Rome is a place that in late 1980s experienced an influx of thousands Eastern European and Asian immigrants per year for about 5 years. But only a trace of this moment remained in the form of an indoor market 3 blocks away from the old outdoor market, where immigrants sell food in one part and clothes in the other. It looked defeated, though, not vibrant as I remember it 21 years before. The current Rome seems to have erased this episode, and instead, weighed down by its architecture and history, can’t shake its inertia. I guess I was hoping to find immigrants that used local resources (even if out of necessity) to create a diverse ecology or economy of their own in these spaces, but instead I found complacency, especially in the uniformity of the types of goods sold. It is hard to identify the causes, but much like the garden at the Academy, Rome’s romanticized image (of the quality and diversity of its products) does not match the reality–related here are the homogenizing policies of the EU, in which many small farmers can’t even sell at most places anymore. Rome is the antithesis of Berlin, a city that has the difficult challenge of modernizing the eastern half of the city while maintaining the west, and throughout negotiating its complicated and contradictory history and architecture.
After checking out about 7-8 markets I settled at Campo di Fiori, mostly a produce market. I picked a place right in the center, with a safe distance from the legal stalls. I was greeted with visits from wary vendors–who seemed undecided whether or not to flex their muscle and make me leave–and so made an effort to befriend them by giving them the fruit-flavored marshmallows I had made–both apricot and strawberries, chosen for being in season and cheap.
Later in the day the highly organized Southeast Asian and African immigrants arrived, selling fake watches, sunglasses, and bags. These people were not independent contractors, but part of a single fanny pack that collected all the proceeds and paid a salary to their salesmen. They also had to negotiate their place in the market, but they were ready to move at a moment’s notice when pushed to do so. If the legal vendors were the insiders, and the fake goods’ vendors the outsiders, I belonged somewhere in the middle, a place that did not have a label anymore.
I have found one place in Rome that is trying to capitalize on the trend of sustainable economy that I wanted to see and talk to its organizers, but its closed in the summer, and only a small organic market that was mostly empty at 5pm was operating in vast space of a former animal processing plant. They have a website, but just in the same vain of my Roman experience its site looks better then its actual offerings. http://www.cittadellaltraeconomia.org/
