Cinematic Space in Rome's Disabitato: Between Metropolis and Terrain Vague in the Films of Fellini, Antonioni, and Pasolini

"They were exhausting scenes … walking in the mud, in the slime, the quicksand," decried veteran comic actor Totò with only slight exaggeration while recalling "the most unbelievable places" he had to cross in the making of Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1965).² Shot mainly in Rome's extensive urban wastelands, known locally as the "disabitato," the film draws viewers into increasingly liminal states, physically as well as psychologically bewildering. From vacant lots and half-built overpasses, to shantytowns and collapsing farm houses, commonly recognizable monuments almost never enter the screen. Confirmation of location by reference to the city center is consistently and carefully denied.

Out of the maze of underbrush and ruins, however, emerges a document valuable not only for its portrait of an ephemeral Roman periphery (and the rough parallels that exist today), but also for how the disabitato both shaped and was shaped by Pasolini's cinematic artistry. Many postwar Italian films are likewise engaged with the overgrown edges of the city, where the landscape has gone to seed, has been bulldozed, is in the initial stages of being redeveloped, or is being furtively inhabited or otherwise used under the radar of local authorities. Such areas are commonly referred to as terrain vague, a term that has emerged from urban studies and gained currency in recent discussions in a variety of disciplines concerning space, place, and everyday life.³

In examining cinematic engagements—or, perhaps more accurately, interventions—with terrain vague, we are particularly interested in how films represent and misrepresent, reveal and conceal, exaggerate and minimize, and in short, selectively illuminate and seek to transform the urban interstice. Our dual exploration of the disabitato and film thus entails reading cinematic and geographic spaces informed by documentary research and fieldwork. We seek to verify—to locate, traverse, ponder—various "settings" of terrain vague in a number of films shot either partially or entirely within the disabitato, including Federico Fellini's Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962). Although there are many classic and recent films alike with rich footage of the disabitato to draw upon, from Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) to Nanni Moretti's Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993), given our limited space, we chose to focus on a selection of both well-known and relatively obscure work of these three major directors from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.⁴

This period in the history of Rome, marked by frenetic postwar expansion, is of particular interest to the study of the disabitato, which has spread and shape-shifted as the city has mushroomed. The early stages of this growth in the 1950s and 1960s was marked by a rapid expansion of residential development into the surrounding rural periphery, and by the 1970s, as John Agnew comments, "an integrated Roman metropolis had come into existence," extending well beyond the official metropolitan neighborhood boundaries.⁵ Despite this intensive development, today 67%, or 86,000 hectares, of the total area of the Comune of Rome (128,500 hectares), consists of open areas, either with sparse or no presence of buildings.⁶ This open space is made up of farm land, urban green space (including public parks and private estates), protected natural areas, and fluvial zones (such as the Tiber and Aniene rivers).

Many of these rough categories escape easy definition and can be referred to as terrain vague, what Ignasi de Solà-Morales defines as land in a "potentially exploitable state but already possessing some definition to which we are external," or "strange places" that "exist outside the city's effective circuits and productive structures."⁷ Although Solà-Morales here focuses on still photography, moving pictures of terrain vague likewise "are territorial indications of strangeness itself, and the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose embrace the problematics of contemporary social life."⁸ In the case of Rome and...