Renovating the Roman Colosseum: Politics, urban restructuring, and the value of heritage in neoliberal times

The paper presents debates over two renovations of the Roman Colosseum between 2011 and 2015, within a broader historical and political context, as prisms through which we can explore the entanglements of neoliberal politics, urban restructuring, and the ways in which heritage is being valued. With reference to the criticisms of art historian Tomaso Montanari, archaeologist Salvatore Settis, and anthropologist Michael Herzfeld, the current study examines the political, aesthetic, and ethical rationalities inscribed in the renovations of the Colosseum and the spatial organisation of the city more generally. The paper concludes by outlining how new forms of political populism in Italy, feeding on the discontents of neoliberalism, have placed heritage at the centre of intensely contested questions of citizenship and national identity.

In the summer of 2014, historian and archaeologist Daniele Manacorda published a proposal to build a new wooden floor in the Colosseum to replace that which had been removed in the nineteenth century.¹ The proposal became a source of lively public controversy when Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, tweeted his support for turning the monument into a venue for cultural events such as films, theatre, opera, and concerts. The subsequent debate, and the critical interventions of Salvatore Settis and Tomaso Montanari, developed into a much wider public discussion about neoliberalism, the state of historical urban preservation in Italy, and of course politics.²

The present study brings together this and an earlier debate, from 2011, about a renovation of the Colosseum by the fashion company Tod, and examines them as prisms through which we can explore the entanglement of neoliberal politics, urban restructuring, and changing heritage practices. The paper begins with a discussion of neoliberalism and how the centre-right policies of Silvio Berlusconi and the centre-left policies of Matteo Renzi have both transformed heritage governance. It then examines some of the consequences of these policies, such as what corporate patrons get in return when they link their brands with heritage sites. Finally, by focusing on the criticisms of art historian Tomaso Montanari, archaeologist Salvatore Settis, and anthropologist Micheal Herzfeld, this study furthers discussion of how the commercialisation of heritage transforms the meaning of heritage and changes Italy’s historic urban centres into enclaves of privilege. The paper concludes with a brief examination of how new forms of populism, feeding on the discontents engendered by neoliberal politics, have placed heritage at the centre of intensely contested questions of citizenship and national identity.

Neoliberalism is a notoriously slippery concept. The term, as historian Rogers (2018) describes it, ‘is the linguistic omnivore of our times’,³ a restless entity that threatens to devour the other words around it. While its definition can be imprecise and vague, we may however identify several characteristics of neoliberalism related to culture, the economy, and politics that bear directly on our discussion of the transformation of heritage protection. Neoliberals see the need to intervene in the economy and the law, and they promote an ethos of what sociologist Davis (2017) calls ‘redesign and innovation’ to provide on-going support to the free market. Classic liberalism believed in a minimalist state that left individuals alone to transact their business. Neoliberalism is not a creature of the minimal state; rather, it presumes that the state should have a much more active role in the organisation of the market economy. The conditions allowing for a free market must be won politically, and the state is re-engineered to provide those conditions. Neoliberalisation has entailed, for example, increased reliance on public-private sponsorships, in heritage preservation and development as in other sectors. Businesses and corporations collaborate intimately with state actors and acquire a strong role in writing legislation and setting regulatory frameworks that are mainly advantageous to themselves. ‘The shift from state power to governance (a broader configuration of the state and key elements in civil society)’, as Harvey (2007, p. 76) commented, is one of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism. The boundaries between the state and corporate power have become more porous than ever before. The state produces legislation and assumes many of the risks while the private sector receives many of the benefits; as a consequence neoliberalism has increased the influence and power of money within the state, and by implementing pro-business policies has contributed to a heritage industry that exacerbates economic inequality and social exclusion.

Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Renzi are the two politicians who framed the debates over the renovation of the Colosseum, and each is part of the larger political transformation that has affected both heritage and national politics more widely. Through them we can analyse the ‘redesign and renovation’ of heritage governance and how it has affected heritage restoration in historical urban centres. The narrative that follows situates them both within the context of neoliberal globalism and identifies them as two faces of Italian neoliberalism. Renzi and Berlusconi represent different stages in the Italian neoliberal reconfiguration of heritage. Berlusconi delivered aggressive government divestment from heritage and culture and the legal constitutional changes for greater market participation in heritage administration. In contrast, Renzi actively promoted private/public heritage ventures by appealing to innovation and marketing, within a framework of protection and conservation of heritage and culture.

Both politicians played a part in establishing a consensus between the centre-right and the centre-left that there is no alternative to neoliberal globalisation. Such ideas are belatedly in line with Fukuyama’s (1993) notorious proclamation of the ‘end of history’ and his suggestion that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the long historical struggle between competing ideologies. The ‘end of history’ is itself an iteration of the ‘end of ideology’, an earlier provocative narrative by Bell ([1960] 1966), but the historical and economic circumstances that inspired Fukuyama were different from the cold war climate in which Bell wrote (Galbo, 2004). The fall of the Berlin wall was accompanied by a proliferation of new treaties that promised a borderless world. Europe’s Schengen Agreement was signed in 1993, the North American free-trade agreement in 1993, and the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995: these and related developments heralded new levels of international connection. They also heralded new political discourses about ‘moving beyond the Right and the Left’ and new debates among philosophers, historians, and social scientists (Beck, 1996; Bobbio, 2009; Giddens, 1994; Mouffe, 2005) about how to understand this transition, or whether the vision of a non-ideological ‘post-political’ world was even possible or coherent. While terms like post-democracy and post-politics are often confusing, they do speak to a phenomenon whereby the institutional spaces for contest, antagonistic struggles, and possible compromises and resolutions that would have formerly required citizens’ involvement or a democratic vote, have become the purview of technocratic management. For commentators like Mouffe, however, one cannot depoliticise democracy: conflict is unavoidable and embedded in political hegemony.

Berlusconi is a figure who defies easy categorisation; he has been defined as a brilliant strategist (Friedman, 2015), a modern populist leader (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017), and a classical demagogue and tyrant who works the crowd (Bobbio, 2008). He was able to govern as long as he did because any substantive political debate disappeared under the weight of his personality and his numerous scandals.⁴ Hoping to change the institutions of the state into reflections of the marketplace, he privatised and deregulated the labour market with the same bluster and bravado that worked for him in business. Under his watch, public sectors such as utilities and telecommunications were rapidly privatised. Italian television, in particular, over a third of which is controlled by Berlusconi’s company Mediaset, ‘dumbed down’ public discourse to the lowest levels imaginable (Jones, 2013)⁵ long before anyone had heard of ‘fake news’. Here was, many believed, political culture hitting rock bottom. Critics suggest that a new kind of politics emerged, a ‘Videocracy’, a media-saturated reality show about politics (Berardi, Jacquemet, & Vitali, 2009; Ginsborg, 2004). Italian political scientist Calise (2013) has argued that media politics emerged at a time marked by the decline of partisan identity within the Italian electorate. The demise of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) as well as the collapse of the Socialist and the DC (Christian Democratic) parties, all in the early 1990s, gave rise to what is now called the ‘Second Republic’ and an unstable party system that reflected the fragmentation of Italian public life. The rise of both Berlusconi and Renzi represent a move towards what Calise calls the ‘personalization of politics’. Calise’s point is that political victory is now powered by personalities. At a time when most people are disaffected from major political parties, candidates’ personae matter more than at any time since Mussolini. The media plays a vital large role in providing a platform to skillful communicators who become political celebrities. The new leaders are, however, simultaneously all-powerful and extremely fragile, vulnerable to shifting opinion polls and the ballot box. They ride popularity waves that are generally short-lived. Berlusconi is in a sense both a reflection of and an exception to this model. He came to power by establishing his own party, Forza Italia, as a personal power base, and, as one of the most long-serving politicians of the post-war period, he survived in large part because of his control of significant segments of the national media.

Particularly hard hit by the global economic downturn of 2008, the Italian economy is generally considered, along with those of Spain and Greece, to be among the weakest of Europe. During this period of intense austerity Berlusconi formed his third and final government and halved Italy’s cultural budget. Public consumption of and participation in art, cinema, theatre, exhibitions, music, opera, museums, and other forms of cultural expression all declined. During the same period there was also a notable drop in the number of people finishing their basic education and going on to university. National youth unemployment grew close to 40%. All these factors transformed the ways in which the average Italian lives (Carlini, 2015; Vecchi, 2017).⁶ Meanwhile, heritage preservation, once defined as a public good, was attacked at its roots and starved to the point of decrepitude. Heritage buildings and monuments became so degraded by public disinvestment that the Villa of Gladiators in Pompeii, a World Heritage site, collapsed after heavy rain, an event which raised international alarm as well as wide criticism at home, including a motion in the Chamber of Deputies that called on the Minister of Heritage, Sandro Bondi, to step down.

The hollowing out of the cultural sector spurred protest and resignations. Salvatore Settis, who was then president of Italy’s consultative body Consiglio Superiore dei Beni Culturali (High Council for Heritage), resigned in order to protest the budget cuts. In Milan at La Scala, music director Daniel Barenboim condemned the cuts from the orchestra pit before a performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Wälkure and noted that cuts to the arts and culture conflicted with Article 9 of the Italian Constitution (Kimmelman, 2010). The reference to Article 9 may be puzzling to many outside the country, but there is in Italy a tradition that access to culture is a right and a fundamental democratic constitutional principle. It was not simply the cognoscenti who objected to these deep cuts to culture and the arts; there were strikes and riots across the country. Berlusconi was unrepentant. His contempt for culture was publicly proclaimed when his Minister, Sandro Bondi – who did not step down – declared that ‘people can’t eat culture’ during a recession. The economic shock therapy imposed by the final Berlusconi government had widespread social consequences and left the heritage infrastructure in ruins (Mcintyre, 2011). Heritage now had to demonstrate a socioeconomic value in order to justify public spending. The process had in fact begun much earlier, during the second Berlusconi government in 2001 when he, with the support of the separatist right-wing Lega Nord, promoted reforms to the Italian Constitution as a way of devolving more power to local regions and governments. The Titolo V reform to the Constitution effectively divided the field of heritage into two separate spheres: protection (tutela) and valorisation (valorizzazione). The distinction is crucial, critics claim (Montanari, 2014; Settis, 2002), because it weakens the idea of heritage protection as a national project and subjects it to new market pressures.

The field of heritage is largely determined by how people remember, organise, and think about the past and how material culture is used as a medium through which such work is done (Avrami, Mason, & de la Torre, 2000; Smith, 2006). Heritage is valued in a variety of ways and is driven by different motivations: economic, political, cultural, spiritual, aesthetic, and so on. Each ideal implies different approaches to preserving heritage. The history of ‘valorisation’ in Italy is a contest over the role of the market. The term ‘valorisation’ was given currency in Italy in the mid 1980s when politicians, won over by arguments about the financial benefits of tourism, embraced the slogan that heritage is ‘the oil of Italy’ (Montanari, 2018, p. 56). With the passing of Titolo V this slogan was put into practice and laws encouraged profit maximisation and value extraction rather than protection.⁷ Settis (2002) wrote about these legal changes with alarm. ‘Italian cultural heritage’, he warned, ‘has never been threatened as much as today, not even during wars and invasions: because today the threat comes from within the state’ (p. 130). For Settis, along with other prominent Italian public intellectuals who are part of an oppositional heritage discourse, these legal changes represented a disturbing move away from a conception of heritage rooted in cultural education, nation building, and the formation of citizenship (the much-discussed Article 9 of the Italian constitution, of which more later) to one where heritage has been re-conceptualised primarily in terms of economic value (see Settis, 2010, 2017). As a vocal critic of these changes, Settis has in turn been criticised for avoiding the innumerable disputes over the meaning and uses of heritage that are part of people’s lived experiences (Dines, 2016; Palumbo, 2003) and for using heritage broadly as a manifestation of a unified collective identity. The intense localism found in Italy that Berardino Palumbo calls ‘civil identity’ (p. 371) is often difficult to reconcile with the civic rationalism of the state or international institutions like UNESCO. A sobering reminder not to essentialise national heritage, these criticisms do not however address the larger changes in political mood that have propelled and legitimated the marketing of heritage in Italy. For critics like Settis and Montanari, the rise of neoliberalism has a created a new political hegemony that embraces market imperatives and technocratic management and it does not much matter if that state is run by centre-right politicians like Berlusconi, or centre-left politicians like Matteo Renzi: though the political rhetoric is different, with the centre-right defending the rationality of the market and the centre-left extolling cultural values, heritage is still being commodified.

When Matteo Renzi became the leader of a new centre-left coalition from 2014 to 2016, his government began an aggressive campaign to define heritage as part of the engine of economic renewal. Previously, as the mayor of Florence, Renzi received considerable attention for transforming the centre of the city into a tourist-friendly pedestrian zone, giving rise to his image as a young, dynamic politician, especially among advocates for the power of mayors and cities to influence global trends (Barber, 2013). Renzi captured Italian voters’ imaginations by positioning himself as a scrapper who would eliminate the outdated and inefficient political and labour systems (Tronci, 2013). His political platform was built on the concept of rottamazione: scrapping the old generation of establishment politicians and giving space to new ones, younger, better, and more honest. The sympathetic foreign press painted him as a ‘demolition man’ (Kramer, 2015), an anti-establishment politician who wanted to change the constitution, and alter the psychology of nepotism and the ‘rigid’ labour market that, business claims, continues to plague the economy.⁸ His Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, looked for a much needed shake-up at the cultural ministry of MiBACT⁹ while at the same time enthusiastically promoting a creative revival of antiquity in order to stimulate urban development and tourism.

In a stinging assessment of Renzi, cultural historian Anderson (2014) wrote that Renzi was a youthful and updated version of Berlusconi.¹⁰ Both illustrate the personalisation of politics that characterise the Second Republic, as discussed by Calese. But unlike Berlusconi, who is wed to more traditional television media, Renzi is a child of the new media and uses Twitter and Facebook to cultivate his support and supply a continuous flow of opinions on issues of the day. He is especially adept at developing his image and projecting himself through highly visible media campaigns. Two of these campaigns involved heritage restorations in the city of Florence that in the end proved hollow, but that demonstrate his drive to gain public attention and his eagerness to use heritage for political advantage. He claimed that beneath the Vassari frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio was Leonardo da Vinci’s Battle of Anghiari, and with modern technology it could be recovered if private patrons could be found to fund the transformation. After months of media attention, a highly publicised trip to the US to secure funds, the drilling of exploratory holes in Vassari’s frescoes, and much protest by art historians and preservationists, nothing came of it. Renzi also announced plans to cover the basilica of San Lorenzo with a marble façade that Michelangelo had designed but never built. That project was also quietly dropped, again after much media excitement, when it was criticised by art historians (Tronci, 2013, pp. 51–54).¹¹

Anderson argues that Renzi made a fatal mistake when he continued to move the Italian left closer to Third Way social policies and looked to former USA President Clinton and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for inspiration.¹² Renzi’s blend of anti-establishment ‘demolition’ and Third Way market-friendly policies struck a superficially optimistic note that served to keep many Italian voters dangling between fear of unemployment and expectation of rewards from the new global economy with its ‘global cities’ and ‘creative classes’. His message was in many ways indistinguishable from neoliberal global cosmopolitanism:¹³ either one finds a way to make it in the new global, border-hopping middle class through labour flexibility and creative flourishing, or risks falling into the new underclass. Neoliberal cosmopolitanism has its supporters in Italy and beyond who believe that globalisation is not only inevitable but has opened up trade and has been successful in lifting millions of people out of poverty in India and China (Friedman, 2005). As never before, globalisation, migration, tourism, and new media are rapidly adding more exchanges to a web of global networks. But as the economist Stiglitz (2017) notes, these changes also reconstituted the global economy so as to permanently favour a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected, and the corporate while leaving poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness as deregulation, privatisation, and austerity force their living standards to decline. Today’s global system is by any measure morbidly unequal when the eight richest people control as much wealth as 3.6 billion others.¹⁴ And it is these global and European economic inequalities that have been the source of much political discontent in Italy.

Renzi’s party, the PD (Partito Democratico), projected youth, frantic optimism and pro-European and global integration, but it quickly became apparent that public support for Renzi, fuelled by skillful media campaigns that cast him as a vibrant politician, was fading. The PD was losing touch with many voters, especially younger ones, as their economic lives grew more precarious under Renzi’s Jobs Act reform (Fana, 2018). The trajectory of the PD exemplifies the fate of many European Left parties that compromised with neoliberalism. Renzi, the ‘demolition man’, was in the end demolished by Italian voters. His political fortunes shifted dramatically in late 2016 when, in quick succession, he lost a controversial referendum on constitutional reform and then his job, largely because many voters saw the proposed reform of the Republican constitution as a political power grab. Voters had also not seen the promised improvement in the economy and were growing sceptical about extending the logic of competition and the market to every aspect of daily life. The PD suffered catastrophic election results in 2018 when voters, drawn to anti-immigration politicians and populist parties such as the Five Star Movement (M5S) and a newly reconstituted nationalist Lega under Matteo Salvini, cast their ballots overwhelmingly against the centre-left.

By the time Berlusconi left office in 2011 under the weight of internal and external pressures Benvenuti (2017), the cult of ‘public-private partnerships’ dominated both right and left-of-centre politics in Europe. Not only were public roads, rails, and the media privatised, but the logic of privatisation and sell-offs dominated the management of cultural heritage as well.¹⁵ Government discourse had decidedly shifted towards using heritage as an economic engine of growth and private initiatives were encouraged to develop local heritage museums and pay for the preservation of historic sites, and one report suggests that there are close to 20,000 of these initiatives in Italy (Ehlers, 2012). The government appealed for corporate sponsorship to help in the preservation of heritage sites and fashion houses and other corporations funding renovation projects soon became a trend. But as more Italian monuments and buildings were being renovated with the help of corporate patrons and plastered with images of handbags, shoes, and jewellery from the sponsoring companies, critics started to ask more questions about what private donors receive in return.

The 25 million Euro restoration of the Roman Colosseum by the luxury shoe firm Tod was by far the more controversial of these ventures. The Colosseum is Italy’s most visited heritage site. It attracts more than five million visitors a year, but it was suffering from damage that compromised its structural integrity. In 2011 Minister Sandro Bondi struck an agreement with the company Tod and its founder Diego Della Valle, known as Italy’s shoe king. Tod gave 25 million euros for the restoration and in exchange, the company obtained exclusive rights to use the image of the Colosseum for two years after the completion of the work and to put its brand logo on entry tickets to the site for fifteen years. The agreement was criticised for not being transparent, the duration of the sponsorship rights was questioned, and critics maintained that rival companies had not been given enough time to compete. Worse, the members of the Restorers Association of Italy were unhappy about the plans, which they believed overlooked them in favour of cheaper, non-specialist general contractors with little experience in professional restoration (McKenna, 2012). Though the restoration was closely scrutinised and completed in accordance with professional restoration standards, question still remained about donor’s intentions. Many business leaders who involve themselves in cultural philanthropy claim to do so out of a sense of public duty. The image they project is one of altruism untainted by self-interest. But scratch the surface and one will see that such initiatives are much more than good-hearted altruism. These projects are encouraged by generous tax breaks and offer a good return on investment in terms of public relations. The monuments of ancient Rome were designed to attract and impress crowds, and to symbolise power, wealth, and political authority, and it is worthwhile to consider the fantasies and narratives being offered by their appropriation.

Luxury goods with the ‘Made in Italy’ designation promote Italian style, project auras of quality and tradition, and emphasise sophisticated yet human scale craftsmanship. These associations mask the darker side of the global fashion industry, however. Nearly all Italy’s fashion giants – Tod, Fendi, Gucci, Armani, Benneton, Versace, Prada, Zegna, Moncler, Dolce and Cabana, and others – outsource much of their production to Eastern Europe, India, or China, or to the Italian south where a shadow economy based on unregulated labour thrives. The low-paid and predominantly female, often immigrant workers of the shadow economy toil at home or in small workshops and create luxury garments with neither contracts nor insurance (Paton & Lazazzera, 2018). The ‘Made in Italy’ designation is a mirage, according to critics. Under the law Reguzzoni-Varsaci-Calearo that was passed in 2010, only two stages of production, packaging and the provenance of textile, for example, are needed for a fashion item to be labelled ‘Made in Italy’. The result has been catastrophic for Italian workers who have seen their jobs outsourced, and confusing for consumers who often believe that the description ‘Made in Italy’ is a guarantee that an item was made in their country under safe and proper working conditions. Tod CEO Diego della Valle has been emphatic in linking luxury goods with the skills of a national artisanal workforce. ‘Italian style is very much in our DNA’, according to della Valle. ‘The artisans who worked on the Colosseum were just like those who work in our shoes and fashion today.’¹⁶ The familiar locution that an aptitude of a people is in ‘their DNA’ invokes the popular belief in genetic explanation, papers over the economic pain of a national work force devastated by a global chain of production, and further conceals the deeply exploitative and sexist nature of the fashion and luxury industries despite critics’ continued attempts at exposure (Mensitieri, 2018; Iorio, 2018). Diego della Valle may celebrate ‘Made in Italy’ with rhetoric about the artisanal genius of Italian workers; the reality however is that the large part of Tod’s shoes are made in Romania and Bulgaria under less than ideal working conditions (Iorio, p. 62). More generally, luxury brands have handled advertising with great discretion and Tod’s marketing of the Colosseum has been muted but not quiescent. Companies such as Fendi and Tod opt for what is called in the fashion trade the aesthetic of ‘stealth wealth’: the covert consumption of luxury items without being showy about it, in this case iconic monuments, to silently signal an association with power, prestige, and history.

In the popular press, criticism of private sponsorship is often framed in terms of leftists objecting to private-public ventures or stubbornly resisting private investment in times of economic hardship. Seldom is there a sustained analysis of how corporate patronage has changed the power dynamics of public service decision-making or how these ventures promote the ethical injunctions of the market at the expense of other ways of valorising heritage. Analysts of governmentality (Davis, 2017; Dean, 1999; Larner, 2000) have noted how the neoliberal restructuring of the state has transformed the role of government from the regulation of public services to the imposition of structured incentives that might compel those involved in the work of heritage preservation to adapt specific types of dispositions and rationalities. In Italy, heritage professionals, many of them housed in the cultural ministry MiBACT, were encouraged to focus on projects that might generate money, such as commercial sponsorships, and leave behind many projects that were perhaps equally important but deemed unprofitable. Because the rules of the heritage governance game, as Swyngedouw (2005) calls it, are set by influential market ‘stakeholders’, the results often benefit those same interests. A concrete example: Berdini (2000) examined the renovation of monuments during Rome’s 2000 Jubilee and concluded that any kind of central city planning was effectively abandoned in favour of contingent interests. Monuments are chosen for high recognition value rather than for their organic relationship to the city, and this privileging of the highly visible at the expense of the perhaps more prosaic needs of the local population attracts the highest bidders – media moguls and real estate magnates – to determine significant elements of city planning. More recently, New York Times reporter Frank Bruni suggested that the current rush to embrace new corporate sponsors created the heritage equivalent of social inequality: ‘monument inequality’.¹⁷ Well-known monuments like the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps were given facelifts because they generate the kind of branding opportunities donors like Tod, Fendi, and Bulgari want; meanwhile, other significant sites are neglected. The branding strategies of these corporations, muted or shrill, have an interest in associating their companies with the allegedly universal history of civilisation, but they also, many critics suggest, implicitly summon visitors to heritage sites as ‘citizen-consumers’ (Rose, 2000; Swyngedouw, 2005): that is, as citizens who understand and manage themselves as consumers of commercial spectacles.

Heritage Minister Franceschini’s tweet in 2014 in support of building a new floor to the Colosseum generated a new debate about the uses of heritage. Franceschini was successful in wresting control of the Roman Forum, The Palatine, and the Colosseum from Rome Special Superintendency, the body which manages these sites as well as other excavations, museums, and well over 30 sites all over Rome. The ministry plan was to hive off these three lucrative sites into a new archeological park that would be established as an autonomous entity under more professional management. Adding a new floor to the Colosseum was to have opened the monument to more cultural events, but when US investor James Pallotta, owner of the soccer team AS Roma, boasted that he could draw millions of viewers to a pay-per-view soccer match in the new arena, hackles went up. Salvatore Settis warned that such uses could jeopardise the preservation of the Colosseum and turn it into what he calls a monument to bad taste. ‘The country is once again making the mistake of focusing on enhancing the value of its monuments rather than protecting them,’ announced Settis to the press. And he was opposed to the idea of turning the Colosseum and other the adjoining sites into ‘an archeological park that would be visited only by tourists and run the risk of being a non-place expelling citizens’.¹⁸ Historian Tomaso Montanari added his voice to the fray when he said of the plan to build a new floor:

While Italy is no stranger to private money sponsoring cultural projects, the numbers and scale of these projects and the benefits gained by the new ‘corporate Medici’, as New York Times reporters call them (Pianigiani & Yardley, 2014), in terms of setting the urban agenda and benefitting from public relations campaigns, is truly unprecedented. Montanari links the rise of this new corporate Medici to neoliberal politics: ‘In Italy we are seeing something that happened with Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, an anti-state rhetoric in favour of privatization.’

The defence of building a floor was left to archaeologist Daniele Manacorda, who had originally floated the idea, and who was encouraged by minister Francescini to realise the plan. In an interview in the left-wing publication Il Manifesto, he spoke of the importance of transforming archaeological sites and museums from ‘dead’ to ‘living’ spaces. He wants to make the Colosseum ‘more understandable to visitors’, and describes the plan as an engagement with modern ‘democratic sensibility’. Restoring the floor of the Colosseum is ‘an aesthetic choice’ the ultimate aim of which is to produce understanding and knowledge, explains Manacorda. By offering visitors an opportunity to step into the arena and appreciate the ancient splendour, archaeologists promote the self-knowledge that comes from being immersed in the setting of past times. Using the amphitheatre to house cultural events is, moreover, the kind of creative transformation needed in order to protect the ancient monument and make it relevant to today’s visitors. He also accuses his critics of refusing to make any changes to monuments, calling them ‘priests of culture’ who want to turn antiquities into a religion and encase the past in esoteric knowledge that only a few can access. These critics abhor mass tourism and popular culture and want to mummify archaeological sites and museums. They believe that they have the truth on their side and want ‘to impose it pedagogically’ on the rest of us. Tourism is now is an integral part of the Italian economy and ‘our task’, he concludes, ‘is to show the value of our heritage assets, not to subordinate them to a late bourgeois thought that fails to deal with mass democracy.’²⁰

For Settis and Montanari, however, the kind of ‘resurrection’ promoted by Manacorda highjacks history, subjects the past to new forms of manipulation, and fundamentally alters the spatial and social organisation of historic centres. Preservation is not, they claim, about remaining stagnant or silent, but is an act of renewal that must evolve harmoniously with its urban surroundings and with the politics of rights and citizenship. When an iconic monument like the Colosseum is further isolated from its urban context, turned into one of the largest archaeological parks in the world, promoted as an agent of economic growth, or used to shill luxury goods, we have moved much closer to selling visitors a collective aesthetic experience where the pertinence of the past is superficially asserted while its substance is evacuated. Settis elaborates his argument forcefully in If Venice Dies (2016), which is primarily about the fate of historic urban centres and a critique of how the sinking city of Venice has been invaded by tourists and mammoth cruise ships and turned into a Disneyland on the sea that further solidifies the mentality that art and nature exist to be photo ops. The book was published in Italian in late 2014, before the debate about covering the floor of the Colosseum, and outlines the destructive effects that economic ‘valorisation’ has had on historic centres where local residents have been displaced and the rigid demarcation of monumental space disrupts residents’ habitual use of the streets and squares. The proliferation of what have been called ‘innovative’ transformation of archaeological sites and historical urban centres in many Italian cities, Settis maintains, imposes a ‘standardized and sterilized version of our past and our diversity’ (p. 94). Such an aesthetic, he claims, is bought at the expense of history, and anyone who places ‘aesthetics above history’ is advocating a preservation that is servile because it is beholden to its customers rather than to its citizens.

As with many who have written about tourism (MacCannell, 1976; Urry, 1990), globalisation and late capitalism (Harvey, 1990; Jameson, 1991), the commodification of ‘authentic experiences’ (Baudrillard, 1981; Eco, 1986), and the effects of late capitalism on heritage sites and museums (Walsh, 1992), Settis and Montanari expose the underlying pathologies of market society and are critical of the ‘infotainment’ model that drives many current restorations. They fear that Italy’s heritage centres have been transformed into ‘history’s supermarkets’, places where visitors are sold historical fantasies with a presentist inflection that dissuades them from looking beyond the here and now. The culture of presentism creates a rapport with the past that is immediate, visual, and fun, but it can also set people adrift in a distorted understanding of history as an entertaining version of an immersive present. Moreover, both are extremely critical of Italy’s political leaders who let market forces dictate their political decisions, are unwilling to manage the millions of tourists that visit’s Italy’s fragile historical centres, and seem indifferent to the struggles of citizens evicted from their historical neighbourhoods.

These frustrations are amply evident in Rome, where the historical centres are being transformed into the preserve of the privileged. It has been more than a decade since Harvard anthropologist Herzfeld (2007, 2009) studied the neoliberal restructuring of the picturesque and rapidly gentrifying Monti neighbourhood, home to the Colosseum. Monti is a microcosm of a Rome undergoing an explosive housing crisis and offers a vivid study of urban change. Herzfeld has an anthropologist’s sharp eye for the lived experience of people in a neighbourhood desperate to maintain a sense of community and collective identity. He provides a rich and complex analysis of the granular textures of intense attachment to place and community, and is cognisant of how those textures are forms of cultural fundamentalism that can easily transform into racism. Herzfeld was concerned with the evictions in Monteciani, mostly labourers, artisans, artists and small merchants who lived in the area. Social memory has an enduring presence in this neighbourhood, known for its Romanesco dialect and its use of public space. After the liberalisation of property laws in 1998 arrived the land speculators, and skyrocketing real estate values transformed a neighbourhood rooted in the rituals of daily sociability into a flashy neoliberal Gesellschaft with little interest in what went before. Gentrification erased the neighbourhood’s collective memory as the residents, with their tight intimacies and local civic pride, were replaced by a new civil society of ‘hoteliers and other entrepreneurs with cosmopolitan pretensions and cultivated sense of national identity’ (p. 262). Gentrification, as Herzfeld discovered, both transformed the neighbourhood into an icon of cool urban living and exacerbated its local tensions and dangerous undercurrents. People were being kicked out of their apartments by a variety of forces, ranging from the local mafias and the banks, to religious institutions claiming charitable status. Loansharking, which had a long history there, intensified as hard-pressed small artisans, unable to get loans from banks, turned to unscrupulous lenders at ruinous interests rates. Monti has perhaps one of the oldest extant red-light districts in the world, yet this too has been disrupted and transformed by the international sex-trade. As the neighbourhood continued to change and more people were forced out, local conflicts intensified. Racism against immigrants, police intolerance, and political extremism increased. These changes, Herzfeld maintains, results of the global economy, have sharpened social inequalities and changed the social life of Rome.

The profoundly felt historical awareness that the residents of Monti have for their monuments and ruins is replaced, Herzfeld writes, by ‘an operatic production of historicity’ managed by archaeologists eager to aestheticize ruins. The replacement of a lived memory by a moneymaking aestheticism, of course, is not inevitable. There are a growing number of activists and academics who are developing heritage practices and discourses that stand in opposition to those of the neoliberals that summon and activate visitors to heritage sites as ‘citizen-consumers’. Disciplines in public archaeology and museum and heritage studies (Schadla-Hall, 1999; Smith, 2006) have been in the foreground in discussing and creating more inclusive displays that incorporate local knowledge and memory. Such strategies can produce heritage spaces that are ‘thinking machines’, as Settis calls them, that allow participants to form collective memories, express ethical values, and understand public responsibilities. Monuments, in particular, have authority, and they influence the way the public remembers and relates to history (Sennett, 1994). The difference between a ‘thinking’ and ‘profit-making’ monument, to use Settis’ language, is the difference between engagement with both the present and history, and exploiting them. An ‘ideal type’ monument organised on the principles of a thinking machine will offer visitors opportunities to examine their own constructions of historical memory.²¹ Their staging and display would challenge people to make meaning of both the remote past and the changing present. Monuments can be used to explore what historian Lowenthal (1985) has called ‘the foreignness’ of the past. Moreover, the beauty of monuments that are ruins, as the Romantics understood, is that they help us imagine what they were once like and they have a way of dissolving self-importance by serving as a reminder of the recurrent mortality of history.

Turning heritage sites into thinking or empathy machines, however, will not solve the problem of making historical city centres affordable to ordinary citizens. While the new urbanists of the early 2000s such as Sassen (2001) and Florida (2002) promised the benefits of new global cities and promoted a ‘trickle down geography’ whereby investment in spectacular architecture and innovative renovations would attract international capital, tourism, and creative classes to settle locally, today there is a new interest in discussing how to build a fairer city (Engelen, Johal, Salento, & Williams, 2014) and create a ‘fundamental economy’ (Barbera, Dagnes, Salento, & Spina, 2016) that can provide people in urban centres with affordable basic goods, services, and housing. The critical literature that deals with building a more democratic and fair city is rich, and older works such as Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Henri Lefebvre’s The Rights to the City (1968), as well as new ones such David Harvey’s Rebel Cities (2013) and Settis’ If Venice Dies (2016), to mention only a few, are extremely useful in exploring how economic fairness and the established rights of urban residents build a sense of the common good. Cities can help us map the ways in which these rights have both been developed and extinguished, and given the impact that neoliberalism and globalisation have had on urban development, understanding how these rights have been eroded and how citizens have been transformed into consumers whose democratic choices are limited to the economic rationality of buying and selling, are the first steps to winning those rights back. Modern-day capital cities such as Rome, as sociologist Göran Therborn argues is his recent book Cities of Power (2017), are manifestations of power, and we should be very interested in figuring out how political power is embedded in and commands recognition though built spaces, so we know how to challenge it.

During the Fascist regime, the pickaxe brigades demolished parts of the old working-class quarters of Monti around the Colosseum and archeological monuments became superimposed with signs of fascist ambition (Manacorda & Tamassia, 1985).²² Mussolini supported major exhibits designed to develop new architectural styles that were both highly modern and reflective of the ancient past, such as the famous Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, affectionately called the square Colosseum, which today houses the headquarters of the fashion company Fendi. Mussolini’s urban renewal was a way to re-imagine a communal memory of empire as well as a glorification of absolute power and ruthless ambition (Atkinson & Cosgrove, 1998). By artificially isolating the Roman ruins in what Mussolini called their ‘solitary grandeur’, he forced monuments to stand as sacred witnesses to the new empire he sought to build (Gentile, 1996).

After the war, the leading political parties of the time, in an unusual show of solidarity, wrote a new Constitution designed to curtail new forms of authoritarianism and declared Italy ‘a democratic Republic founded on labour’. The Constitution was the reasoned response of a generation that wanted to leave behind totalitarianism and build a new governance free of fear and economic injustice, ready to fulfil the promises of democracy made during the anti-fascist struggle. Unique to this document was its Article 9. Italy was one of the first countries in the world to legally protect cultural heritage and the national landscape in its constitution. Article 9 states: ‘The Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research. It safeguards the landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation.’²³ This has been interpreted to mean that the protection and conservation of heritage is part of the res public, or public affairs.²⁴ The phrase literally means ‘public thing’, or something held in common by many people. The ancient Roman Republic granted its citizens the right to do certain things in the public eye: to attend public assemblies, elect politicians to office, and to vote on legislation. The post-war Italian constitution conceived the protection of heritage as a part of public affairs that requires the involvement of scientific experts with their obvious technical skills and, more crucially, a knowledgeable citizenry, aware of their rights and obligations, and capable of using their individual reflective powers. The collective use of reflective power is public reason, and the use of collective reason to make laws and policy is the basis of democratic sovereignty and governance.²⁵

In his latest book about Article 9, Montanari (2018) argues for the centrality of culture in post-war Italian politics and illustrates why the protection and promotion of culture is essential to centre-left political rhetoric. Article 9 declares that culture is to be made accessible to all citizens, thus necessitating providing them with the educational tools with which to exercise their rights. Gramsci ([1948] 1971), in particular, placed singular stress on accessible culture, stating that public intellectual services, such as schools, museums, libraries, monuments, and theatres, should not be left in the hands of private initiatives, for that will lead to exclusion and the reduction of a shared sense of public good (see ‘On education’ in Prison Notebooks, pp. 26–43). Article 9 was the result of collaboration among Aldo Moro, Giuseppe Dosetti, and Piero Clemendrei, three figures whose views on the civic and political value of culture drew directly from a humanistic understanding that culture is a slow process of intellectual and moral formation, as well as from their own experience with anti-fascism. For Clemendrei in particular, culture includes a ‘critical spirit’ based on knowledge, responsibility, and justice. The awakening of this critical spirit had proven essential to fascist resistance and was necessary to post-war national reconstruction as well. The recent debates about the renovation of the Colosseum revisit some of this history and bring the discussion forward to the present. Montanari and Settis have placed heritage within the framework of Republican post-war nation-building and the formation of democratic citizenship. Today questions of who can be a citizen and who can claim to be part of Italian cultural heritage have moved to the centre of political disputes and Settis (2016) counsels to move beyond traditional notions of citizenship rooted in place of birth or blood, Jus soli or Jus Sanguinis, and settle on Jus voluntatis, the ‘willful desire to be a citizen’ (p. 177), a phrase he has borrowed from the Sardinian feminist writer and autonomous politician, Murgia (2016). Murgia also stresses that Italy should move towards a Canadian style of multiculturalism and think about citizenship as a ‘discourse’, a mode of talking about citizenship, rather than a set of idealised beliefs about place and race.

If citizens’ involvement in the life of the city is crucial to democratic life, then ideally a city like Rome, with its long history of cosmopolitanism, should be fertile testing ground for an inclusive notion of citizenship and a place where the manifestation of democratic power is put on display in its built spaces. But here we are confronted with the glaring gap between of the promises of democracy and the challenges to their full realisation. Today the city of Rome, like the rest of Italy, is mired in division and crisis. Over the past two decades Rome has undergone a major urban restructuring whereby conservation is often an excuse for intervention into urban life and where, in Herzfeld’s judgment, ‘the cultural values of the Roman working classes apparently render them unfit to remain in the newly restructured historic centre’ (p. 262). The attempts to control Roman real estate by the Church, the state, and the underworld has intensified existing social tensions and provided a space for new disruptive politics. The ‘Mafia Capitale’ scandal of 2014 unveiled a vast criminal takeover of Rome’s city services, from road repairs to hostels for refugees. The scandal implicated politicians across party lines and pushed the Five Star Movement (M5S) to national prominence when M5S candidate Virginia Raggi swept to victory as mayor of Rome in 2016. Rome is in a state of disrepair, an unmanageable city in what sometimes seems an unworkable nation, and Romans remain sceptical of the efforts of traditional parties to handle the urban crisis. The city seems less tolerant of racial and ethnic differences than previously, in part as a reaction to neoliberal grievances. Beginning with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and more recently with the Italian election of 2018, a toxic fusion of economic insecurity and cultural scapegoating has exacerbated the voters’ sense of abandonment and brought neoliberalism to a turning point, and one might ask the question: after a period some critics called the ‘post-political’, are we are now witnessing a return of the political? Neoliberalism has certainly stirred resentments that have been exploited by right-wing parties, especially by extreme groups like Casa Pound who are active in the organisation of urban discontent (Jones, 2018). The failure of various national elites to speak directly to the arrested mobility of Italians, and fear of refugees and immigration, have unleashed a new populist nationalism that threatens to tear the fragile fabric of democracy. At the same time, as political theorist Mouffe (2018) discusses, these conflicts are shaping new resistance to neoliberal hegemony and creating the grounds for potential left-wing populism.

One has to view Mouffe’s opinion with caution. With the collapse of Renzi and his centre-left coalition, Italy has experienced the rise of the populist cyberpolitics of the Five Star Movement (Revelli, 2017) and the ‘fear of the other’ populism of Matteo Salvini’s Lega party (Caporale, 2018). The appeal of politics based on personalities has grown even more attractive to voters. Social media has enabled politicians to bypass traditional gatekeepers and communicate directly with their base; the reliance on simplified, divisive, and caustic rhetoric has increased, and so has the ethno-nationalist belief that a ‘popular nation’ rooted in ‘blood and soil’ can resolve social and global contradiction of inequality, sovereignty, and identity. The new populisms privilege feelings of attachment and one of the things that ties their divergent interests together is their scorn of an elite technocratic management that refuses to acknowledge the economic dislocation and cultural anxieties felt by many citizens (Mudde, 2004; Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017). Even Renzi has grudgingly admitted, in a recent Guardian report (Wintour, 2018) on the rise of global populism, ‘We were almost technocrats. This was our mistake.’ We will have to see how neoliberalism adapts to the new emotional appeals to local attachment and identity that dominate much right-wing populist rhetoric and which will no doubt influence heritage discourses. Heritage is, after all, an open, dynamic discourse shaped by power relationships. There are many reasons why Italians think that the political life of the Second Republic is a spectacle, remote and out of touch. Parliamentary debates, with their legalism and their high drama, have a curious air of unreality about them: politicians mug for the cameras, orate, tweet, and insult one another; meanwhile the economic crisis continues. Changes in government, coupled with the rise of an extremist right, suggest that whatever coalitions emerge are attempting to cover over deep cracks; they are coalitions without consensus. There are too many people who believe that political goals are obscure or lacking altogether. The struggle against this political confusion is also ongoing, however, and so we await the next stage of the renovation of the Colosseum.

Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana (AISU) Conference Multi-Ethnic Cities in the Mediterranean World: History, Culture, Heritage. Universitá di Genova, Polytechnic School of Architecture, Genova, Italy, June 4-5, 2018, and the XIX International Sociology Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology, Power, Violence, and Justice. Toronto, July 15-21, 2018. I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from the journal who gave me valuable feedback and made this a stronger paper. Additional thanks to Chris Armstrong and Maureen Boulanger of Nagoya University Japan for getting the whole project started by inviting me to give a talk at Nagoya U. Finally, special thanks to Miriam Jones for reading and giving critical insights on several versions of this paper, and to my colleague Chris Doran whose emphasis on discourse analysis helped shape part of this paper.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.