Roma 1968

There are many apparently contradictory black-and-white images of Rome that Ludovico Quaroni took around the eternal city. The baroque is to be found side by side with shacks, while the explosion of consumer society – during Italy’s economic boom – does little to erase the traces of a city that seems to have come straight out of a Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini film. And then there are the fountains of Rome and the banks of the Tiber, Franco Albini’s Rinascente and Castel Sant’Angelo, the EUR and the Vatican, right up to the market in Piazza Vittorio and the ancient Appian Way. Layers of civilisations intertwining, and in between them, the people of Rome, seemingly indifferent to the passing of the centuries. The architect’s eye brings to life an unpublished and surprising book that may also be considered – and this is the common thread – an act of love towards the city where he was born. A text by the writer Francesco Pecoraro, himself a student of Quaroni, pays homage to the great architect’s Rome.