Born: 1957, Italy
Profession: Photographer
Lives and works: Rome, Italy
The Palace of Crossed Destinies
The new Corviale, also known as the “Serpentone,” is a building nearly 1 km long located on the western outskirts of Rome. It was conceived in the late 1970s as a response to the housing crisis. Since its inception, this place has become synonymous with decay and crime—primarily due to poor management—and has come to symbolize one of Rome’s most stigmatized neighborhoods.
The story follows men and women catapulted into a place without infrastructure, still bearing the wounds of mass eviction, forced to live together by necessity or circumstance.
Over the past forty years, life inside has never been easy: a metropolis of people from countless backgrounds who meet and clash, communicate and conflict. There is meticulous care for the space, yet despair always looms near.
But every life here longs to be lived, and every individual feels like the protagonist of their own story. Although the grey of these silent structures is tinged with a life that may not be ideal, each person strives to live it, color it, and reinvent it by creating something around them that resembles themselves.
They—the true heroes of this difficult chapter—give rise to self-organized ways of living, their personal answer to the long silence and institutional neglect.
