Hundreds camp on sweltering Rome street amid tussle over squatted building
After a fire broke out, the building was cleared in what activists say was a politically motivated move. Rome, Italy – Ana Bizdoaca has stopped
After a fire broke out, the building was cleared in what activists say was a politically motivated move. Rome, Italy – Ana Bizdoaca has stopped expecting to be able to sleep on a mattress on the pavement a few streets from Rome’s Termini station. A heatwave has pushed temperatures past 40 degrees Celsius (104F). “Our hearts have been torn to pieces,” Bizdoaca said on the ninth night of missing sleep. Around her, some 300 people, including vulnerable people and about 100 children, from across the world, are doing the same. Behind them stands the seven-storey former office block known as Spin Time, a squatted building where they all lived until days ago. Bizdoaca has lived there since 2013. First occupied in 2013, it became home to many, including 140 families from more than 20 countries. It started with a simple idea at its centre: housing as a fundamental right. The residents have been outside since July 29, when a small fire broke out in the evening in a lower floor room where nobody lived. Residents put it out within minutes, before the fire brigade arrived, and the damage was minimal. Police evacuated the building and magistrates placed it under judicial seizure. It was declared unfit, and residents are now let back in one at a time, escorted by police, only to collect documents and essentials. The pavement has become home to the sit-in. Food arrives at lunchtime from volunteers in the surrounding district, along with water, mattresses, and clothes. Thousands have passed through over the past nine days, including dozens of politicians, singers and actors. In the evenings, an open-air cinema gives the camp’s children something to watch other than the street.
On the first night, many did not have shoes. At 4am, they were told they would not be let back in. “Some of us were on our feet for 40 hours,” said Maria Cabrera, who has lived in the building for almost 11 years and helps organise the camp. “Seeing the children on the ground, on flattened cardboard from the bins, it was awful. It really was.” On August 6, a two-year-old girl fainted in a Red Cross nurse’s arms. “I cried for two hours,” said a Kurdish resident, who watched the scene unfold. She told Al Jazeera that her brother, also a resident of the building, is blind and uses a wheelchair. Neighbours used to check on him while she was at work. Now, he sits under the scorching sun. The community has drawn support from well beyond the neighbourhood. On Friday, the physicist Giorgio Parisi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2021, sent the residents a letter. “Inequality and marginalisation are the woodworm eating away at our democracy”, he wrote, “and we should all be on the side of those who fight them concretely, not just in words”. ‘It became a family’ Cabrera arrived a year after losing her job, having been unable to pay rent. “At the beginning, it wasn’t simple, because there are 27 different nationalities here,” she said. “But it became family. Whoever is on my floor, I can go and ask them for anything.” One of Rome’s most active cultural spaces, Spin Time has a free co-working area, a newspaper put together by people aged below 30, and hosts concerts and plays.
The BriefWire