The Other Rome: Centring People and Spaces of Maintenance

People imagine Rome as a city of famous monuments. But there is a whole other, hidden Rome: one that exists to maintain its iconic counterpart. A lot of work goes into keeping touristic sites clean. This work is usually carried out by underprivileged and immigrant residents from Eastern Europe or Africa. As they do not look like the Romans that tourists expect to see (that is, white people enjoying "la dolce vita," not sweating labourers), cleaners are labelled as inappropriate users of space and made to work out of sight from visitors and wealthy residents. Hidden spaces too help sustain the tourism industry: alleys and back-rooms create a service infrastructure that profits business and property owners, but hides the people who actually keep the city running.

Making this Other Rome visible is key to challenge tourist economies that capitalise on an image of purity, excluding people and spaces that contradict that image. The research will examine how the invisible city of maintenance developed and how it supports the Rome that most people know today. Archival and ethnographic methods will identify how policies and transformations of space have relegated cleaners to a condition of marginality, and how the workers in turn have countered exclusion by forging their own Rome. Special attention will be given to how the city of maintenance is not simply ancillary to, but rather a critical agent of Rome's heritage.

Analyses of historical documents will form the first phase of the project. While much has been written on Rome's architecture, most studies focus on the history of celebrated buildings and the influential people who made them. Hardly any work has centred the people who cleaned those spaces. Yet efforts to keep Rome tidy have long shaped the city and its people. Since the late-nineteenth century, poor residents were hired to clean streets and monuments while being prohibited from using those spaces to eat, play, or even loiter. Written and visual sources from three archives will help detail how sanitizing measures relegated poor residents to service activities, and how residents occupied spaces for their daily routines.

The second phase will focus on contemporary Rome. Since the 1990s, welfare cuts, rising housing prices, and sanitising regulations of public space have made the historic centre an exclusive playground for tourists and elites. Staging this playground as a theatre of art and power requires keeping streets in order. As administrators struggle with this task due to disinvestments and corruption, managers supplement city services by hiring people to clean churches, shops, and the streets around them. These cleaners are often immigrants who, after traveling for hours to get to the centre, find no services catering to their needs and are asked by employers to remain invisible to tourists. Spatial surveys and interviews with workers, employers, and tourists will investigate how cleaning governance disciplines labourers, and how cleaners use space to fabricate their own city within the city.

The last phase of the project will make the Other Rome known to specialised and general publics. Outputs for the former will include an interdisciplinary symposium, a journal article, a book proposal, and a report with design guidelines. Two other outputs will target general audiences. Firstly, made in collaboration with the cleaners, an audio-tour will allow tourists to visit historic sites while listening to workers' memories of those spaces. Secondly, an exhibition will combine historical and present-day photographs, sounds, and digitized archival data on maintenance.

Altogether, these activities will show how mainstream representations of Rome systematically erase an essential part of what-and who-the city is about. Recognizing the people who clean and their Rome as integral to the city's identity, the project will set a basis for dismantling exploitative employment and spatial discriminations.