Another topic about Rome: Thursday night we went to a soccer game, Lazio (the team for the greater Rome area) versus Tottenham (a British team). Our goal was to sit in the Lazio cheer block, an experience apparently like any other. After making it to the stadium on the north side of the city and through the first gates, we had almost passed the main line of security…until one guard asked Alex Gilham ’13 and another student if they spoke English. Obviously, they said yes. At that, the guard stopped the two of them, and the rest of us held back as well. After a minute or so of confusion and broken Italian, we realized that thought we were English fans, here to infiltrate among loyal Lazio fans. I was at the front of the group, wearing a Lazio scarf I had bought the day before. One of the guards noticed it, and I told him “siamo tutti americani, touristiche. No Tottenham.” Eventually the matter was cleared up. However, we weren’t allowed into the normal doors, but were instead shuffled through a side door, from which we were dismissed, and told to “sit anywhere in the section.”
But of course, this new section wasn’t the cheer block. Soccer stadiums are divided by pricing, and there is no way to move between them. Our new section was much quieter and emptier, but at least we could watch the crazy fans from a distance. What struck me was the appropriateness of this scene to our course. Constantly throughout class, we had discussed how Roman society enforced status. Buildings and architecture and urban planning found ways to reinforce the superiority of the elites over the “lower class.” Rich over poor, elite family over “newcomers,” Romans against aliens. One of the Coliseum’s notable characteristics is its separation of seating levels, from emperor at the bottom, then the Senate and other aristocrats, and then everyone else. The “everyone else” even had to enter through a different way. 1800 years later, modern-day Romans were doing the same thing. Our lack of language, our foreign citizenship, were held against us through the very structure of the building. As Dr. Hartnett often remarked, it was “society, literally stratified by design.”
Final score: 0-0
