Rome, Italy – Ana Bizdoaca has stopped expecting to be able to sleep on a mattress on the pavement a few streets from Rome’s Termini station. A relentless heatwave has pushed temperatures past 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), turning the city streets into a furnace for those displaced from their homes.
“Our hearts have been torn to pieces,” Bizdoaca said on the ninth night of missing sleep. Around her, some 300 people, including about 100 children, are enduring similar conditions. Behind them stands the seven-storey former office block known as Spin Time, a squatted building where they all lived until days ago.
Bizdoaca has lived there since 2013, when it was first occupied. It has become home to many, including 140 families from more than 20 countries. It started with a simple idea at its centre: Housing as a fundamental right. The residents have been camped outside since the evening of July 29, when a small fire broke out in a lower-floor room where nobody lived. Residents put it out within minutes, before the fire brigade arrived, and the damage was minimal.
Despite the minor nature of the incident, police evacuated the building and magistrates placed it under judicial seizure. It was declared unfit, and residents are now let back in one at a time, escorted by police, only to collect documents and essentials. On the first night, many did not have shoes. At 4am, they were told they would not be let back in.
The pavement has become home to the sit-in. Food arrives at lunchtime from volunteers in the surrounding district, along with water, mattresses, and clothes. Thousands have passed through to offer support over the past nine days, including dozens of politicians, singers and actors. In the evenings, an open-air cinema gives the camp’s children something to watch other than the street.
“Some of us were on our feet for 40 hours,” said Maria Cabrera, who has lived in the building for almost 11 years and helps organise the camp. “Seeing the children on the ground, on flattened cardboard from the bins, it was awful.” On August 6, a two-year-old girl fainted in a Red Cross nurse’s arms. “I cried for two hours,” said a Kurdish resident, who watched the scene unfold.
She told Al Jazeera that her brother, also a resident of the building, is blind and uses a wheelchair. Neighbours used to check on him while she was at work. Now, he sits under the scorching sun. The community has drawn support from well beyond the neighbourhood. On Friday, the physicist Giorgio Parisi, who won the Nobel Prize in 2021, sent the residents a letter. “Inequality and marginalisation are the woodworm eating away at our democracy,” he wrote, “and we should all be on the side of those who fight them concretely, not just in words.”
Cabrera arrived a year after losing her job, having been unable to pay rent. “At the beginning, it wasn’t simple, because there are 27 different nationalities here,” she said. “But it became family. Whoever is on my floor, I can go and ask them for anything.” One of Rome’s most active cultural spaces, Spin Time has a free co-working area, a newspaper put together by people aged below 30, and hosts concerts and plays. Cabrera saw her first classical music show here. “Things I could never have afforded outside,” she said.
In 2019, the building made headlines worldwide when the pope’s almoner, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, descended into a manhole to restore electricity that had been cut off due to mounting debts. On August 3, Rome’s prefect convened the mayor, police chief, housing councillor and Cardinal Baldassare Reina, vicar general of the Diocese of Rome. Cardinal Reina has said the pope asks to be updated hour by hour.
The city offered to buy the building from InvestiRE SGR, the fund that manages it, with an interim arrangement that would let residents return while the sale went through. Another meeting was held on Thursday. Mayor Roberto Gualtieri announced live on television that the offer had been rejected. “I’m not happy, and I’m somewhat irritated,” he said, adding that the Church had done everything it could to persuade them.
In a statement issued late on Thursday, InvestiRE SGR said the inspection confirmed that after 13 years of occupation, the building does not meet safety standards and this legally precludes handing possession to the city, thereby ruling out any interim arrangement. The company added that it remains willing to continue talks towards selling the building. Gualtieri said the city would be able to place residents in alternative accommodation from Monday.
But the activists, who want to stay, say they will hold the sit-in as long as possible to pressure the local government. The fund has long planned a luxury hotel on the site, and Spin Time has for years been listed by the government as a site to be cleared. The governing right-wing Brothers of Italy party pressured the mayor against the purchase, saying using public money as thousands wait on housing lists would reward illegality. “We never thought they would use this tragedy” to evacuate the building, resident Aurora Jacob said. “Someone took advantage of an emergency, of the vulnerability of families and children, to push them out of their homes. “I don’t think being poor is a crime.”
The authorities should stop “playing” with people who need help, she said, and the owners should finally sell.
“Everyone is just speculating, on the price of a building and on us, on people going through difficult times.”
The difference between us and you is that we are second-class citizens.”
Pope Leo XIV recently received members of the community.
If a permanent eviction goes ahead, Spin Time would be the largest occupation to face such measures in Italy.
Source: Aljazeera
