ANDREA TERROSU
Hell’s valley

The inhabitants call it "Valle dell'inferno", for the Romans "Valle Aurelia", a village formed in the early 19th century wedged between San Pietro and the Prati district, where the Papaline vineyards used to be, now a semi-residential area with shopping centers and ten-storey high buildings.
The Hell’s valley, from the 19th century, was made up of a cohesive community which until the end of the 1960s, as long as the furnaces remained in operation, was the main working class of the city of Rome made up of the "fornaciari", that is, the workers of the kilns, who made bricks, tiles, ceramics and similar materials.
Working community which during fascism was known for its anti-fascism and resistance to the racial laws, where Jews were also hidden and in the post-war period a point of reference for the PCI as a pool of votes and electoral consensus.
In the 80s, in order to comply with a master plan that redefined the urban planning of the area, council houses were built next to the village and in the historic summer of 1981, when the municipal bulldozer razed most of the housing fabric of the oldest part to the ground of the neighborhood, the community was disintegrated: some inhabitants agreed to go and live in the council houses newly built in the area (10-storey buildings), other inhabitants moved to other areas of Rome, while a few citizens, chaining themselves to the gates of the houses, managed not to be sent away from your home.
There are very few traces left of this described community: some still live in public housing; elderly people, or their heirs, a very small group of inhabitants live in the villas that remain of the previous nucleus of the "borgo dei fornaciari" and finally a people's house which, after having been occupied for a long time, the municipality is renovating.

Evidence of change and a return to the logic for which the village was born can be found in the fact that for some decades artists and artisans have opened spaces, studios, laboratories, again in the village area, creating a small community again which is always based on common work even if not with the same reasons for which the village was born.
The socio-documentary photographic project presented depicts this past and this present in images, questioning us about the change in approach to living together and what it means to create civil aggregations, in a Western society that struggles to find points of reference and the desire to a common life, where we share not only ideas and spaces, but also have the strength, as a community, to make ourselves heard and to have a voice in the social debate which has become increasingly complex and difficult to implement.
All this in the context of an increasingly alienated and "virtual" metropolis which, due to its extension, creates more and more difficulty in bringing together people, citizens, human beings, in which the neighbor is no longer seen as a shoulder or point of reference, a person with whom you can share work, entertainment, daily life, but a stranger with whom you hardly come into contact.
The people portrayed in this project therefore try to go against this vision of alienation, finding common points and alternative logics.
The exhibition choice of the project was that of the diptych, bringing together the places, present with portraits of the past and present, where nature has remained unchanged and the city has changed.
The intent is therefore not only to portray and document as an invisible observer, but as a subject in action, where I can ask questions that are part of common life, seeing myself in those faces and those images, reflecting myself in the city in which I am born and raised who continues to change from day to day, trying not to get overwhelmed and to share a physical everyday life that allows us to remain as human as possible.

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