to Shield.

Kids eat pizza for lunch. Italians eat pizza in the evening. Last year, one night I took my family and the mother in law to Taverna Mercanti in Trastevere. Very few tourists would know about the place. More know about it now because bloody Rachel Ray did a show from Rome and ate at the place. My boys are eating machines. I do not do so badly myself. There were 6 of us none the less and we are not socialist vegetarians. No offense Maro. We ate wonderful antipasti. Prosciutto, Salame, various cheeses. We ordered 2 pizze for the kids and they were larger than the usual individual pizze. I had buccatini all'amatriciana and then a veal chop. My wife, the same. I can't remember what the old bag ate after the buccatini. My 18 year old and I drank 2 caraffe of the house red wine and my wife and her mother had a caraffe of white wine. The kids then had gelato and the adults had espresso with a little Sambuca. Then the adults had an Amaro. Cost: 68 euro including the service. Anyway, Walter Ellis reporting from New York is full of shit.


The only thing I agree with at this point is that Italians are not having kids for some odd reason.

[aba_bab]

[maro]

Glad, I'm not sure that guy really does your argument justice. Part of the problem, of course, is that it's just typical journalistic inanity - lazily and pretty thoughtlessly written. Still, Avvocato, the question you ask about why so many people from all over the earth come to Rome is a provocative one. Of course they come to see the culture and history which is enshrined there. On the other hand, that culture and history is a memorial to a living, active, political, social, and cultural centre. To turn Rome into a static museum is to turn away from much which is enshrined within its monuments. Equally, tourism turns Rome into an object which serves the desires of this new kind of imperialism, tourism. It runs the risk of making Rome's 'meaning' into that which it 'means' for those who live outside it. It becomes no longer a living subject but an inert object. In a perverse way, you could actually argue that preserving Rome in aspic is just another version of its apparent opposite - the building of a McD's in the historical centre - since both work carefully to modulate the balance of difference and familiarity which the unthinking mass of cretinous tourists want. They want a bit of Pantheon and a bit of Big Mac, a bit of Michelangelo and one of those whacky itsybitsy coffees which they only ever drink when they're on holiday in Rome and a glass of Chianti Classico which can't be too distinctive, must again be recognisable.

The problem for me with Glad's argument, as I see it, is simply that I don't trust our contemporary planners and engineers and architects. This may, of course, simply be that remarkably consistent distrust of the contemporary that we see thoughout the sweep of cultural history: there is a medieval writer who complains that the only reason his work isn't getting any respect is because he's not yet dead - a failing, he's quick to note, he's not about to correct. And 25 years after his death this same work was suddenly claimed not to have been his at all but a lost work of one of the ancient writers and suddenly it became famous and authoritative. No doubt he'd have relished the irony from amid the stars. Still, Glad, I don't trust them. Part of this reflects cultural and social shifts: I think the gap between popular culture and 'high art' is so radical as to be catastrophic for both. And the power of the market and of the people is potentially disastrous for serious art - by which I mean things like the Sistine Chapel or the friezes around Trajan's Column: seriously popular, popularly serious. And of course the shift in the forms of relationship between technology and craftsmanship has also fundamentally altered the practices and values of 'monumental' art. All of these, for me, at least, are reasons to be deeply distrustful of any of those individuals who might be responsible for the re-enlivening of Rome's architectural landscape from within.