A few days ago, together with our closest friend we entered a huge area on the outskirts of Rome that had been destined since 2004 to become “The City of Rugby”. A rugby and a football field, fitness areas, swimming pools of all kinds, for adults and, children as well as a huge guesthouse for rugby athletes were envisioned here. The investment was huge: € 30 million of which 95% guaranteed by the municipality of Rome. Well, to make a long story short, how did it end? In 2013 the works were suspended, the private entrepreneur packed up and stopped paying the loan, the area was completely abandoned and, surprise surprise, the city of Rome was left with the “hot potato” to deal with.
However, this is not the only case; in Rome there are several, about seventy, places entrusted to private entrepreneurs to create quality works (as they called them). These entrepreneurs took mortgages worth millions of euros and then disappeared, leaving the municipality with an overall debt of 600 million euros, to be paid, of course, with taxpayers’ money!
But our purpose here is not to denounce the abuses perpetrated at the expense of the community. Our purpose is much more limited, although it has a certain cultural significance: to raise awareness about the unrest that is present within the cultural avant-garde in Rome. Let us now come to the purpose of our visit in this immense and abandoned place. Inside most, if not all, of the walls host what is called a “piece”, a work of writing. During our visit, which was not planned and thus carried out without the necessary technical equipment, we found over sixty works that we will now review. The place was so huge that we probably missed some of the rooms, and who knows if we will ever be able to visit them all!
We also do not recommend visiting this site to anyone because of the excessive dangers (lack of balustrades, slippery floor – the latter experienced directly through a ruinous fall, fortunately with no serious consequences).
The visit begins in a gallery above the swimming pools; we visited those that were supposed to be the rooms of the guest house (today’s images). We will then visit the gym, then we will go down to the basement and we finally will end the journey back the pools level. Enjoy!
the first impact with the setting
We now begin to slowly enter the rooms of the colossal building. The light is dim and it is raining outside, but the colours of these works dazzle us.
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Let us begin our journey:
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In the passage through the guesthouse rooms we suddenly find ourselves in a very slippery terrace, where we find a very funny puppet:
On our way…
the puppet
The written part next to it
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And now the two last pieces of today – with the last one we reached the gym.
