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From Our Own Correspondent
The Ruin of Rome
00:27:41
The financial crash has devastated the historic centre of Rome - Joanna Robertson of a...
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Transcript12 lines
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This is from our own correspondent, a download from BBC Radio. And here to introduce the latest addition is Kate Ady.
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Hello. Today, the ruin of Rome. How soaring rents and rising prices have ripped the soul from the historic centre of the Italian capital, the Angela Merkel bugging row. It's reminding Germans of the days when neighbour spied upon neighbour. We meet the Sri Lankan editor who lives at his newspaper office because it's just too dangerous to go home. And baby comes too. A correspondent takes a toddler out. News gathering. So was it a delight or a total disaster? The historic centre of Rome, like the rest of Italy, has been hard hit by the political upheavals and financial crises of the last decade. This was once a city with strong community life at its core, filled with small family businesses, grocers, butchers, bakeries, artisans, workshops. But steeply rising costs and ever increasing numbers of tourists have left their mark. Now the city authorities are taking action. They're clamping down on the illegal markets which sell tat and counterfeit goods to tourists, driving away the illegal food vans that block the historic sites and moving on the people who dress up as Roman centurions and pester visitors for money. Joanna Robertson, who lived in Rome 10 years ago, has just been back to find a very different city.
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Lunchtime at Tonino's. The menu rolls off his tongue. Facciamo un po di pasta alle melanzane al pomodoro con broccoli alla carbonaro con sugo, pasta faggioli. With his bravado, rhythm and speed, he's like Figaro in the Barber of Seville, an opera Rossini composed a couple of hundred years ago. Just a few streets away. Most likely on a stomach full of the hearty Roman food, Tonino still cooks. Time seems nothing to Rome. Centuries wax and wane. Civilizations come and go, but the eternal city endures. For Tonino and many Romans like him, present times are not good times. Not so long ago, there had been a queue along the street to get a table at Tenino's. A queue of locals, artisans, shopkeepers. Now the place fills up, but mostly with tourists, to whom Tonino's dazzling verbal aria is pure double Dutch. They've all gone, he says. All our friends on this street. It's so sad. It's Italian artisans are amongst the best in the world. How do you ever get that? Back on Via di Cappellari, the street of the hat makers, Franco stands outside his silent workshop. This street forgot about making hats long ago. Instead, it became a vibrant street of carpenters full of banging Sawing, whistling and joking. It often took a full half hour to walk the five minutes to the market. So many neighbours stopped to talk along the way. Now the place is deserted. They've all gone. Franco gestures at the empty, shuttered workshops. My wife, my son and I, we're the only ones left. In the old days, Franco earned around 500,000 lira a week. With that, he says, I could pay everything, take the family to the trattoria on Sunday and still have change on Monday. Now, with a new currency, the same €260 barely covers basics. No more trattoria and not a cent left by Friday. Lots of neighbours sold out to foreigners for cash. They took less than the properties were worth, but they couldn't afford to refuse. As for us, my wife won't budge. That's right, she says. I was born in this house and I'll die in this house. Like my family before me. Along with many Romans, Franco's managing by renting part of their home to tourists. Cash in hand, it makes more in a month than he makes in six. With carpentry these days, a stroll away on Via Piedi Marmo, the street of the Marble Foot, the always elegant Signora Piamina Mimelli oversees the family chocolate business, founded by her great grandfather in 1886. Rome's ruined, she says, arranging glistening fruit jellies in a scarlet box. The imagination, the creativity, it's gone. Everything's filthy and crowded. Siamo resiliente. We're resilient, she says. They won't be driven out. Her son Atelio, grew up running in and out of the shop kitchen, surrounded by steaming copper pans of simmering chocolate and bubbling sugar. He has a passion for chocolate making, the signora says. His great grandfather's talent runs in his veins, and the secret family recipes are safe in his head. Across the River Tiber is the biscotti Ficcio Innocenti, a biscuit maker's that stood on the Via della Luce, the street of light, for 107 years. Inside, Stefania Nascenti is baking some of the dozens of varieties of biscuits, jam tarts and traditional sweet pastries handmade each day, just as her mother, Anna, did for decades before her, Anna now resides in a large photograph on the wall, immortalized in black and white, surrounded by piles of sugared cookies. Anna used to say, when I'm gone, if my daughters ever try to sell the shop, I'll come back to haunt them. I'll tweak their toes. In the night. Stefania selects biscuits for a Russian who communicates entirely through energetic sign language. Tourists are good for business, she says as the Russian leaves, happily laden. But mass tourism's ruined Rome. Fast food, pizza, Chinese junk, dreary mini markets. There's no poetry anymore. Fine to stay for a day or two, but it's hell to live in. On Via del Moro, Virginia Valzani, now 92, sits behind the counter of her pasticheria, where she's made Roman sweets for the last 77 years. The real life of the neighbourhood has all but disappeared. It's a tragedy, she says. Two French tourists burst in, shrieking with delight. Let me take your photograph. One cries, grabbing Signora Valzani, while the other clicks and texts the images. Now you're famous in Paris. They hoot, rushing from the shop. Signora Valzani sighs. I pray that Rome will become herself again con le persone giuste with the right people who'll take care of her.
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And that was Joanna Robertson. Next to Sri Lanka, this is still one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, particularly those critical of the government. It had been hoped the climate for news gatherers might improve when the country's bitter civil war came to an end four years ago. But they still face violence and intimidation, and there's a list of unsolved journalist murder cases. The police stand accused of doing little to try to solve them. Fergal Keen's been finding out what it takes to be a newsman in what was formerly rebel territory in the north of the country.
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I was standing in the suffocating heat of the press room, deafened by the immense rattle of the presses as they rolled into action, when my mind wandered back over three decades to the most important day of my journalistic life. Here I was in October 2013, in Jaffna, capital of the Tamil north of Sri Lanka, and I was suddenly connected, for reasons that would only later become obvious, to a September day in 1979 in Ireland. I was 18 years old when I first climbed the stairs of the Limerick Leader and Chronicle newspaper. The place smelled of ink and cigars. I was wearing my only suit, purchased hastily the previous week. Knocking tentatively on the door of a room bearing the sign Editorial Department, I awaited my summons. A gruff voice beckoned, come in. I crossed the threshold into a world that would delight, frustrate, inspire, infuriate, but above all, would feel like home. Inside, men. It was still an all male preserve in those days were hunched over typewriters, whispering into telephones or, in the case of two, at the end of the room, gossiping and laughing. This was before computers and mobile phones, when newsrooms were noisy, rollicking arenas. I took it all in, and I knew that I belonged here among these noisy, frequently profane, sometimes hard drinking, but always utterly committed denizens of the editorial department. What mattered were the stories, and to hell with who they pleased or displeased. Certainly there were pressures. The politicians didn't always like what we wrote, but we depended on our editor. As tough a man as ever walked the streets of Limerick to deal with the complainers and any would be intimidators. He did once threaten to throw me out of his office window, only half jokingly for mistakenly attributing the words of one county councillor to another in an early piece I'd written. But the ferocity with which he demanded accuracy was returned in his willingness to defend his reporters against outside attack. I thought of my first boss, Brendan Halligan, as I sat waiting to meet the editor in chief of Udayan, the biggest Tamil language newspaper in the north of Sri Lanka. In Limerick we didn't suffer from an oppressive state. We were protected by the law and by custom, from the meddling of politicians, the threats of criminals, the intimidation of vested interests. When he came into the room, the editor in chief, MV Kadamalnathan, was limping and walking with the aid of a stick. At 71, he's frail and quiet spoken. His injury was caused, he says, when he was run down in the street by paramilitaries supported by the government. Working for Udayan can be a very dangerous job. Seven members of its staff, from journalists to circulation workers, have been killed over the last decade. Yet in the newsroom upstairs, there were reporters, sub editors, copy proofers, busy getting the next day's edition ready for press. Down in the press room, they were printing a supplement. I asked Mr. Kanamalnathan why he did the job. It was what he'd always done, he explained. What else was he trained for? And the stories of the Tamil people had to be told, he said. I told him I thought he was the bravest journalist I'd ever met. He laughed. And don't go putting that on me. This elderly man lives in the newspaper offices now because it's not safe for him to live at home. For a moment I thought to myself, it must be a lonely existence. But I very much doubt he sees it that way. The journalists, the printers, the van drivers. How could he be lonely, surrounded by that boisterous clan? As I said, all of that is a long way from Limerick and a long way from London, too. But the principles they fight for at Udayan are those that any journalist should hold sacred the instinctive kick against those who would try to impose silence on us, who would shut out uncomfortable facts. MV Kanamalnathan is a true journalist, one of a universal tribe for whom the newsroom, the press room are home, for whom the sound of the great machines starting up and rolling out the day's paper is more than a romantic echo of a bygone age of journalism. It is, in that troubled place, an essential statement of defiance.
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Fergal Keene in Jaffna, the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott has rejected an assertion by a senior United nations official that the devastating bushfires west of Sydney are linked to climate change. For his part, the former US Vice president and climate campaigner Al Gore said scientists had clearly shown that when temper temperatures rise, bushfires become more pervasive. John Donison has spent much of this past week with the firefighters. In New South Wales, hundreds of homes have been destroyed there. Two people have been killed this morning. The fires continue to burn across a huge area. But not everyone's convinced that climate change is responsible.
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Australia's Blue Mountains get their name from the eucalyptus trees that coat their slopes. On a warm day, the sun heats up the oils in the trees vibrant green leaves, and as those oils evaporate into the atmosphere, it gives the range a shimmering blue hue. For much of this week, though, the Blue Mountains were more a shade of grey, cloaked in smoke, the air acrid and woody. And of course, there is no smoke without fire. These have been the most devastating bushfires New South Wales has seen in decades. Tens of thousands of hectares have been burned, hundreds of homes destroyed, and they're still burning in the small community of Winmalee, around an hour's drive from Sydney. I looked on as Chris Muller stood head in, hands in front of what was left of her house. And what was left was pretty much nothing, a once beautiful property looking out over the bush, reduced to little more than rubble, twisted metal and ash. Many of the houses on the suburban street had suffered the same fate. Chris's daughter, picking through the debris, tried to cheer her mother. Look, Mum. She shouted, holding up a few metal spoons and an old blue coffee pot. I guess we're all still here, chris said. That's the main thing, before heading off to talk with her family about how they were going to regain their lives. A local sports club was transformed into a disaster welfare centre, offering food and advice to those who'd lost their homes, husbands and wives, sons and daughters could be seen pouring over long to do lists. The question surely where to begin? Of course, Australians are used to the threat from bushfires, and there have been much more deadly ones than these. More than 170 people were killed in 2009 in the black Saturday fires in the state of Victoria. But this year the fires have come unusually early, and after unseasonably hot weather, it's still only spring. The full heat of summer, with its even higher fire risk, is months away, and according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, this all follows the country's hottest year on record. That fact has given these fires a political edge. Environmentalists often like to refer to Australia as as the petri dish of climate change, a place where perhaps you can actually see global warming happening and judge its effects. Australia's new conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott, has sometimes seemed reluctant to accept that view. Mr. Abbott, who's a volunteer firefighter himself and even gave up his day job to man the hoses on occasions these last few days, once described the science behind human induced climate change as absolute crap. He since refined that opinion and now accepts global warming is happening. But this week he was quick to dismiss comments from a senior United nations official who had linked the fires to the changing climate. She's talking through her hat, Mr. Abbott said, saying that fire had always been part of the Australian experience, and he listed a whole host of major fires across the country and stretching back more than a century. His comments have angered environmentalists. The former U.S. vice president and climate change campaigner Al Gore said denying the link between these latest fires and global warming was like claiming smoking didn't cause lung cancer. People like the Nobel laureate are already dismayed that since coming to power last month, Mr. Abbott has pledged to dismantle Australia's carbon tax. The tax, introduced last year by the previous Labour government, makes the country's biggest polluters pay for the amount of greenhouse gases they produce. Instead, Prime Minister Abbott favours what he calls direct action, giving businesses financial incentives to adopt green technology if they choose to. Within days of taking office, he shut down the country's climate commission, set up to compile scientific research into the issue. All this has put the prime minister at odds with environmentalists, and if the fire season continues as it has started, the heat of the argument over the causes is also likely to intensify. It's a divisive issue in Australia, but up in the Blue Mountains, most people I spoke to this week tended to side with Mr. Abbott. This year's fires were all part of the cycle. Cole MacDonald told me as he prepared to defend his farmhouse while thick white smoke billowed from the hillside behind him. He said that fires like this had been going on throughout the ages and that it was all part of life in the bush.
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John Donison in New South Wales. German officials travel to Washington next week for talks. After the allegation that the Americans have been bugging Angela Merkel's phone, some people wonder should she really be surprised? Surely everyone knows it's not so difficult to listen into mobiles and monitor text messages. A State Department official said it'd be a mistake to let the disclosures get in the way of resolving issues such as Syria and Iran. But European leaders meeting in Brussels yesterday said it had led to a lack of trust between the United States and its European allies. A partnership, they pointed out, must be based on respect and trust. Steve Evans says Germans are particularly sensitive about spying and state intrusion, and many have been outraged by this week's developments.
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Angela Merkel is a texter. She does it in public all the time. Texting is frowned upon in the Bundestag, but not if you're the Chancellor of Germany. There she is during a debate, thumbs going furiously. Sometimes she texts colleagues across the chamber and then looks up and catches their eye to check they've got the message. A Chancellor and her mobile, and are really parted in her office, in the Chancellor and the Chancellery, it lies on the floor, charging. But the rest of the time it's not far from her hand. Since she's learned that others might be reading her messages at the National Security Agency in Maryland outside Washington, she said that she doesn't plan to change her habits. An enterprising German company has marketed what it calls the Chancellor phone, one so secure that prying eyes and ears can't intrude. The Chancellor will no doubt use the Chancellor phone, but she will find it hard to shake off her old habit of constant texting. You can't doubt that recent events have shaken her in Germany, particularly in East Germany, when, where Angela Merkel grew up, people feel strongly about the state tapping phones and bugging rooms. In the east of Berlin, there is an amazing complex of buildings. What was the headquarters of the Ministry of State Security, the Ministerium fur Starzerheits, the Stasi. Today the headquarters is a museum and and a home for the vast archive where East Germans can learn who spied on whom. One Berlin politician learnt after the Wall came down that her husband had spied on her. She divorced him. The offices themselves now display all the paraphernalia of eavesdropping. The hollow tree trunks with a hole for the camera, the jacket buttons, the that turn out to be lenses. The spying of the past is there for all to see. When communism collapsed, there were 91,000 people working for the Stasi. It's easy to find maps showing old Stasi premises. And just in the area where I live in Berlin, there are seven places used by the spooks of the Stasi. Seven secret flats within an area not much bigger than a football field. That's how pervasive spying on citizens was Just behind where I live. 79 Dunkerstrasse was, it turns out, rented by the Stasi. At the end of my square, Helmholtz Platz, there was an apartment which purported to be for students, but which was actually the place where where one Major Grabner and his colleague Wolff met informers. At the other end of the square there is now a bright blue door between a second hand clothes shop and a shishi restaurant. This used to be a door through which informers would go. So when Angela Merkel says now that friends don't spy on friends, she means what she says she knows about it. Everybody knew what was going on. After all, Chancellor Cole used to go off to telephone boxes to make sensitive calls when he was the leader of West Germany. He assumed the official phones he used might be tapped by the East German authorities. Perhaps, though Chancellor Merkel has been too trusting. Despite growing up in a police state, I've noticed how she seems to have far less security in general than do other world leaders. I once went to a meeting she was addressing a big meeting with demonstrators. One man was striding up and down along the entrance hall waiting for her. He had a long stick with a banner on the end of it. I can remember thinking as she was about to arrive that this man wasn't going to be allowed to remain there. Right on her route as she walked in and sure enough, the police did go up to him. There was a long discussion, but instead of him being carted off as would have happened in the United States or I think Britain, he was told that the big stick was the problem. He was welcome to stay and wave the banner in her face, but not with the stick. I found that refreshing. And also the way she keeps texting. What did the Americans learn? Only they know. It would be nice to think that it was nothing more useful than I'll be back from Brussels later, dear. Why don't you get a couple of schnitzel from the corner shop?
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Steve Evans in Berlin. A checklist of essential kit for the travelling correspondent. Recording gear, microphone, telephone, camera, batteries, laptop. And personally, I'd add torch and toothbrush. Now, while those correspondents who are also parents might miss their children while they're away, there aren't many who'd say, no need to pine, I'll take the kid along with me. But that's exactly what Madeleine Morris decided to do. And in her case, the little girl was only two years old. So did the toddler help in the process of newsgathering or did she prove rather a handful?
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I'm not sure. At which point I decided it would be a good idea to bring my two year old with me while I made two radio documentaries for the BBC. But I was clearly drunk or delirious or just crazy. After all, there's a reason childcare exists, and that's because it's impossible to achieve anything much of substance when you're in charge of a toddler. But my friend Hussain had suggested we pitch some documentaries about that very subject, childcare. And in search of the unique selling point which would win us the commission, I'd had a brain wave. How about I bring Scarlet along? I can see how she reacts to the different ways of doing things. She'll be an extra voice, plus it'll be fun. And so it was that a couple of months later, I found myself checking in for a flight to Beijing. In one hand, a bag of clothes and nappies. In the other, my radio equipment, rucksack full of toys on my back and large baby strapped to my front. Not so much a reporter as a pack horse. But we were doing fine. Scarlet and I. We made it onto the flight, she had a nap. I even had the chance to do some background reading for the story. I was actually feeling a little proud of myself until our layover in Singapore Airport. We were killing time in Duty Free. Scarlet was strapped to my chest in her baby carrier, her face next to mine. When I saw it turn purple, then white, I could only watch in slow motion as the aeroplane meal from the first leg came up all over me and her and a good portion of the airport floor. Suddenly I was less super mum, more super soaked, and with another 10 hours of travel to go, I'm pretty sure John Simpson never began an assignment like this. Of course, there are plenty more tales of bodily fluid woe. Like the one where I found myself holding Scarlett out over a bathtub in Fiji while my interviewee hosed her down after an unfortunate exploding nappy incident. How's that for changing the reporter guest dynamic? In an instant. But gross out stories are par for the course when small people are involved. So let me tell you about the good stuff instead, about how babies bring out the best in people. The policeman in Fiji who gave us a free lift in his taxi when we were late to an interview. Or the Chinese immigration official who waved us through when she saw an exhausted mum and a sick baby. Even though my journalist visa would normally have resulted in a few questions, as reporters, we typically try to give as little of ourselves away as possible. But with Scarlett along, I had laid out my own deepest vulnerability for all to see. And I think that in this case, it helped. Parents generously shared their own guilt, their sadness and their relief at having to leave their children with others when they went back to work. Perhaps it was because they saw that I, too understood that emotional turmoil. Our sojourns in Fiji and China were without doubt the most inefficient work trips I have ever undertaken. Instead of scheduling five interviews in a day, I could manage just two, with nap time, playtime and meal times taking precedence. But being forced to slow down also helped me to look closer, think longer and listen harder simply because I had time to. There were moments when I felt terribly guilty for taking Scarlett out of her happy daily routine to help me get a better story for the 12 hours of her food poisoning. When I had no choice but to continue our journey, I felt like the worst mother in the world. Maybe some of you think I am, but then I wonder how many other 2 year olds from suburban Melbourne will ever have the chance to run around barefoot in a Fijian village or sit on a grass mat eating homemade roti with a gaggle of other kids who look and sound nothing like, or have a ringside seat while 4 year old Chinese children, dressed in army fatigues march to their patriotic songs. Very few, I'd say she won't remember it, but I hope the record of our journey in the form of those radio programmes will become part of Scarlett's own personal story. And as she grows up, she'll think, I did all those things when I was just two. What I must be capable of now.
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Madeline Morris, bravely out on assignment with Little Scarlet and bringing this edition to a close. I'm here again on Thursday and Saturday of next week with more from correspondence around the world. Do join us. Goodbye.