Dreaming the Socialist Tripadvisor
As British cities are increasingly hollowed out by property developers, a tradition on the Italian left has seen the creation of ‘social centres’, where radical ways of being and thinking can take root. Can we replicate their success?
Members gather at one of Rome's cultural centres, Scomodo. (Credit: Scomodo)
An Italian band displaying a Celtic flag while smashing out Irish rebel songs might not be what you’d expect on a night out in Rome. But this is no average Roman venue. As I sip a local real ale and sample a barbecued arrosticino, the band delivers a convincing rendition of ‘Come Out Ye Black and Tans’.
The setting: an abandoned greyhound track currently occupied by an anti-fascist group, one of Rome’s glorious centri sociali (social centres). You won’t find them on Tripadvisor, but the centri sociali offer a unique blend of social organising, live events, and cheap hangouts.
The centro sociale — and its more institutional relative, the centro culturale (cultural centre) — are both legacies of Italy’s modern leftist history. Until the 1990s, Italy was home to the largest communist party in the West, and its huge membership organised a broad array of movement-building activities, from food festivals to newspapers. A fateful series of events, including the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of neoliberalism, and Silvio Berlusconi taking a sledge-hammer to class politics, have left this remnant of late-twentieth century leftist culture increasingly isolated in an Italy that has tended towards the right. If you’re sceptical of the British left’s chronically online status, however, and disappointed by the UK’s urban cultural offering, there’s a lot to be learnt from these spaces.
Liberty Leading the People
The centro culturale is the slightly more refined relative of the centro sociale. The first stop on my tour is Zalib on the Via della Penitenza. Passing through the door, I’m greeted by a mural of ‘Liberty Leading the People’, its main subject bearing a red flag in her hand.
‘Where there’s home, there’s Zalib,’ the cultural centre’s events coordinator Diana tells me as she guides me through its gardens. The space is filled with greenery, uniquely so in this dense, medieval part of the city. Over hand-rolled cigarettes in the events marquee, Diana recounts how Zalib started as an independent bookshop-cum-study space, which was then forced to close due to rising rents in the city centre.
Not content to see their home-from-home disappear, the students who frequented Zalib teamed up with its owner to try to find a replacement site, eventually discovering a disused youth centre on the other side of the river. The withdrawal of state funding and threats of closure led to protests in the town hall. Diana was a part of this movement, which fought and won the right to run Zalib in this location for six years. She explains Zalib’s radical proposition: ‘It’s one of the exceptions in Rome. Once you have a membership, which is eight euros for the whole year, you’re not obliged to buy anything again. People come to play the piano, to enjoy the sun, to read a book.’
Zalib exists in a changing Rome. This year marks the quarter-centennial Catholic Jubilee, which has been criticised for accelerating a housing crisis in the capital, with 20,000 Airbnbs further inflating an already expensive rental market.
In this context, Diana describes how Zalib provides a haven for young people suffering from the housing crisis through its events. It is especially supportive of LGBT+ young people and those involved in women’s empowerment groups. ‘We want young people to have a space in which they can show their art,’ she says, ‘to show their voice.’ From its beginnings as a small bookshop, Zalib now boasts over 20,000 members and offers a radical alternative to the mainstream in central Rome.
Seven Storey Love Song
On the other side of the city centre — and just a short walk from the British ambassador’s residence, Villa Wolkonsky — lies La Redazione Scomodo. Descending into a former underground car park, I met with Chiara, the events manager, to talk about Scomodo’s approach.
Chiara nods at the ceiling: ‘There are seven inhabited floors above here with over 400 people, from 23 different nationalities, a barber, a restaurant and an auditorium.’ The former office block has been occupied since 2013, with Scomodo taking over the bottom two floors in 2019. It was a huge effort. ‘We restored this place,’ Chiara tells me, ‘by asking for a mortgage from the bank, which we’re still paying off!’
The results are impressive. The toilets are accessed through an old phone booth, while new members register in the old security guards’ office. Chiara shows me to the Scomodo editorial room, a large split-level space in which groups of young people work on the next edition of its in-house magazine and avoid the temptation of the cash-only bar on the other side of the large swing doors.
While Scomodo produces a magazine of the same name, it also offers a physical space for the creation and production of artistic and cultural events. Chiara defines its organisational structure as, ‘at the core, a community’. This community has democratic input into the direction of the magazine and space. ‘We have an assembly model,’ she says, ‘in which working groups come together and have editorial inputs and event outputs.’
It hasn’t always been easy. ‘We’re in an occupied place, so it’s technically illegal,’ she explains. Despite that, the community is growing, with a new sister space set to open in Milan this month.
A Political Occupation
Back in the south of Rome, one of the working-class areas in which the centro sociale model tends to appear, I met up with Francesco, a long-term member of the social centre Acrobax, which organised last week’s Irish rebel music and beer festival. Francesco doesn’t mince his words. ‘It’s a political occupation,’ he tells me, ‘a reaction to society. We don’t like this kind of society, the economic and social model out there. We believe in something better.’
The former greyhound track is now home to a rugby pitch, with several teams competing in the appropriately named ‘All Reds’ grouping. This has helped to cement the centre in the local area. ‘We’re very connected to the community; everything we offer is for free,’ Francesco explains. ‘Many people in the area might only earn a thousand euros a month — this way their kids can go somewhere to stay, play sport and socialise.
‘Antifascism is a practice that you have to practice,’ adds Francesco, as he reels off the activities the centre engages in. Acrobax is split into ‘laboratories’, each one working on a project, from sport to samba, with anti-fascist politics running throughout. The space itself is a delight, partly because it’s unusual to come across such a large area in a European capital not ear-marked for development. Kennels and betting rooms have been turned into spaces for workshops and nights out, and a large Palestine flag flies below the former Cinodrome sign. Events are cash only and the space is open almost 24/7.
The more political ethos underpinning Acrobax stands in contrast to that of the less doctrinaire cultural centres. ‘We need to do something, even if it’s against the rules,’ Francesco proclaims, with the group drawing explicitly on the legacy of Italy’s anarcho-communist left. Its future, however, is increasingly uncertain. ‘Everything is a bit harder now,’ says Francesco, in reference to Georgia Meloni’s government and its origins in a neo-fascist movement opposed to the social centre model. ‘She’s still a Fascist,’ spits Francesco.
Step into Space
Housing has always been a centre of struggle in Rome. One of its key fronts was the creation of squats, which gave rise to the likes of Scomodo and Acrobax. This is partly why these centres would be difficult to replicate in a British context: the law against squatting in the UK is more strictly enforced (though this wasn’t always the case). The broader war against public ownership has left the UK in an unenviable position, as cultural institutions like libraries have closed and leftist squats have become almost non-existent. Some places try to defy the norm, like London’s Pelican House, but all do so within the unforgiving limits of the private property sector. Perhaps this is part of the reason why the anglo-left is now so terminally online: it is hard to build real-world alternatives.
As a Brit stepping into a social or cultural centre in Rome, however, you are reminded of how good those alternatives could be. Crossing the threshold entails a shift away from the increasingly bland and securitised spaces of contemporary capitalism familiar at home, and into human-centricity. There’s no CCTV, and no camcorder-wearing security workers. Everything is cash-only and affordable, and every poster and stage is built by the venue’s members. Like Poland’s milkbars, Italy’s social and cultural centres are a nod to a bygone age — but they hold the seed of a possible future, too.