Rome and Paris, two cities united by a snobbish monogamy

“Only Rome is worthy of Paris, and only Paris is worthy of Rome,” goes the dictum that prevents the two capitals from being twinned with other cities, thus sparing them that unsightly list of names – unpronounceable to most – beneath the sign marking the entrance to the municipal area. A true snobbish monogamy exists between the Seine and the Tiber, which began 70 years ago at the Hôtel de Ville, during that post-war period when efforts were being made to lay solid foundations to ensure there would be no more quarrelling. This partnership has been realised mainly by granting Romans free entry to certain museums in Paris and Parisians free entry to certain museums in Rome – thus placing them on that list at the ticket office alongside the over-65s, children and people with disabilities. The twinning has been in place since 1956, and this year, photos from the Alinari archive have been displayed on the external railings of the French town hall, arranged in mirror-image pairs, like a ‘spot the difference’ puzzle from Settimana Enigmistica. Claudia Cardinale in a café / Jean-Paul Belmondo amongst the 500 in the city centre, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir / Bertolucci and Pasolini, the Napoleonic arch at the Tuileries / the Arch of Titus, children on bikes at Saint-Sulpice / schoolchildren in smocks dancing around a petrol pump… On the one hand, the neorealist vibe and Via Veneto; on the other, the mood of a Truffaut film and the Café de Flore. Gianni Berengo Gardin and Basilico on one side, Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson on the other – black-and-white chroniclers of scenes from everyday urban life that instantly evoke a sense of nostalgia for that time before Cova opened just a stone’s throw from the Louvre. And film programmes were organised – "La Dolce Vita"-sur-Seine and "Nouvelle Vague" on the Tiber – to escape the clichés. But since the word ‘dignity’ is often used to justify exclusivity, one wonders today – having set aside memories of glorious eras and the ‘grandmother’s corpses’ paraded for tourists, to use an expression by James Joyce – what makes these cities exclusive and interconnected? What would appear in these mirror-image photographs if they were taken today, to be presented in 70 years’ time?

In both capitals there is a frantic rush to plant trees, which do not always survive; and whilst Gualtieri cuts down the pine trees reminiscent of Venditti and plants shrubs, using the term ‘urban woodlands’, in Paris, squares are being taken over by flowerbeds that replace tarmac car parks with Provençal hackberry trees and holm oaks to create those ‘oases of coolness’ to combat the heatwave, an alternative to shutting oneself away in air-conditioned supermarkets ‘during the hottest hours’. Place de Catalogne, in Montparnasse, has been transformed into an ‘urban forest’ by demolishing a marble fountain by Ricardo Bofill; the right criticises the removal of car parks and traffic junctions, whilst the left speaks of a ‘semantic scam’ – ‘a forest is a forest is a forest’, to quote Gertrude Stein – and of pure marketing. Will the next step perhaps be to bring roe deer and wild boar onto the Promenade Plantée? Will we all become ‘forest families’? And above all, then, what will appear in the photos displayed in the future, apart from the fake Filipino noodle sellers in Monti in the windows of the ‘authentic’ taverns? Apart from the queues for a matcha latte in the Marais? Will there be photos of scraggly little oaks and magnolias in the roundabouts? If the city – as a capitalist labyrinth of Benjaminian memory – becomes a pseudo-playground for rampant barons, and the flâneur turns into a hiker, then it’s quicker to go and live in the countryside, as the English do.