On the 13-14th of April, Italy held an early parliamentary election following the collapse of Prime Minister Romano Prodi’s center-left coalition government, which lost a vote of confidence in the Italian Senate last January 24th.
The elections greatly enlivened Rome’s streetscape – a myriad of political candidates and their associated parties wallpapered the Eternal City with posters applied to building walls and to metal billboards. Whether they intended to do so or not, Romans (and those of us here at the eCool Compound) spent months studying the smiling faces, clever logos, and optimistic campaign promises of an endless series of candidates, for it was impossible to venture out of one’s home without being visually bombarded by the paper propaganda.
Then, election day came – it was time for it all to be over. We’d tired of the grinning mugs of the politicians and were ready to return to streets lined with circus posters and notices about concerts, art exhibits, and other cultural offerings.
That, of course, was not to be the case. Those April 13-14th elections were more than just parliamentary in Rome, for the city’s mayor, Walter Veltroni, had stepped down from office in order to face off with Silvio Berlusconi for the office of Prime Minister. That meant that Romans were faced with choosing a new mayor in the mid-April elections. Their votes, however, were inconclusive. The two candidates, Gianni Alemanno and Francesco Rutelli, were evenly divided and therefore a runoff was required.
So, as the posters pertaining to the national election were stripped away, a whole new array of political advertisements appeared. Almost daily, the walls and placards were caked with new posters, creating a Rutelli-Alemanno, Rutelli-Alemanno, Rutelli-Alemanno stratigraphy that left the head spinning and the eye rolling.
Two long weeks later, the runoff election was held. Alemanno was found to have defeated his rival Rutelli by some 7 percentage points. And so what do the streets of Rome look like in the aftermath of Alemanno’s victory? The now-obsolete posters are starting to peel from the walls leaving a streetscape that’s more visually interesting than anything provided by the political candidates.
Today, on Photo Friday, Susan Sanders gives us a view into the perforated and peeling layers that line Rome’s streets. In some cases, overlapping layers have been ripped away to frame the face of someone’s preferred candidate (see top photo), while in other cases the degradation appears to be fueled by weak glue, wind, and rain. In every case, it’s interesting to watch the promising faces of Italy’s political vanguard peel away as the new governments – both local and national – take office and settle into what is likely to be the same old routine.
On 15 March 2008, Susan Sanders gave us a look at the political debris engendered when torrential rains sweep these posters off their walls and billboards and onto the streets. Click here. And click here for the clever poster created by a Roman artist whose studies of political propaganda posted in the Eternal City was called Lasagna Elettorale.
For more of Susan’s photos, visit her blog: Rome With A View.
