Abroad - As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly Crumbles - NYTimes.com

As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly Crumbles

Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times

“Widow,” an installation by Anish Kapoor at the Maxxi, Rome’s new national museum for contemporary art. More Photos »

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Collapses this spring at a couple of ancient sites here caused weary archaeologists to warn, yet again, about other imminent calamities threatening Rome’s precarious architectural birthright.

Meanwhile, the smart set went gaga when an ostentatious national museum for contemporary art, Maxxi, opened recently, along with an expansion to the city-run new-art museum, Macro. That was just after Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, convened a conference for planners and architects to mull a bid for the 2020 Olympics as an incentive to update Italy’s capital. Contemporary architecture now promises to be the engine and symbol of a new creative identity for Rome that, if development is done right for a change, would complement the city’s glorious past.

“What does Rome want to be when it grows up?” is how Richard Burdett, a planner from London with Italian roots, put the situation the other day. He meant the situation of Rome at a crossroads, struggling ahead, falling behind.

Change is never easy here. When a museum designed by Richard Meier, a glass and marble building to house the Ara Pacis, opened a few years ago, Romans howled. But then, it resembles a clunky, fascist mausoleum. Maxxi, whose style presents a whole other set of problems, has fared much better in terms of public approval, attracting some 74,000 visitors in its first month and accelerating talk by leaders like Mr. Alemanno about Rome in the 21st century.

But it’s one thing for politicians to support a new headline-grabbing museum. The art crowd rolls into town, bestows its blessing, then rolls out. It’s another to take on grittier challenges like immigration, transportation and sprawl.

Even culture: a nation whose identity and fiscal survival rests on it now devotes .21 percent of its state budget (and that figure has been dropping), which is about one-fifth of the percentage that France devotes, to theater, film, exhibitions, music and museums, not to mention the upkeep of all those thousands of historical sites for which there is still no master conservation plan.

And there’s nothing close to a thought-out approach to shaping this city’s new identity, either, just a burst of mixed architecture creating facts on the ground and a fresh hunger for something better. The problems facing Rome are not going to be solved by a few big stars designing buildings but by a larger effort to rethink a city that has swiftly grown to 3.7 million inhabitants, almost all of them outside the historic center, where its past is crumbling.

Abroad - As Rome Modernizes, Its Past Quietly Crumbles - NYTimes.com