The Catholic School

by Edoardo Albinati

  Their exterior appearance is dignified. An understated style, intelligent use of materials, and not much more. If you rule out daring structural approaches, the so-called décor almost always takes the form of ornamental inserts, or else it incorporates effects designed to add scale: the monumental ambition of certain apartment houses and small villas, for example, was expressed by their ground-floor street presence with entrances so grand that they jutted out beyond the second-story façade. These are cases of grandeur typical of the QT, touching, after their fashion. As I walk past them, on Corso Trieste, and I admire these colonnades, these spacious, shadowy atriums that lead into buildings that, all things considered, are really quite modest, I think of the effort, yes, the sheer effort to attain distinction: the interplay of recessed and jutting sections of the façade, the obsessive motif of pocket balconies and terraces, which forced the architects to pursue an exhausting succession of variations on such a narrow theme, as well as the use of materials that were more or less precious and appropriate. On the façades, the brick curtain wall alternates playfully with travertine and plaster.

  All this because, in spite of how widespread it is, the apartment house, specifically, the small, three-story apartment house, the palazzina, is a structural model so amorphous that it doesn’t even seem to merit a clear and specific definition. In the architecture textbooks that I’ve consulted, there is no mention of it. Very commonly used, on the other hand, is the term derived from it, “palazzinaro,” the “building speculator,” the developer, without whom the Roman social landscape would be left incomplete and, in many ways, inexplicable. But I don’t want to delve into the topic. I myself am the son of a “palazzinaro.”

  I walk and I walk, and I look, and I walk, and I think.

  It’s true, the work of inventing things all concerns the surface, not the form. These are purely graphic expedients, they are to architecture as illustration is to painting . . .

  Via Sabazio, Via Topino, Via Sebino, Via Taro . . . so lovely, with the stringcourses marking each floor designed in a pseudosculptural fashion, decorated with cornices of foliage and flowers . . . the little balconies shaped like upside-down bells, so tiny that you can barely open the window and step out, one person at a time . . . and then there are little loggias, arches, Latin inscriptions, and mosaics. Around Piazza Verbano, the décor is smeared onto buildings that would otherwise be strictly working class in character . . . and peering in, the courtyards of the apartment buildings, well tended, deserted . . . because inflexible building regulations prohibit children from chasing one another around the palm trees, bicycles and motor scooters from parking, and playing soccer is forbidden.

  Decent housing for white-collar workers, that’s the source of all of Rome’s modernization.

  While for the working classes, a home is a shelter from the elements, the middle class sees it as a mark of distinction and a sign of social recognition: the QT is the middle class’s reward. In one case it’s the alternative to living in a hovel, a favela, in the other it’s a way of assuring that someone (the doorman, your barber, the mailman, a city courier, the grocer’s delivery boy) will say, “Accountant Filacchioni/Construction Surveyor Pedetta/ Professor Sacripante . . . lives there,” in that apartment house with the fine moldings around the windows and the Jugendstil dripstone.

  I look at those little balconies filled with flowers: they’re meant to liven up the façade, give it a rhythm. I’m thinking in formal terms. In existential terms, they’re good for going out and smoking a cigarette, now that you can no longer do it indoors.

  There was a time when in the stately apartment houses, the palazzi signorili, the balcony was not used to bask in the sun or enjoy a cool breeze: no one seemed to feel any need for the outdoors. The outdoors was vulgar, opening to the exterior was a weakness, a crack through which strangers and enemies could penetrate to the heart of the building. The balcony was a place where a gentleman or a lord could look out or, more likely, show himself to the populace. Something of this closure toward the exterior, and of a perch where the master could display himself on official occasions, can still be found in certain small villas or palazzine, whose windows are curiously smaller than one might expect or the dimensions might allow, as if the occupants weren’t interested in having excessive interactions with the world outside.

  If you’re fine indoors, then you’re fine where you are.

  In Rome the tradition of heaviness as a synonym for solidity still survives. Rome is a conservative city, or perhaps it’s just a lazy one, a place that is reluctant to give up its customs and its habits, not because it’s especially attached to them, but to avoid the psychic cost of change, out of skepticism toward the new. Change is futile or deceptive. It’s not that the Romans are afraid of the new, no, rather they deride it, they take it in stride, with a smirk. The law of inertia is respected in Rome when it comes to habits, but certainly not because it’s venerated.

  In ancient buildings, it was the weight of the cornerstone that conferred solidity.

  Here in the QT, on the other hand, the idea of the balcony as a central element of an apartment’s quality is widespread. Its decorative motifs are simple and elegant. Prestige, decorum, dignity: but what prevails over all is the theme of the compromise. Yes, compromise is the true key to any understanding of the train-de-vie, the lifestyle, the very soul of the QT; it was under the rubric of compromise that this quarter was built, from the first small villa to the last immense apartment house, over the course of eighty years. Very much like its inhabitants, in social terms, the buildings in which those inhabitants live are the product of eclecticism: what with the tireless connecting of different elements, a specific style was created here. Just now, on my way down Via Adige, I walk past a palazzina that meets all those criteria, courtly, elegant, urbane, embellished and brightened by every possible figure of the monumental style reduced to a domestic scale: a classical pediment, baroque medallions, just as the motif that highlights the stringcourses of each floor is baroque. Each window has a differently designed cornice and a small balcony, where just one person can look out, maybe two if they squeeze in together.

  Other buildings, however, don’t even bother to try to lighten any part of themselves, they don’t want decoration. They’re closed to the world and severe. Travertine on the ground floor, a brick curtain wall on the rest of the façade: signs of the determination to remain firmly planted on the ground (solid, maintaining our position!).

  On Via Gradisca, an apartment house has an external staircase that might suggest a turret, but one made of glass: it’s not designed to look out from within, rather it seems built to look in from without. At night, I observe it from the windows of my home, it’s quite impressive all lit up like that, erect, slender, it looks like a spaceship in an old sci-fi movie. Now I walk past it and I’m struck with admiration.

  Via Gradisca, take a left at Via Tolmino, then a right on Via Bolzano . . .

  And I finally emerge in front of SLM.

  Built like a modern fortress, with walls constructed alternately in cement and brick, dull and neutral colors and a fire-engine-red band that runs under the ribbon windows. Little towers that loom over each building contain the stairwells. And four large internal courtyards, overlooked by the outsized classroom windows: one common courtyard in front of the church, and then one courtyard behind the elementary school, one where the middle school students have their recess, and one for the high school. These courtyards were once connected, even though the student populations were never supposed to mix, at the start of the school day, when they were let out from class, and at recess, never mix—never!—because mixing may be stimulating but it is also very, very dangerous. Otherwise the older students might bully the younger ones. Mingling the generations and the sexes, the old and the young, men and women, boys and girls, young men almost fully grown mingling with kids and with children—it’s all risky business. Life itself, if you stop to think about it, is terribly risky, made up as it is of conta
mination and contagion, contact and exchange. The fences are constantly being scaled and the sheep are lost or else clawed, savaged, devoured. If everything would just stay in its proper place, life would be so much quieter, so much more peaceful. But then it happens anyway: the sheep remain shut up in their fold, tame and obedient, but it’s the wolf who gets in. And what then? What good are rules then? Just a way of postponing the slaughter? This is what they’re good for: so you can say, we did what we could, as if right from the beginning it was just a matter of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, and the prohibitions, the precautions, the sanctions were just there so that, right from the beginning, they could put their mind at rest. We did what we could.

  Perhaps this is why the loin-stirring mothers of elementary school children were required to wait outside the gate for them: SLM was a world apart, and inside it, other worlds apart were trying to enter into contact with one another. The courtyard behind the elementary school was the most secret and impenetrable one, small and crowded because back then the classes were all particularly crowded. I spent five years of my life in that courtyard. Then three more in the courtyard of the middle school, and four in the courtyard of the high school.

  Yes, a modern fortress, SLM. Its modernity lies in the combination of materials, in the horizontal stringcourses of the ribbon windows, cement and brick, neutral colors and vivid ones, gray, beige, red . . . the relationship between full surfaces and empty spaces, bricks and glass. The emptier, more open walls face the courtyards, while the walls that overlook the street are solid, practically blind. It turns its severity toward the exterior, and that is all. Toward the interior, on the other hand, a reciprocal glance is allowed between those who are in the classrooms and those who run and play in the courtyard . . .

  My generation still read the book Cuore (Heart) at school, as a novel and as a manual of ethics. That was at least eighty years after it was written. Perfect for reading during a school year since it actually takes place over a school year, and is structured more or less like a calendar (brilliant stunt!). Eventually, though, a custom that had endured all those decades died out: I don’t think my children even know what the book is about, if we mention Garrone, Franti, Bottini, or de Rossi, or the little Lombard sentry, or the Florentine scribe. For at least the past thirty years, the book has vanished from circulation. Now I wonder: could it be that my generation was more similar to those youngsters of the late nineteenth century than our children are to us? Because nowadays, a young person reading this book would find it, more than boring or dated, simply incomprehensible.

  I’ve just reread it. Well, it’s formidable, with a formidable structure, cunningly devised.

  That said, it’s the book thickest with misfortune, bad luck, unhappiness, and physical deformities, hunchbacks, rickets sufferers, amputees, deaf-mutes, consumptives, widows, and orphans that I’ve ever read, and while I have no doubt that this is a faithful or even an optimistic reflection of the society of the time, well, still, all these misfortunes seem to me to have been assembled and distilled in its pages to emphasize more forcefully the ideal of the human ability to withstand adversity. (This, too, is an excellent idea.)

  Perhaps its most distinctive feature, now lost, is that it describes a universe in which the most elevated and most intense and most, shall we say, virile sentiment that can be fostered is esteem. Yes, that’s right, esteem, to esteem someone, feel esteem for them, to be esteemed.

  Even back in the day when I was still in school, this somewhat antiquated sentiment still existed, before it was finally drowned in a lake of ridicule.

  In any case, it’s the only book in Italian literature and perhaps in the literature of all times that, any time you mention it, you must specify that it is a book, to be clear, the book Cuore.

  At a certain point in this book, a piece of advice is offered that struck me, and that anyone ought to adopt as their own:

  AND STUDY CLOSELY YOUR QUARTER; study its streets, its intersections, impress well in your memory that litany of rivers and cities, so that if you were to be hurled far away from it to-morrow, you would be glad to have clearly present in your memory that grid of streets.

  2

  AMUSEMENTS WERE RARE IN THE QT. They were rare anywhere, truth be told.

  Breaking down the muffler of a motor scooter, and then reassembling it after emptying it, tensing up your pectoral muscles in front of the mirror, hitting volley after volley against half a Ping-Pong table angled vertically, or else on a full table, four players running around it in what, I can’t even remember now, was called (in any case, for no good reason) either “American style” or “German style,” a version of Ping-Pong that consisted of hitting the ball when it came your turn, setting the paddle down on the table and rushing around to the opposite side just in time to pick up the paddle left there by your classmate and hit back the ball, which had in the meantime been frantically returned by the three other players, laughing and panting, trying to place the ball where none of the adversaries could possibly reach it in time, with treacherous volleys that would fall short; and then shouting “Whore!” at a nun, collecting trading cards, bottles, flags.

  It’s not as if there was a lot to do . . . Oh, right, the filthy pulps (the term “porn” would have been too explicit).

  These were the chief entertainments of the young boys of the QT, before drugs and political violence became widespread.

  OUR EDUCATION was rounded out on trading cards, and not only the cards featuring soccer players, as people seem to think based on the array of superficial accounts that tend to collapse those years solely to images of singers and soccer stars. Instead, the array extended to include what some refer to as general culture, with collections illustrating the nations of the world, the great men of history, from generals to scientists and artists, armies and navies and ships and planes, animals, the continents, outer space, natural phenomena . . .

  I remember the trading card of the aurora borealis, the hunt for the extremely rare trading card of the northern lights, with the drapery of its luminous curtains in the Arctic sky, the object of dizzying offers, proposals to trade ten, twenty, or even fifty cards (useless, common doubles, cards that we all had in multiple copies . . .) for an aurora borealis. Then there were the collections of records. Records set for height, speed, weight. We’d write them down and update them, building genuine full-fledged cults around those who had set them. Records themselves became a subject in which records were set, where it was the most fanatical and know-it-all nerd who excelled, memorized the Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest midget, the oldest Chinaman, the deepest scuba dive, even if just a month later another scuba diver would come along, beating that record by getting two meters deeper, and then the velocity of supersonic jets expressed in Mach speed, the Olympic gold medals won by Mark Spitz (9) and the number of Motorcycle Grand Prix World Championship titles won by Giacomo Agostini (15) and his number of Gran Prix wins (122) . . . all this was the subject of superficial, meaningless knowledge and aggregations of legend, which when all mixed together created a very particular form of devotion.

  Yes, “devotion” is the right word to describe that genre of adolescent fanaticism.

  We boys would argue and fantasize endlessly about information concerning the length of sharks and the speed records set on land and water by infernal machines whose pilots often died in spectacular crashes. And off we’d go, reciting the names of the fallen heroes, starting with Formula One racers. I remember that I once had, perhaps as late as middle school, a school planner on the theme of car racing, with all the photos and achievements of the various racers of the time. When I finished high school, I cleared a giant stack of school material from my room, and I found the planner again. We students used to personalize them, pasting in photographs, decorating and illuminating them with markers in various colors, writing random phrases on them, and of course scribbling and scrawling on the planners of our classmates in exactly the same way, until those little volum
es would swell until they were three or four fingers thick, an inch or even two. Well, as I leafed through my old “Formula One” planner it dawned on me that the racers depicted in it were all dead. When I bought it, they were all daredevils tearing down the track and smiling in photographs; a few racing seasons and a few school years later, and not one of them was left on the face of the earth. The deaths that hit me hardest were those of Jim Clark, Lorenzo Bandini, Jochen Rindt, who posthumously won the world championship with Lotus after dying in a crash at Monza, and the stunningly handsome François Cevert.

  I remember that they chose not to come to Lorenzo Bandini’s aid while he was being burned alive in his Ferrari, along the waterfront in Monte Carlo—a city that I detest. “Of all the places in the world, the one where the concept of human brotherhood is shared least.”

  Ah, I want to add a name, Graham Hill, a great racer with a famous mustache, who died not in a car but in an airplane. The Piper he was piloting hit a tree while flying over a golf course, in thick fog.

  THE COLLECTIONS OF TRADING CARDS were folk encyclopedias. The cards for soccer players included such statistics as their weight, height, and number of goals achieved or conceded, by such hardworking professional athletes as Cereser, Pizzaballa, or Battisodo. The ejaculatory prayer of the names of the bike racers, on the other hand, was something we learned during the summer, from the half-transparent little plastic balls with their faces sealed inside, balls that we’d launch with a flick of the middle finger along racetracks that we carved out of the wet beach sand by dragging one of our friends along by the heels, if possible a friend with a fat ass so that the track would be nice and wide and the curves parabolic to keep the balls from flying over the sides.

  AFTER EXCHANGING TRADING CARDS or winning them in various games and bets, we would argue at length over the accuracy and truthfulness of the captions that accompanied them, whether, that is, the Ganges crocodile really did grow to measure twenty-three feet in length, and whether the race driver who drove the Thunderbolt on the Bonneville Salt Flats really did die in the explosion of his wheeled rocket just seconds after smashing the record . . .