This week I am honored to host the founder of Retake Rome, Prof. Rebecca Spitzmiller founder of Retake Rome . Rebecca tells how the idea of Retake Rome began and how it has grown over the years .
Part I
Italy’s beauty and allure colluded in forging my romance with Gianni, my Roman husband, an MD who loves philosophy, history, art and family. His values and consequent life choices blended with and affected my own. I now recognize these values as being rooted in the Ethics of Care. This ethical framework elicits us to care for and care about people, ideas and even things, through our thoughts, words, actions and interactions with others. Marrying a Roman and his culture has led me onto a bigger trampoline and into adventures that are still astonishing and fascinating me.
With Rome as my new home in 1985, my world outlook suddenly burst open onto a different and much broader panorama than what I had perceived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I had lived with my family. My trajectory from art teacher to lawyer had surprised some, but for me the transition was logical: art and beauty could only thrive in a place governed by the rule of law, where mutual respect and basic dignity are expected and guaranteed. In addition, both disciplines require problem-solving skills – those needed to appraise a situation, identify a solution and effect it.
My transition to living in Italy was much more disorienting; it required a major shift in focus. Rome set the scene for me to approach life from a more global perspective: now I was working as a lawyer in an international juridical organization and teaching law and government to university students from all over the planet, in the cradle of Western civilization and storehouse of the world’s greatest art.
Although my cum laude academic background had equipped me for such tasks, my non-existent Italian language skills undercut my self-confidence and capabilities. Acquiring a new language is tougher than grasping even the most complex legal issues, or even mastering the manual skills to paint and draw, needed to create art. This process entails many funny, embarrassing moments, which jarred my high-achiever self-image. I wasn’t used to people laughing at me when I was trying my best to communicate!
Nonetheless, I rolled with the punches, persisted and slowly gained competence. Speaking a new language changes your very identity: somehow, you become another person – surprising yourself with strange new expressions and sounds you’ve never voiced before. Finding that different voice – my own new Italian voice with an American accent – empowered me to discover other, unexpected skills and interests.
I was privileged to teach law and government in US university programs in Rome and to manage study-abroad programs for some 25 years. Then, in 2009, I began teaching law at the Università Roma Tre and coordinating the world’s only US-Italian dual degree in law. I was proud that my professional ability had finally found recognition even in a prestigious public institution of my adopted country.
At that very moment, however, I was stricken by an acute decline in the quality of life in Rome: my own neighborhood and many others suffered from vandalism: tags – or illegal graffiti – proliferated on every surface and litter filled the streets and parks of the Eternal City. Ugly, illegal stickers abounded on doorways, signs and even on garbage cans; other illegal signage blemished roadways. Even traffic rules seemed to be increasingly ignored, with cars illegally double and triple parked, blocking traffic, causing impatient drivers to rudely honk their horns in retaliation. Lawlessness appeared to be reigning unchecked.
Retakers clearing litter
I fell into depression at the loss of beauty and tranquility in the bel paese and felt a sense of despair. I had finally found my voice professionally but my aesthetic outlook was in distress. The rule of law that I’d come to treasure and was teaching to law students was apparently unable to defend Rome’s beauty. Realizing that it would do me no good to merely anguish over Rome’s growing degradation, I decided to take action to help defend my neighborhood and myself. Maybe my Italian voice could also rally others living in Rome to do so, through civic activism.
My idea started in my familiar, native voice, when I shared a startling discovery with a group of English-speaking women living in Rome: Google had revealed that oven cleaner can remove spray-paint graffiti from travertine; I tested that claim on the tagged columns of my own building, after gaining condominium approval, of course (“Basta che non devo paga’ io!”). Astonishingly, it worked!
Before and after the Retake at the base of a Roman bridge
When I told my Girl Friends about it, one of them, Lori Hickey, an urban planner by education and de facto mover and shaker, convinced me we could take my idea and run with it. Soon we had landed on a name for our “movement” – Retake Roma – and were planning an event to “Retake” none other than Villa Borghese, which was increasingly falling victim to litter and graffiti. Lori and I rallied support from the American community in Rome, through the US embassy, and we attracted some Italian friends too.
We also had the essential support from none other than Anita Garibaldi, the great granddaughter of the famous Hero of Two Worlds, Italian patriot and revolutionary, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Our first online presence was on the Fondazione Giuseppe Garibaldi website. About 200 people showed up at Villa Borghese on that Saint Patrick’s Day of 2010, including a Garibaldi look-alike on his white horse, Marsala.
We began holding Retakes every week – at the next one the Mayor of Rome and three US Ambassadors showed up – and drawing attention from the press, both Italian and international. Besides local TV and newspaper attention, Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal ran stories on Retake in 2010.
Our message was clear: collaborate with local governments to take care of your environment by helping to clean it up and keep it a safe, worthy and beautiful place to live. Our philosophy thus reflected a blend of my love for the rule of law and for beauty; they were as interdependent as I’d imagined.
As an educator, I realized that reaching young people would be the most efficient way to spread the word, so I approahed international and private schools in Rome and offered to give lessons in civic education. Again my bilingual voice was a catalyst to building Retake’s momentum. One condition: these lessons would have a twist. After a few introductory theoretical lessons, the students would participate in a Retake in the neighborhood of the school. Administrators were skeptical but delighted; international schools required a certain number of community service hours for their graduates and Italian schools were thrilled we’d speak English with their students. Retake’s phrasal-verb slogan animated our lessons: “Wake up, speak up, clean up and grow up”.
Young Retakers tear down abusive signage in 2010
Wake up: be aware of your surroundings and your relationship to it, the need to take care of it. Speak up: talk it up; connect with others and involve them; tell them how much you care about your common spaces and why you want to care for them. Why is it the right thing to do? Clean up: take action by taking care of those places together with the people who share them with you.
…..And Grow up: take responsibility for your surroundings, individually and collectively; don’t blame someone else for your degraded neighborhood.
Coming next week: Part II
Thank you Letizia, Rebecca and her co-founders are examples of civic responsibility- something that lacks in Italy in the past 20 years or so. Im sure there is a group nearby - in Part II more information coming next week.
I love what this organization is doing. We're hoping to move to Rome in September and I would love to be involved in this. Keeping all of the info on hand and planning to reach out once we're settled!