Abstract
This article seeks to make sense of the Italian city of Rome as a more-than-human city through tracing a particular set of temporal and spatial relations that constitute and connect the worlds of humans and the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) in the city. It will explore these geographical relations through the practices and materials of human and starling lives and consider the ways in which city space is formed through shared spatial logics, processes of social organisation and boundary making between humans and starlings. It will also argue that olives play a fundamental role in mediating human-starling relations in the city not least through their significance in articulating the circulation of temporal-spatial connections between present day Rome, the idealised fascist landscapes created under the rule of Benito Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s and ancient Augustan Rome at the beginning of the first century CE. These three temporal moments will primarily be articulated through three related sites: a columbarium discovered in 1984 beneath the Villa Doria Pamphili in western central Rome, the reclaimed Pontine marshes of the Agro Pontino to the south-east of Rome and the streets of the present-day city centre. Through this temporal-spatial framework I will explore how starlings have inscribed themselves into the spatial politics of Roman life, how they map the city through the extension of their bodies through space and how the entangled spaces of Rome represent both the wilful agency of starlings and the wildness of the city. In doing so I seek to compliment and extend recent thinking about the constitution of the more-than-human city in two particular ways: through observing specific sites where human-starling worlds co-operate, overlap, abrade or conflict and through recentring the role of the temporal in tracing the geographies of the more-than-human city.
Introduction: The columbarium
In 1984 the remains of an ancient Augustan (circa 27 BCE to 14 CE) columbarium were unearthed at the Villa Doria Pamphili in western central Rome. Whilst the area had previously revealed a number of sepulchral buildings, most of the columbaria that had been discovered were designed for the housing of a relatively small number of familial cremation urns. The columbarium discovered in 1984 however - what would later be referred to as ‘The Great Columbarium’ (Museo nazionale Romano, 2024) – incorporated niches for several hundred urns. Decoration surrounding these niches featured ‘wreaths, plants, birds, fruit-pieces, architectural representations of gardens and grotesques’ (Turismoroma, n.d.) - the materials and companion species of everyday Augustan life. Amongst these depictions, olives and birds appear as reoccurring motifs. The significance of olives to ancient Roman life is widely acknowledged (see for example Zanini De Vita, 2013; O'Sullivan et al., 2008), the olive tree symbolising ‘not only the fertility of humans and of the earth but also peace and a serene life’ (Zanini De Vita, 2013), but less valorised are the familiar looking black birds that dwell in telling proximity to the olives (Figure 1). The combination of dark plumage and a dark bill, as well as the general size and posture of the birds, strongly suggests that these are starlings, an assertion also supported by contemporary accounts of large starling flocks feeding in olive plantations and forging an infamous association with the fruits as a result (Feare, 1984). Taken as a whole, the story of the columbarium is therefore one of associations; the unusually large number of niches indicates that between them these ‘humans past’ must have fostered a social or communal association with each other beyond the merely familial. Then there are the associations between the ‘humans past’ and the depicted plants and animals; the urns literally embedded within these scenes, forming a continuous, almost two-dimensional frieze of beings and materials flattened and nested within each other. If nothing else the Great Columbarium forms an intriguing representational landscape of Augustan life in Rome and a provocation to revisit the city with a contemporary, more-than-human sensibility. But more than this, the columbarium's frieze also serves to open a wider set of spatial and temporal connections which are not only mediated through the practices and materialities of humans and starlings, but traceable through patterns of temporal and spatial circulation that have come to constitute a more-than-human Rome.
Detail from the wall of the Villa Doria Pamphili columbarium - photo author's own.
The Villa Doria Pamphili columbarium offers an illustrative starting point from which I want to follow this series of temporal-spatial connections between starlings and humans that circulate through ancient Rome, the idealised fascist landscapes envisaged by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1930s and Rome in the early twenty-first century. The columbarium is also particularly significant in the way that it speaks to what Bruno Latour has described as the pre-modern devotion to the conceiving of hybrids (Latour, 1993). Here Rome is configured as a place constituted, through a series of relations, as a more-than-human city at a time before ‘the border between social actors and objects had to be carefully patrolled’ (Latour, 2004: 77). The columbarium is both a starting point and a point of return in the tracing of these connections; it both reveals temporal-spatial continuities to contemporary Rome as well as moments of rupture signalled by the modernising project of Mussolini during the 1930s, which ‘designate(d) a break in the regular passage of time, […] a combat in which there are victors and vanquished’ (Latour, 1993: 10). In this sense what I begin to outline in this paper is a story of Rome as an accumulation of place through time, where a necessarily more-than-human reading makes clear that the city is continuously produced through these relations whilst also bearing the scars of its ruptures. The concept of sympoiesis, which Donna Haraway (2016) develops from the work of M. Beth Dempster is useful here in the way that it articulates a ‘making of each other through the collective entanglement [of human and non-human lives]’ (Guevara, 2018). What this ‘more-than-human’ reading of the city also serves to emphasise is a more relational sense of the spatialities that constitute the city. In the most immediate sense, it is evident that the city has been, and continues to be, constituted through connections to the wider Lazio region in which it is situated, forged by the necessary mobilities of feeding, nurturing and reproducing human and non-human lives. Consequentially, a reading of these more relational spatialities also serves to throw into sharper relief the historical attempts to maintain a strained delineation of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ through the spatial politics of Mussolini's fascist landscape. More specifically, my aim here is to trace the movements of starlings and olives through these time-spaces in order to highlight their roles not only as constitutive elements in the relational geographies of Rome, but as a way of situating them alongside humans within these stories of ‘making worlds with’. In this sense, what this tracing of the relations between humans, starlings and olives serves to highlight is the negotiation, navigation and contestation that takes place as these worlds combine, abrade and conflict, whether across great tracts of time or at the site of a tree.
In the section that follows I begin by briefly situating my argument within the broader sub-disciplines of animal geographies and urban studies in relation to the concept of the ‘more-than-human’ city before focusing more specifically on the constitutive role of starlings in Rome. The conceptual development here draws principally on the work of Bruno Latour, as well as Haraway's articulation of sympoiesis. Having provided something of a conceptual context for this work, Section 3 will then provide a broad historical overview of the period of Mussolini's fascist landscaping of the Pontine marshes including critical debates surrounding the project both at the time and through more recent critical reflections. This will also include some comparative reflection on Nazism in attempting to contextualise broader visions of the fascist city as well as fascism's attempts to maintain the pure categories of urban/rural and nature/ society. Drawing on the critical work of Miltiadis (2022) and Grupposo (2022) towards the end of Section 3 then opens up the possibilities of a more intricate reading of these histories within the time-spaces of a more-than-human Rome in Section 4 where the journeys of starlings and olives serve to articulate the more productive geographies lying behind the artifice of Mussolini's attempted purification of categories. Section 5 then draws empirical fieldwork and conceptual framing together in mapping the convergence of human and starling worlds generated through the practices, movements and negotiations that constitute the contemporary urban centre of Rome. In particular, this will draw attention to the formation of temporal and spatial boundaries forged through the materialities of this co-produced urban time-space.
The choice of the three sites that form the focus of this account was informed by a combination of interviews and conversations with Alessandro Montemaggiore at Sapienza University who initially drew my attention to the implications that Mussolini's reclamation project had for avian habitat loss in the Pontine marshes. The choice of the third site came through my archival work at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome where the remains of the columbarium frieze now reside. Further interviewing and ethnographic work, including filming and photography of urban roosting locations, was carried out across three fieldwork visits to Rome and additional archival work was carried out back in the UK
Overcoming the burden of ‘the city’
The concept of a ‘more-than-human’ city is not new and within the work of the geographical sub-discipline of animal geographies, the idea that cities, as a form of place, are constituted through the identities, movements, energies and e/affects of other-than-human lives is well documented (see for example Anderson, 1998; Barua, 2023; Holmberg, 2015; Howell, 2000; Philo, 1998; Wolch et al., 2000). As Barua and Sinha have recently suggested, this period of engagement with the idea of the ‘more-than-human’ city can be broadly categorised as progressing from a more representational politics of animal identities within the constitution of urban spaces towards a more affective, practice-based understanding of animals as part of the active constitution of city life (Barua and Sinha, 2023). This sentiment is also echoed in the notion of ‘encounters’ between humans and animals (see for example Lorimer, 2015; Wilson, 2016), a making and unmaking of relations where ‘encounters are about more than the coming together of different bodies. Encounters make difference’ (Wilson, 2016: 455). In seeking to extend the range of this thinking Barua and Sinha propose a way of conceptualising ‘the urban as an ecological formation, that is, an arrangement of forces and intensities […] constituted by heterogeneous forms of practice that include relations, if not alliances, with other-than-human company’(Barua and Sinha, 2023: 2207). This provides a useful and accessible framing for scrutinising the constitutive role of starlings in Rome in that it clearly signals the centrality of the other-than-human within the co-production of urban space, both in terms of practices as well as their distinctly material consequences.
In thinking more specifically about birds in urban space Helen Wilson also notes that: ‘Avian flight transcends places in ways that undermine anthropocentric boundaries, lending birds a liminal status and further confounding efforts to instil and regulate ‘urban order’’ (Wilson, 2021: 1140). This is certainly another useful consideration but my aim here is to refine this point further by thinking about how this spatial transcendence can itself be seen as productive of new forms of place-making and boundary formation. There are also two specific aspects of Barua and Sinha's observations that I want to extend here. Firstly, their observations are based on the Indian city of Delhi and a particularly inter-active set of relations between humans and mammalian non-human species (cattle, macaques and street dogs). These are species whose presence in the urban world is quite apparent or, as Barua and Sinha express it: ‘where the other-than-human is always in the field of vision’ (Barua and Sinha, 2023: 2222) i . To this end what I am proposing here is a form of constituting the urban through relations with non-humans where their presence is sometimes less immediate, where ‘they create the effect of a presence in absence […] a form of presence which creates certain modes of attention’ (Despret, 2022: 25). This leads to the second distinction I want to add, which is that whilst Barua and Sinha's proposal is clearly articulated through a spatial register, what I want to emphasise here is that the significance of the temporal, and the difference the temporal makes, should not be forgotten within these constitutive dynamics: ‘that time and space must be thought together: that this is not some mere rhetorical flourish, but that it influences how we think about both terms’ (Massey, 2005: 18).
In considering further how starlings make cities with humans, Bruno Latour offers an illustrative account of co-constitutive association: ‘as we stop taking non-humans as objects. As soon as we allow them to enter the collective in the form of new entities with uncertain boundaries, entities that hesitate, quake, and induce perplexity, it is not hard to see that we can grant them the designation of actors’ (Latour, 2004: 76 – emphasis added). Not only does this facilitate an understanding of how animal ‘sentience and action […] subversion and disobedience renders the urban alive’ (Barua, 2023: 6), but also how we can usefully understand these processes of messy and contingent relating as geographically constitutive of an urban space where boundaries become uncertain. And within Latour's later reflections on the related concepts of the Anthropocene and Gaia hypothesis developed by James Lovelock and Lyn Margulis during the 1970s (see for example Latour, 2017; Latour, 2018; Latour, 2021; Latour, 2024) he emphasises how Gaia captures an understanding of ‘Earth’ as ‘the term that comprises the agents – what biologists call ‘living organisms’ – as well as the effects of their actions (Latour, 2021: 25 – emphasis in original). In this sense, Latour places particular emphasis on the importance of understanding what we might commonly refer to as ‘the environment’ as an inherently relational space and not merely a vessel within which these relations play out: ‘living beings aren’t just organisms in an environment, but have the particularity of transforming the environment to their benefit. That's not out of generosity or friendliness, but simply out of interconnection’ (Latour, 2024: 34). These ideas have been given further attention in recent geographical work that draws upon the natural sciences use of the notion of niche construction which, in a challenge to traditional evolutionary thinking, places emphasis on the capacity of animals to change aspects of their environment rather than simply adapt to them, and actively shape, manipulate and demarcate spaces in association with human cohabitants, such as in the case of parakeets in the city (Barua, 2023) or beavers in the riparian landscape (Lorimer, 2024). Elsewhere, Latour points to what he sees as a principal barrier to embracing more connective conceptualisations through ‘the excessive burden of the Globe’ (Latour, 2017: 130); a way of reading the earth as a reductive model that functions only as a simplistic, representational device standing for a ‘whole’ that it can never really account for. As a consequence, for Latour, when thinking with concepts such as the Anthropocene or Gaia we must first overcome this burden: ‘…the danger is always the same: the figure of the Globe authorizes a premature leap to a higher level by confusing the figures of connection with the totality’ (Latour, 2017: 130 – emphasis in original). And what I want to argue here is that ‘the city’ authorises a comparable leap.
To think through the processes by which starlings are implicated in the making of Rome we are required to move beyond lines drawn between humans and starlings at various points in and around the city and instead draw attention to the ways they also negotiate, overlap and interconnect in making sense of each other and the versions of the city they create. In doing so the fundamental premise is always that ‘neither nature nor society can enter intact into the Anthropocene’ (Latour, 2017: 120) or, to draw upon Karen Barad's related observation that ‘relations do not follow relata, but the other way around’ (Barad, 2007: 136–7). In tracing the constitutive connections between humans and starlings (and olives) in making the city I am invoking the ‘making-with’ of Donna Haraway's sympoiesis – ‘a word for worlding-with’, as she has stated (Haraway, 2016: 58). But, in a more specifically geographical context, there is something a little more fraught at play here too: ‘a more-than-human world in which time is out of joint, spatial patterns and connections are scrambled’ (Lorimer, 2024: 5). In this sense it is a ‘making with’ where the geographical consequences are often ‘weird’ (Lorimer, 2024). In helping to navigate such disconcerting spaces, it is the olives that provide something of a guiding intermediary, helping to reveal ‘all the intermingled and unpredictable consequences of the agents, each of which is pursuing its own interest by manipulating its own environment’ (Latour, 2017: 142).
To contextualise the place of olives in these temporal and spatial processes of ‘making with’, some historical detail is required before we can begin to trace connections between the three related sites that form the focus of this account. To make sense of the journey that has taken the olives of Augustan Rome to the contemporary city it will first be necessary to understand the temporal and spatial conduit formed by Mussolini's fascist landscaping.
Mussolini and the idealised fascist landscape
As well as being the capital city of Italy, Rome forms a central province within the wider region of Lazio, the other provinces being Viterbo and Rieti to the north-west and north-east of Rome respectively and Frosinone to the east. The fifth of Lazio's provinces – Latina – lies to the south-east of Rome and was first established in 1934 under Benito Mussolini's rule as part of a project known as La Bonifica Integrale (The Great Reclamation). La Bonifica, as it is often simply referred to, was designed to reclaim the area of marshland known as the Pontine marshes and establish the lowland plains of the wider Agro Pontino area as productive agricultural land. Due to the area's potential to provide valuable resources to the proximate city, the task of draining the marshes for agricultural use had seen numerous attempts over the previous two millennia, but although ‘popes and kings tried in vain to tame with centuries-long efforts’ (Metta and Onorati, 2019: 2), all previous attempts had ended in failure. Much of the challenge to successful drainage related to the effects of a distinctive topography combined with extensive deforestation during the early ancient Roman republic (around 400 BCE) (O'Sullivan et al., 2008). This deforestation served to raise the water table in the area, leading to soil erosion and the formation of extensive areas of swamp by around 100 BCE (O'Sullivan et al., 2008). Topographically, the marshes are positioned between the Tyrrhenian coast to the west of the Agro Pontino area and the higher ground of the Monti Lepini to the east. However, the coastal side of the marshes also features ‘a higher complex of marine terraces’ (Sevink et al., 2023: 1087) meaning that the marshes sit within a depression that retains standing water. With the water unable to drain, the marshes became notorious as the perfect habitat for the malaria carrying anopheles mosquito. On this basis Mussolini's ambitions required an unparalleled mobilisation of planning, resources and indentured labour. Not only did he intend to rid the marshes of malaria and establish small areas of arable land (Poderi) with accompanying rural settlements (Borghi) for agricultural workers (Sibilla and Barbati, 2017), but beyond this he also sought to establish modern city centres and new urban communities.
Plans to drain the Pontine Marshes were first mooted in 1922 shortly after Mussolini's appointment as Prime Minister, and work on La Bonifica Integrale began in 1924. Over 10,000 miles of drainage canals (Metta and Onorati, 2019) along with a series of water pumps were installed in order to keep the water moving away from newly created arable land. Lines of non-native Eucalyptus trees were planted along the canal's embankments in order to both retain their structure and further reduce sub-surface water, Eucalyptus being chosen for its exceptionally high water uptake capacity. The development of La Bonifica was closely associated with another of Mussolini's ideologically driven projects, the 1925 declaration of La Battaglia del Grano, variously translated as ‘the battle for grain’ or ‘the battle for wheat’, part of a drive towards Italian agricultural self-sufficiency in order to, as Mussolini saw it, ‘free Italy from the slavery of imports’ (Davidson, 1938, p198). For Caprotti and Kaïka the Pontine marshes were reconfigured as an ideological project through ‘the desire to link these socially constructed techno-natures to a broader project of promoting national unity and identity.’ (Caprotti and Kaïka, 2008: 619). And consistent with the ideological machinations of fascism much was made of the propaganda potential of these ventures through cinematic and photographic representation (Caprotti and Kaïka, 2008). Not only did La Bonifica represent a ‘cleansing’ of the malaria infested marshland but a realisation of its potential for productive agriculture and a rural life that was seen to promote human fertility and toughness (Binde, 1999). And, as Armiero et al. note, this is always framed in the context of ‘a battle’ against a form of nature in need of taming, Mussolini's vision being that ‘rural workers would become stronger, more fertile and more loyal creatures while fighting against swamps and mosquitoes’ (Armiero et al., 2022: 2–3).
For Mussolini the visual representation of this romanticised agrarian landscape through films, photographs and posters was key to articulating an empowered Italian national identity and ‘the transformative potential of Mussolini's natural wars’ (Armiero et al., 2022: 54) . Newsreels were broadcast showing fleets of tractors working the land, some even featuring Mussolini himself threshing wheat by hand: ‘filmmaking became part and parcel of the process of ‘taming’ nature in the Pontine Marshes under Mussolini's regime’. (Caprotti and Kaïka, 2008: 629). This evocation of a process of ‘taming’ is also key to understanding an important distinction in the relationship between constructions of nature and society as they existed in Mussolini's Italian fascist landscape compared to the ‘Blut und Boden’ (‘Blood and Soil’) vision of Nazi Germany, with which Mussolini's regime is often compared. For Per Binde, whereas Nazism saw ‘das Volk’ (the people) as rooted in the land, bound to ideas of nature and consequently uprooted by an era of industrialisation and urbanisation, Italian fascism sought to cast nature as an enemy of society and civilisation and rural labour as a necessary process of civilising otherwise wasted land (Binde, 1999), thus echoing Cronon's famous account of early European settler culture in North America (Cronon, 1996). Where Mussolini's fascism and Nazism align more readily is in the strict dichotomy between ‘city’ and ‘country’ and whilst the country could be made fertile through labour, for Mussolini ‘sterile environments and infertile bodies are the characteristics of cities’ (Armiero et al., 2022: 35). But it is the racialisation of this logic that is particularly pervasive. Just as Mussolini perceived rural land and race to be inseparable (Armiero et al., 2022), in Nazism the German rootedness in the soil was seen as ‘threatened by urban ‘rootlessness’’ (Blackbourn, 2006: 279). As Gassner has also noted, where Nazism did envisage urban life, through the planning ideas of Gottfried Feder, it was strictly divided and bounded from external influence, perceived as an antithesis to the modern city ‘where race is not an issue anymore because racial hierarchies only exist elsewhere’ (Gassner, 2022; Gassner, 2023: 24).
In a similar logic of urban purification, further to the creation of extensive agricultural land through the 1920s and 1930s Mussolini also established a number of new urban centres on the drained land, including the development of the principal city and province of Littoria (now renamed Latina) ii approximately 30 miles to the south-east of Rome in 1932. The name Littoria was derived from the fascio littorio or Fasces (in English), a symbolic bundle of sticks used in fascist imagery and, like the swastika, drawn from ancient Greco-Roman symbolism (Harland and Liguori, 2020). The evocation of, and comparison with, ancient Roman colonisation was central to Mussolini's articulation of the ideological function of these new settlements as highlighted by a quote from his speech at the inauguration of Littoria in 1934: ‘it is here that we have conquered a new province. It is here that we have conducted, and will continue to conduct, true and proper military operations’ (Binde, 1999: 768). The utilisation and development of land was both rapid and uncompromising and what little conservation of existing landscape features took place occurred only when it enabled Mussolini to forge mythologising links to the ancient past, such as the preservation of known ancient Roman hunting grounds (von Hardenberg, 2014).
This adoption of representational symbolism and militaristic language in an attempt to align the empirical power of ancient Rome with Mussolini's own endeavours has prompted an extensive body of critical reflection on La Bonifica within geography and related disciplines. For Emanuela Margione a literature review of this material necessitates dividing works into three broad areas: ‘1923–1936: the contemporary debate concerning the building of the new towns; 1936–1945: the debate immediately following the reclamation project [and] From 1970 to the present day: the critical debate’ (Margione, 2019). Whilst a detailed critique of this categorisation is beyond the remit of this article, it is nonetheless useful to draw out two particularly pertinent points in reflecting on this body of work.
Firstly, a broad but significant observation to make of the accounts produced in more recent decades is that the environmental consequences of La Bonifica have become more significant to the understanding of its geographies. Whilst some accounts centre almost entirely on its environmental implications, particularly in terms of habitat loss and impacts on biodiversity (see for example Metta and Onorati, 2019; O'Sullivan et al., 2008; Sibilla and Barbati, 2017) other accounts acknowledge the significance of La Bonifica's environmental consequences as integral to understanding the political and socio-spatial implications of Mussolini's idealised fascist landscape (see for example Armiero et al., 2022; Binde, 1999; Caprotti, 2006; Caprotti and Kaika, 2008; Gruppuso, 2022; Miltiadis, 2022; von Hardenberg, 2013). In the latter context we can not only see a slightly more variegated account of La Bonifica, but also one which begins to reveal a richer sense of the constitutive human-non-human interconnections of this landscape. Therefore, as well as offering some continuation of the familiar critiques of the political-socio-cultural effects of La Bonifica, what also emerges through this work is a sense of the conceptual limitations of only viewing it through the narrower register of these specific effects. In particular, Caprotti points not only to the ideological significance of the fascist project to eliminate nature, but also the dangers inherent in critiques of La Bonifica that inadvertently serve to replicate precisely the sharp distinction between nature and society that Mussolini's vision depended upon: ‘attempt[s] to excavate the mutual interactions between nature and society can partially reinstate the modern dualism between the two’ (Caprotti, 2006: 148).
For Gruppuso, drawing on the work of Tim Ingold and others, a further consideration is to establish a relational context for exploring the historical geographies of the Agro Pontino through ‘spatial and temporal zones in-between fluidity and solidity […] in which fluidity and solidity are understood as patterns of social and ecological relations rather than mutually exclusive properties of matter, thus exposing the continuity between them’ (Grupposo, 2022: 53). This is particularly effective when considered through the example of derelict infrastructure as parts of the landscape: ‘Built and natural, abandoned and regenerated, are qualities that the landscape expresses as it emerges into the lives of the myriad beings – human and non-human – that are always entangled in contingent historical, geological, and ecological relations’ (Grupposo, 2022: 67). This is explored through the former Monticchio quarry, situated at the foot of the Lepini hills where much of the extractive activity to fuel La Bonifica took place, the site now heavily eroded and the infrastructure rusted and decaying. There are a number of useful insights to be gained from Grupposso, but particularly relevant to the argument I want to make here is the significance of time and the role of ‘process’ for defining these spaces: ‘a process of formation in which the flux of materials takes different shapes according to historical, political, and hydrogeological contingencies’ (Grupposo, 2022: 67). In this sense, these time-spaces are defined precisely in the continually shifting, but always present, relations between Rome and the Pontine marshes, the ancient Augustans and Mussolini, politics, concrete, steel and malaria.
The second critical reflection I want to make here relates to Margione's categorisation itself and a need to question the somewhat linear relationship that it forges between the emergence of critical voices over the passage of time since La Bonifica. Miltiadis (2022) provides a productive basis upon which to propose a somewhat messier temporal picture through her account of the role of displacement for those living in contemporary Latina as they attempt to negate the haunting legacies that fascism has brought to bear on place-making in Latina. As she outlines, ‘given its controversial past that cannot be celebrated, Latina is presented […] as a displaced city, whose history cannot serve as a locus for place-making, meaning-making, and future-making’ (Miltiadis, 2022: 1). In articulating this, Miltiadis refers to a sense of ‘broken time’ where ‘the city was experienced through the complexity of non-linear and disruptive temporalities, which were expressed as a difficulty or unwillingness to speak about the city's past or the city in its entirety’ (Miltiadis, 2022: 4). In this sense Miltiadis’ argument highlights the possibilities for a slightly different way of evading the trap of replicating dualisms - in this case those of ‘historic sympathy/apathy’ on one side and ‘contemporary critique’ on the other. The key here is to acknowledge the plurality of temporalities that residents are able to draw upon in making sense of place. She cites the significance of remembrance of those who laboured to build the city during the 1920s and 1930s through their earlier contributions during the First World War, for example. The value of these observations here is in how they vividly illustrate the constitutive intersection of different relations in ongoing attempts to make sense of place-making in Latina. Miltiadis’ observations serve both to distil a very tangible sense of the forced separation of Mussolini's modernist, fascist landscape whilst also presenting a much more relational reading of the lived experiences of Latina's residents, with all the historical contingencies that are bought to bear on their negotiated sense of place. There is resonance here with Eva Haifa Giraud's conceptual work, where there is a need to acknowledge the ‘entangled complexity of the world […] but to explore the possibilities for action amid and despite this complexity (Giraud, 2019: 2).
Whilst Miltiadis's insights highlight a past (or pasts) that challenge Margione's categorisation, primary sources themselves can also reveal a surprising diversity of political and conceptual interpretation, the varied political tone within geographical writing during the period of reclamation itself ranging from unapologetic valorisation of Mussolini's ‘achievements’ to insightful critique of the mobilisation of fascist ideals through the project (see in particular Davidson, 1938; Russell, 1939; Schmidt, 1937; Sterling-Frost, 1934). Writing in The Geographical Review in 1934 Ruth Sterling-Frost observed that ‘Here authority stepped in and expropriated the land, turning it over to the proper agencies to be made into farms for intensive cultivation and for home makers’ (Sterling-Frost, 1934: 593). Alternatively, writing in The Geographical Journal in 1939 E. J. Russell not only provides a more politically critical take on Mussolini's project, but also offers insight to a particular spatial politics evoked through the relationship between bodies and place. ‘The farmhouses are uniform in type but with variations in design which save them from monotony. Provision is made for tree planting: pines near the sea and eucalyptus inland. Everything is then ready for the colonists, and they are brought in en masse. They are mostly peasants from the more crowded parts of Italy, and they are carefully selected on strict Fascist principles, always having in view the fundamental purposes of increasing the number of young Fascists and of binding the peasant to the soil’. (Russell, 1939: 276)
What begins to emerge from this brief engagement with some of the body of work that both constitutes and reflects upon the historical geographies of Mussolini's idealised fascist landscape is a sense that historical accounts in particular can point to a more intricate and variegated picture than has been conventionally articulated. This closer reading provides a more contested politics of resistant voices serving to open up questions about the relational configuration of the marshes through the movement of people. Added to this, such reflections have also engaged further with a critical dissolution of the natural and the social through a more political ecology. Taken together, what both these forms of critique help to enable are the possibilities for a richer and more productive series of connections through which we can begin to rearticulate the relations of both time and space through the stories of a more then human Rome and, in particular, through tracing the specific journeys of starlings and olives through this landscape.
Unmaking the delicate web of relations
As the depictions of the Great Columbarium attest, the relationship between starlings, olives and the city of Rome can be traced back more than two millennia. The Agro Pontino, and specifically the higher ground of the Monti Lepini, was certainly well established as a location for olive groves by then and the construction of the Appian way around 300 BCE provided a route between Rome and the Agro Pontino for the transport of crops to feed the city's growing population: ‘indeed, it was these very environmental conditions that made possible the intensive farming of staple crops—notably of grain, olives, and grapes among the Greco-Romans—on which the growth of urban populations was predicated’ (O'Sullivan et al., 2008: 756). Whilst the conversion of this higher ground for agriculture had led to extensive deforestation and soil erosion, the lowland areas would have been left largely unaltered, the nature and scale of farming at this time making minimal impression on the huge extent of reedbeds in an area of over 150,000 hectares (Greenchange, 2018). It was the creation of this close proximity of fruitful olive groves and the safe roosting space of extensive reedbeds in the Pontine marshes that provided starlings with an ideal winter habitat for approximately two millennia.
Areas of extensive reedbeds are commonly used by starlings as roosting sites during colder months as they provide secure and accessible cover with warmer and more consistent temperatures compared to the colder and more fluctuating air temperatures of the surrounding area. This habitat combined with a novel and extremely rich source of nutrition in the form of olives would have allowed starlings to thrive on the marshes from this time. Starlings are particularly noted amongst birds for their adaptability and dietary range (Feare, 1984) and it has been observed that starlings can develop the ability to both peck the flesh from olives as well as swallow them whole (Rey and Gutiérrez, 1996). Whilst it might be assumed that ancient Roman farmers would have seen the starlings as a threat to their crops it is likely that they would not have been entirely unwelcome as they in turn were probably regarded as a source of food for the farmers. Indeed, whilst they are comparatively recent, depictions of starlings being hunted and trapped exist from the late medieval period, a time by which olives had also established themselves as one of the most important crops in the Lazio region, suggesting that both starlings and olives were not only able to coexist but thrive in the area (Zanini De Vita, 2013). Starlings were certainly consumed by humans on a fairly routine basis in the rural areas of Lazio until as recently as the mid- twentieth century (Montemaggiori, 2019, personal communication), and this is still the case today in other areas of Europe, such as in the form of the French ‘pate de sansonnet’.
Whilst starlings would have largely remained in the rural areas to the south and east of the city during the period of Augustan Rome, humans would have brought olives from the Agro Pontino into the city, via rural mills for processing. As the Great Columbarium demonstrates, beyond their consumption as food and the use of their oil for lamps, within the city olives would gain a representational quality as figures within the depiction of a bountiful Roman life. Consequently, the extensive areas of reedbed on the lower grounds of the Agro Pontino provided tempting opportunities to extend the range of this productive land for a burgeoning city population but, as noted above, it was not until Mussolini's insistent deconstruction of this ecosystem into a landscape of ‘techno-natures’ (Caprotti and Kaika, 2008) that the fascist landscape vision would facilitate any agricultural use of this land. And whilst the extensive swathes of reedbed would have contributed to the helpful uptake of water, they also took up valuable wheat growing space and were therefore removed en masse. It is this destruction of the starlings’ winter roosting habitat that instigates a shifting pattern of temporal-spatial relations as starlings are forced to re-map their world and, in doing so, begin to reveal the folly of Mussolini's ideological commitment to the spatial and temporal logic of the moderns, where fascists were: ‘free to give up following the ridiculous constraints of their past which required them to take into account the delicate web of relations between things and people’ (Latour, 1993: 39).
The starlings’ response to Mussolini's techno-scaping would be catalysed by another modernising disrupter of time-spaces: the internal combustion engine. Having enabled such efficient re-landscaping of the marshes it would also, over the decades that followed, transform the geographies of the city as the death of Mussolini and his vision for Italy gave way to post-war affluence, extensive urban expansion and the rise of the motor car in Rome. The combined effects of these developments led to an increasingly pronounced Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect where winter nighttime temperatures in central Rome began to regularly exceed those in nearby rural areas by up to 5 degrees centigrade (Lowen, 2019, see also Wilby, 2003). Consequently, starlings began to make the short flight into the warmer city to roost during the winter months. Urban roosting is a habit that starlings have adopted in many cities, particularly where the UHI has become more pronounced during the twentieth century, and whilst some roosting populations, such as those in London, have largely disappeared due to the decline of proximate feeding grounds, starlings in Rome have continued to thrive due, in large part, to the enduring proximity of the Monti Lepini's olives.
In beginning to trace these movements of people, starlings and olives across both time and space, patterns of circulation begin to emerge as - through the conduit of the starling body - the olives of ancient Rome, displaced by Mussolini's fascist landscape, now find their way to the twenty-first century city through novel, non-human passage. In Latina and the other settlements of the Agro Pontino, starlings are adding to the layers of displacement in this landscape, creating another, non-human thread running through the stories outlined by Miltiadis where ‘Latina informs but also complicates significantly debates on the presence of Fascism in contemporary Italy and how the past permeates and shapes the present’ (Miltiadis, 2022: 11). As Miltiadis observes of the human residents of Latina, the consequences of the past permeating the present are often hard to quantify but distinctly challenging of the sense of place nonetheless. In this way, the displacement of starlings to the city also serves to challenge notions of the city as a space demarcated and ordered by the activities of humans. Starlings have responded to their displacement by appropriating the city and disproving Mussolini's belief in it as a locus of human order. As Vinciane Despret has observed of avian spatialities, and the notion of ‘territory’ more specifically: ‘territory is above all a process […] linked as much to time as it is to space’ (Despret, 2022: 17) and in this sense the starlings, displaced by Mussolini, have now come home to roost.
How starlings make cities
In twenty-first century Rome, as has been the case in other cities where starlings have established winter roosts, their presence has come to be resented by some of the city's residents, as well as the agencies responsible for street cleaning. The number of birds roosting in central Rome increased steadily during the early 2000s, gaining notoriety not least for the associated increase in guano noticed by those living in affected areas of the city. Parked cars, scooters, roads and pavements in the areas of starling roosts were regularly covered in faeces during winter nights, necessitating labour-intensive morning clean-up operations. This early period of increased roosting activity and the subsequent clean-up operation is captured in Italian director Giovanni ‘Nanni’ Moretti's 2003 short film Il grido d'angoscia dell'uccello predatore (The anguished cry of the predator bird) reflecting a time when these activities became a regular part of the rhythm of urban Roman life. Additional concern was prompted by the high proportion of olives in the diet of starlings flying in from the Agro Pontino, the high oil content creating particularly hazardous slicks on roads and pavements, sometimes resulting in the need for public exclusion from such areas for fear of road accidents or pedestrian injuries. As pressure for a greater response on the part of Rome's authorities grew the Mayor's office continued to fund clean-up crews from the sanitation department AMA to clear roads, also utilising the city's police force to manage road and pavement closures. Funding was also made available for the Italian conservation and animal welfare charity LIPU to help dissuade starlings from using key sites such as the main Lungotevere road along the embankment of the River Tiber and the piazza in front of Rome's principal Termini railway station where mobile groups of LIPU employees utilised megaphones to broadcast starling distress calls. On occasion this also necessitated elaborate scaffolding rigs to mount speakers at the height of the roosting birds who were not fooled by the transmission of such calls at ground level. As Francesca Manzia from LIPU explained ‘this intervention must be done intelligently because starlings obviously aren’t stupid, and they can understand that it is fake’ (Manzia, 2019, personal communication). However, as starling numbers continued to grow over the subsequent winters these measures soon proved too costly to maintain amidst wider financial challenges to the city authorities.
Then, in 2013, sanitation concerns in the city were significantly exacerbated when the principal site for Rome's landfill waste, and the largest landfill site in Europe, Malagrotta, was closed by the European Union. The 240 ha site had been in receipt of between 4500 and 5000 tons of waste per day (Spizzichino, 2015) to this point, despite threats of sanctions and closure being issued by the E.U. since 1997 after concerns about air and ground water pollution in residential areas close to the vast site. The Italian government failed to find an alternative site during a period of protracted local protest and the eventual E.U. enforced closure left the city's authorities with no immediate alternative for Rome's refuse. As a consequence, rubbish immediately began to accumulate on the streets, attracting the intervention of an increasing number of gulls and rats, and in suburban areas of the city wild boar were seen more regularly and in increasing numbers as they exploited new opportunities afforded by their human co-habitants iii .
By the winter of 2015–16 the number of starlings roosting in the city centre was estimated at as many as 1.5 million each night (Manzia, 2019, personal communication) and it is at this point that starlings become inscribed within a story of the city's broader malaise. Both mainstream news and social media regularly referred to Rome's increasing state of ‘degrado’ [degradation] (see for example Nicolini, 2015), a term which spoke not only to public hygiene and safety concerns on the streets but also failings in the city's ATAC public transport system, including the closure of malfunctioning Metro stations and numerous incidents of city buses catching fire as a result of maintenance shortcomings, the resultant dramatic images leading to coverage across international news networks (BBC, 2018; Pianigiani, 2018). The controversial leadership of the populist ‘5 star movement’ Mayor of Rome, Virginnia Raggi, elected in June 2016, soon became the focus for protest both online and in the streets of the city with the hashtag ‘#della colpa Raggi’ (‘#it's Raggi's fault’) trending on Twitter and crowds forming around banners reading ‘Roma dice basta!’ (Rome says, enough!). In the fallout from increasing political turmoil and more straitened forms of response on the part of the Mayor, ties were cut with LIPU as a more ‘cost effective’ solution to banishing the starlings was sought through the deployment of a trained Harris Hawk – a move which LIPU suggested would prove ineffective (Manzia, 2019, personal communication). Then, in a final dramatic twist, in October 2019 the entire board of AMA agreed to resign.
Whilst such notoriety might point towards a claim that starlings had woven themselves into the political fabric of the city, and thus forged a meaningful, co-constitutive role, it is more useful to see the news coverage as a symptom rather than cause of their prominence in Roman life. Similarly, the spatial connections to Malagrotta, out to the west of the city, and to the more distant offices of the European Union in Brussels, as well as the offices and boardrooms of AMA and ATAC, certainly add further to the accumulating geographies of Rome's starlings, but these are connections of human making and to that end they only really speak of the human-constructed geographies of ‘degrado’, a story into which the starlings have been written. In this sense, whilst these geographies are certainly relevant, they do not speak to the constitutive role of starlings; they are not an expression of their agency in forming urban space. To observe the work of starlings in making the city requires closer observation of the materialities of the city and an investigative will to follow the olives as they highlight the sites where the work of starlings is really done and, as Vinciane Despret has described, to observe their many ‘ways of inhabiting a territory, all of which may give rise to many different worlds’ (Despret, 2022: 28).
If olives can help us to navigate these spaces, then it is the navigational tool of the river that guides many birds, whether migrating near or far. But for winter roosting starlings on the banks of the River Tiber, the river provides further benefits. In addition to the warming effects of the UHI in the centre of Rome, air rising from the river is also warmer than the surrounding air temperature in winter. Consequently, the river provides both a means of navigation and an added buffer of insulating air. But what city planners have also inadvertently offered the starlings here is the extensive structure and cover of London Plane trees (commonly referred to as either platanus x acerifolia or platanus x hispanica), stretching in a line along the Lungotevere. The London Plane is a hybrid species which has been successfully developed to suit urban environments where it both tolerates and absorbs significant levels of air borne pollutants into its leaves before flushing them away via rainfall. As Jane Hutton states in her insightful account of the perceived benefits of the tree's place in the development of twentieth century New York City, ‘the species improves its own health, but also the health of the people around it’ (Hutton, 2020: 146). Indeed, the use of the London Plane in New York City stems directly from its use in Rome after visits by New York Parks department employee Michal Rapuano in the 1940s inspired their widespread adoption on the streets of Manhattan (Hutton, 2020). Their additional benefit to starlings is that they are an extremely large tree, growing to a height of 30 metres (100 feet) or more with expansive, often almost horizontal, branches creating a broad structure reaching over 20 metres (65 feet) across. Consequently, each of these trees provides a huge surface area of comfortable roosting space for thousands of starlings, evoking a clear illustration of the Italian word used to describe a roost: ‘dormitori’. But, on the other side of the line of Plane trees lies an even greater source of heat in the form of the radiating tarmac and paving of the Lungotevere, further enhanced by heat emitting cars travelling along this principal road throughout the night.
It is the convergence of these particular elements in time-space – the river, the trees, the road and the cars – juxtaposed unintentionally by human planners, that have invited the starlings to the Lungotevere; the beneficial association of these elements has been sensed and consequently ‘purposed’ by them. But, as we have seen, despite its human-starling co-production, the purposing of this space has created tensions with human co-habitants. The significant impact of 1.5 million defecating birds serves, in a very tangible way, to extend the effects of starling bodies through space – rendering cars and scooters unusable, closing roads and pavements, instigating demands on financial resources and, in turn, political leaders – connections stretching from the foot of the Plane trees to the Mayoral office as reciprocally unintentional as the planners original provision of the dormitori. For the human recipients, there is also the sensory experience of the Lungotevere dormitori. As a result of the significant olive oil content of the faeces it produces high levels of oleic acid, producing a choking, musty smell which has been linked to that emitted by cockroaches and other dying animals to communicate disease contagion to others (McMaster University, 2009; Walker, 2009). And then there is the sound; not only the overwhelming volume of hundreds of thousands of birds communicating within the confines of the trees, but an audible accompaniment to the act of defecation – the rain-like sound of thousands of olive stones bouncing from pavements and car roofs. As Vinciane Despret has observed of avian territories, these are ‘bodies which expand to become living spaces [through] forces of sound and forces of smell’ (Despret, 2022: 28); not only inhabiting but constituting this space through practices of worlding. But, as already articulated, worlding is not a process enacted alone, and as well as human attempts to ‘unmake’ starling worlds through broadcasting distress calls, starlings and humans also co-produce this space through quite specific processes of ordering.
At regular intervals along the embankment of the river Tiber the Lungotevere road is intersected by roads crossing the river via a series of bridges. In order to control the flow of traffic as the four lanes of the Lungotevere meet each crossing point, arrays of traffic lights dictate the movement of vehicles at these nodal points. On cold winter nights, as the vehicles of the Lungotevere sit waiting for the lights to change, the heat of engines conducted through metal bodywork creates concentrated patches of warm air which rises to the plane trees above. Consequently, the trees at the mid-points between the bridges, several hundred metres distant from the heat-emitting stationary traffic, experience the lowest dormitori temperatures. Then, as the line of trees reaches the next junction along the embankment, the microclimate of each tree begins to warm again. Consequently, the starlings organise their social space in response to these fluctuations, the trees at the warm junctions becoming more heavily populated by socially dominant birds and the trees between them being sparsely populated by those unable to situate themselves adjacent to the desirable junctions. During one field work visit this was explained and then demonstrated to me by Alessandro Montemaggiori of Sapienza university as we travelled along the Lungotevere by motor scooter. Through our own, very particular, negotiation of time and space in this way it was possible to hear the distinctly undulating volume of noise being produced by the starlings as dense clusters of noisy chattering gave way to sparser groups of birds making faint contact calls between the bridges before reaching a crescendo once more as the next junction was approached; a sonic wave through time-space.
This convergence of human and starling worlds in the city reached a particularly acute moment when initially successful attempts to move starlings on from the Lungotevere prompted the birds to relocate a few miles to the east at the city's 83-hectare Verano cemetery. As before, the new location offered heat from urban structure and nearby busy roads as well as roosting space in tall trees, but with the additional accommodation of large sepulchral monuments. The significant difference between the Lungotevere and the Verano cemetery however was that as dusk fell and the starlings arrived to roost, humans had been excluded from this particular time-space by locked gates and high walls. But, although the temporal boundaries between these worlds appeared to offer a degree of accommodation, as day returned, the absent presence of the starlings instigated a new affective register between starlings and humans as the latter were confronted by the guano covered graves of loved ones. New intensities of relating emerged through the coming together of starlings ‘present’ and humans ‘past’, prompting an emotional response echoed in the Roman press as ‘a desolate spectacle that must never happen again’ (di Panarella, 2016). In response, the affected humans (present) formed new boundaries of plastic sheeting and gaffer tape to cover tombs and headstones, creating a protective barrier between the human and the starling worlds that had come into a new and abrasive contact. Once again crews were deployed to clear the guano from paths, but in hollows of stonework and the surrounding flower beds and shrubbery, olive stones accumulated, continuing to trace their journey through the time-spaces of the city.
This shifting of intersecting worlds has continued to play out across the city as humans and starlings in turn respond to each temporal-spatial negotiation. At the extensive piazza by the Termini railway station and on other major roads lined with mature plane trees, such as at the via Luigi Settembrini (Figure 2), the cities authorities have also adopted a programme of pruning, removing the plane's accommodating, shallow-angled branches and training them into upright poplar-like structures that afford limited roosting space. Here the tree itself becomes the contested site, its wilfully wild form complicit with the starlings reading of the space, the pruning an authoritarian attempt to usher the trees back across a boundary of human constraint. The pruned tree becomes a proxy for human intervention, an absent presence of temporal-spatial coercion in the form of avian hostile architecture. Each of these sites of contestation map onto a broader picture of numerous human-starling convergencies across a constantly unsettled city, stretching from its urban centre to its outer suburbs. The numerous and varied attempted strategies to constrain starlings in Rome over recent decades have created intensities of political and moral affect, flaring up at numerous points across time and space where the boundaries between worlds abrade. These multiple forms of spatiality within place emphasise both the wilfulness of starlings and the wildness of the city. As the starlings move, respond and continually remake their city they are worlding alongside their human cohabitees, and in doing so they lay bare the lived experiences of urban time- space.
Conclusion
In building upon recent observations and assertions of the role of non-human life in co-constituting urban space, this paper has sought to make two related points. Firstly, that starling and human worlds are continually made in relation to each other and that in the process of this sympoetic ‘making with’ (Haraway, 2016) they not only come into conflict with each other but also inform each other, reflect each other's practices and adopt comparable spatial logics for negotiating and constructing the city through simultaneous processes of worlding. The second specific point I have made here is that whilst recent geographical work has emphasised the constitution of urban spaces through their more-than-human geographies, less attention has been paid to the construction and weaving together of the temporal urban fabric and, as I have attempted to illustrate here, the city's more-then-human constitution is only productively revealed through scrutinising the temporalities of these relations. In particular I have sought to convey this through tracing the temporal relations that connect humans and starlings through Augustan Rome, the early twentieth century period of Mussolini's modernising project and the early twenty-first century city.
The long-hidden depictions of the great columbarium at the Villa Doria Pamphili serve to illuminate a connection that runs through this account and, no doubt, speaks to many other possible connections yet to be unearthed. Here the intimate relationship between humans, starlings and olives is captured in a discreet pictorial moment, but also in a way that speaks fluently to the present. The ancient Appian way facilitated the bringing of olives to the city as part of the ancient civilising project that returns centuries later through Mussolini's direct invocation of this ancient city and its sustaining agricultural hinterland. In the archetypical Latourian tradition, Mussolini's modernising project attempts a work of purification: between land and water, country and city, human and non-human, a project which unwittingly and inevitably leads to the proliferation of hybrids (Latour, 1993). The need for constant maintenance to keep the area from reflooding and the aging drainage infrastructure have rendered the marshes a fragile landscape, victim to the vicissitudes of time and the delusions of the modernising project (Metta and Onorati, 2019). Deracinated by Mussolini and his creation of new worlds, the starlings of the Agro Pontino responded with their own re-worlding, constructed with the unintended help of humans, through processes of spatial interpretation, appropriation and re-creation. In doing so, they have brought the olives back to the city with them, inscribing them further into their continually unfolding role in the making of Rome. As worlds come together and overlap in a ‘generative friction’ (Haraway, 2016) exposing the relationality of these times and spaces, the columbarium comes back to us anew – it speaks both to and of the city today. Starlings and humans circulate through the time-spaces of Rome, intra-acting, changing each other, collectively generating the accumulation of place through time. The streets of Rome today are a convergence of these temporal-spatial threads as Augustan olives, displaced by Mussolini through the bodies of starlings, rain down, marking territories, drawing lines and creating worlds, all with constitutive consequences for each other.
Highlights
More-than-human geographies constituted through human-starling relations
Human-starling worlds created through overlapping, abrading and conflicting practices, processes and materials
Recentering the temporal in the constitutive time-spaces of the more-than-human city
The role of Mussolini and the idealised fascist landscape in present day more-than-human Rome.
The role of olives in mediating these geographies
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alessandro Montemaggiori and Francesa Manzia for their time and insight. I would also like to thank Mara Miele, Katie Nudd and the three anonymous referees who helped greatly in refining the final version of this paper.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
