The other night, when it seemed as if everybody was on the street sweating off the late summer heat, a young, smart-looking crowd filed through a fog of cigarette smoke into the Teatro dell'Opera to hear a small orchestra of fellow Romans play the overture from Mozart's The Magic Flute.
That does not sound remarkable, but then Sanjay Kansa Banik got the ball rolling on the tabla with a long, mesmerizing solo of quickening tempo, which segued into a virtuoso turn by Dialy Mady Sissoko on the oud, to the accompaniment of a viola and violin.
The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, as it is called, is made up mostly of immigrants living in Rome. An immigrant band would not raise an eyebrow in the US, but it does in Europe, especially in Italy, where periodically some local arts star bemoans the country's insularity and its resulting moribund culture.
Not that the US isn't suffering through its own bout of immigration anxiety, with Republican presidential hopefuls jockeying for conservative votes by promising to outdo one another in cracking down on illegals. Even so, the most strident candidates, conjuring up thousand-kilometer fences on the Mexican border, are careful to rail against only the current crop of mostly Hispanic arrivals, still embracing the feel-good Ellis Island saga. It is inseparable from the national self-image.
Europe is different. Immigrants by and large do not arrive here expecting to be made citizens, and, overwhelmingly, they are not invited to do so.
Italy used to be an emigrant society. Now legal immigration here has nearly quadrupled since the mid-1990s, reaching 2.67 million in 2005, when last counted. Who knows the number of illegals, but an invitation last year to sign up for jobs prompted a half-million unregistered foreigners to apply.
Meanwhile, with a population of 56 million, Italy granted citizenship to just 30,000 immigrants last year, 90 percent thanks to marriage or Italian ancestry. Antonio Ricci, a researcher for Caritas, the nonprofit organization that tracks this information, says four of every five euros spent by the Italian government on immigration issues go to getting foreigners out -- to deportation and holding facilities, called Centers for Temporary Residents -- never mind that Italy has been remarkably inefficient in enforcing the laws.
The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio consists of some 16 musicians, most of whom have come here from, among other places, India, Tunisia, Cuba, Argentina, Hungary and Ecuador; they're joined by a few Italians. The orchestra's name derives from a bustling, tumbledown neighborhood near the main train station in Rome, where the orchestra's founder lives. He is a curly haired 45-year-old with a hangdog face, named Mario Tronco.
"The world around us changed," Tronco told me backstage, before the concert. "Immigrants started arriving.
"For Italians it is still strange for the baker to be Chinese and the butcher Bengalese," he said.
Through his window, Tronco recalled, he listened to mothers singing native lullabies. Then Sept. 11 happened, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government came up with an anti-immigrant law that sparked protests in the piazza.
"The orchestra was conceived as a challenge to the government," Tronco said. "For 20 years I played in an Italian pop band and I listened to everything. But I got interested in the orchestra because I was interested in these people, and then in their music."
Oddly, it helped that he was not expert in African or Indian or Andean music because he was not wedded to authenticity. Free to mix styles, languages and instruments, he came up with his own sound.
Players said, "That's not Indian, that's not Senegalese," but came to see it was Indian and Senegalese, Tronco's way.
Last year a documentary about the orchestra made the rounds of the international film festivals; it has become a box-office hit in Rome. A concurrent brassy, big-band-like recording, not too likable, does not do the live orchestra's cool, jazzy, itinerant populism justice. Now the movie's commercial release in the US is linked to a concert tour, which kicks off at the IFC Center in New York tomorrow. Smelling votes, Roman politicians have belatedly jumped on the bandwagon, and Italian newspapers, balancing headlines about terrorists and crackdowns on foreigners, have taken to periodically trotting out the orchestra as the new face of Italy, which in fact it is not.
Italy still exports some singers, furniture and cars, and every city boasts its local orchestra. But Italian visual art feels shopworn, Italian fashion made at least one US critic yawn. (It continues to "putter along," wrote Guy Trebay in the New York Times, causing the predictable national gnashing of teeth.) Its once prestigious film industry has, among young directors big on the international stage, not much beyond Gabriele Muccino, working in a Hollywood mode, to boast about.
"Italy's cultural system is on the brink of collapse," Cecilia Bartoli, the soprano, told the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel just this month, repeating what the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini and other self-flagellating Italian stars have bemoaned over the years.
"We live in a condition of paralysis and are not able to do anything about it, to liberate ourselves from the lethargy. You might call it a coma. Maybe it has something to do with the state of Italian television," she said.
She has a point. Italians are said to watch more television, and more bad television, than any other Europeans. An Italian television drama last year about social integration starring Fiona May, a black British-born track star turned local actress, who last year won the Italian Dancing With the Stars, is the rare exception to an all-white, all-native diet of Italian game shows and Italian pop music and Italian advertisements for improbable weight-loss machines that entail vibrating belts, or for potato chips hawked by a former Italian porn star with a tag line that is slang for the female anatomy.
So the orchestra, playing to sold-out crowds, like the one the other night, provides Italians with a helpful dose of quality homegrown culture. It also provides evidence, which clearly the Italians need, that immigrants are not all boat people or petty criminals or farm laborers or street merchants hawking Gucci knockoffs -- that they're musicians, too, good ones at that, willing to advertise themselves as Roman, no less.
That many of the players, who until lately struggled to supplement concert fees by working as cooks and waiters, still have a hard time getting temporary work permits, is another matter.
Before the concert, I stopped by the church of Sant'Agostino, near the Piazza Navona, where Raphael painted a fresco of Isaiah and Caravaggio painted The Madonna of the Pilgrims. The Raphael is High Renaissance rhetoric and bright color. The Caravaggio, dark as molasses, picks out a pair of scruffy, supplicating peasants before the Virgin and Child with a hard, slanting light.
A universe separates the two pictures, painted some 90 years apart. Caravaggio arrived in Rome from Lombardy, got work doing menial tasks like painting fruit because as a straniero, or outsider, he was not thought properly trained. He resisted conforming, and a revolution in Italian art unfolded largely thanks to him and to the arrival of another non-Roman, Annibale Carracci. Mobs of tourists jamming museums and churches, swelling local pride, tacitly celebrate this history of stranieri.
Intentionally or otherwise, Tronco is trying to extend this past.
Pino Pecorelli, the orchestra's Italian double bassist, told me: "The secret is that everyone's allowed to be himself -- 16 soloists, one sound. I remember at the first concert I didn't even know the names of the other musicians or the names of some of their instruments. It felt like being in an amusement park, like we were kids with new toys. Now we all contribute ideas."
During encores, Houcine Ataa, a Tunisian, wearing tinted glasses, and with a dry martini voice, set the stage for Omar Lopez Valle, a restless Cuban trumpeter, whose snaking melody welled up into a stomping coda, which got the audience to its feet. The man who united Italy was Vittorio Emanuele, after whom the orchestra's piazza, and hence the orchestra is named. Surely that's not a coincidence.
Of course, it will take more than 16 musicians to solve the immigration problems in Italy and make a melting pot. But for an evening, anyway, old Italy, in the form of the crowd, which sauntered out of the opera house to light up again, and to gossip in the night air, met the supposed new face of Italy, and everybody looked rightly pleased.
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