I wrote an article for a recent issue of
Vice Italy. The theme was the "Immersion Issue," so I decided to eat three times a week at a local soup kitchen in my neighborhood. I met a lot of interesting people.
My friend Ariela took the photo.
Here is the link:
Carita' CristianaHere is the original in English:
The Community of Saint Egidio is one of the few places to eat for free in Rome. In the heart of Trastevere, a haven for emerging artists, musicians, and beggars in search of tourists with deep pockets, an army of volunteers serve food three times a week to nearly one thousand poor and needy of Rome.
Standing outside its large wrought-iron gates, a group of men with hushed voices and dirty fingers mutter to each other in Russian. A volunteer posted in the door stops me when I enter.
"Are you Italian?" he says. I shake my head, and he hands me a blue slip of paper. I am number 425.
Of the one thousand people who patronize this soup kitchen, roughly seven hundred are foreigners, mostly illegal immigrants from the north of Africa, Romania, Poland, and Albania. Of the remaining three hundred foreigners, a majority are the extremely old and desperate.
I walk through a narrow hallway lined with people smoking cigarettes and waiting out the pouring rain. When I present my ticket to the man blocking the doorway to the dining room, he shakes his head and points to a long line snaking out the door. I join the queue behind a short, stubby little man with a bad haircut and a yellow Brazil soccer jersey.
Although Italians and foreigners once used the same line, they are now separated.
"The Italians with special problems didn't like mixing with the Africans," says Carlo Santoro, the volunteer in charge of checking tickets.
"We understand that it's hard when you do not speak the language," Santoro says. "That is why we offer an Italian class every Wednesday."
In the seventeen years that Santoro has worked here, he has formed many close relationships with visitors.
"For people that are generally disliked, this is a place to feel at home, not just to eat," he says. "Most are foreign prisoners, alcoholics, and drug addicts -- people with very special needs."
For these individuals, Santoro reserves tables where those with similar problems can converse in a positive, supportive environment. And although arguments often stem from these interactions, Santoro has never seen a single act of violence in the Saint Egidio community for as long as he has worked here.
"We want to avoid riots," Santoro says. "We care a lot."
After waiting on line for ten minutes, I make it into a room where Italian women man tables with stacks of yellow folders.
"Number four twenty-five," I say. The woman shakes her head and points out the door. "But I came here to eat," I say.
"First time? The first room on the left," she says.
I step into a small, stuffy waiting room crowded with people and sweaty benches. I take a seat next to a big, burly black woman clutching plastic bags of all shapes and sizes under her flabby arms. An ancient Korean man takes a seat next to me and nudges my shoulder. I turn to him and he smiles at me with yellow teeth. He removes two passport-sized photos of himself from his pocket and mumbles something I cannot understand. He places one of the photographs in my hand, and we study them for a moment. Then without a word he returns both pictures to his pocket.
After waiting at least fifteen minutes, I am starting to become concerned about the complete lack of organization. And at that moment, a matronly Indian woman swings her office door open and gestures for me to take a seat at her desk.
She asks for my name, age, address, and country of birth, which she enters in a thick black book.
"This number will let you eat here in the future," she says, writing it out on a piece of paper.
I ask her why this whole registration process is necessary, and she tells me that the Council of Rome, which funds a large part of this program, requires the information for its public records. The rest of the budget is covered by private donations.
"You don't really look poor," she says. I tell her that I am from New Orleans. A delayed reaction of painful recognition washes over her face. She stamps my blue ticket.
"See you next time," she says.
I hand Santoro my ticket and finally enter the dining room. Dingy fluorescent lights hang from the high ceilings. Abstract paintings of Jesus Christ line the walls. I take a seat in a sea of blue-checkered tablecloths. An old man with a gray sweater vest hands me a bag of plastic utensils and a cup like the one used for gargling at the dentist.
"Pasta or soup?" he asks. I choose pasta. He returns with a plastic plate full of cold, soggy gnocchi. No actual cooking is done on the premises. Volunteers merely warm the food.
While I pick at my pasta, a man who looks like Charles Manson walks past our table. A guy from the neighborhood that everyone calls Mr. Bronx signals for him to sit. Manson joins our table and pulls a white pill out of his jacket pocket.
"Wait," Mr. Bronx says as our server arrives to set a place for Manson. When the volunteer finishes, Manson splits the pill in half, and the two throw their heads back and take quick swallows.
"It's like methadone," says a man I recognize from a little reggae bar called Il Viaggio. I swallow my mouthful of pasta and force a weak smile. "I didn't know Mr. Bronx was a junkie," he says.
Before I finish even half of my pasta, Manson and his friend move on to the second course -- mushy breaded fish on a bed of wet zucchini. I pass on the second course, and the old man with the gray sweater vest brings me two mandarin oranges, which I pocket for later. I take one last gulp of water from my tiny plastic cup, clean up my plate, and bid the table farewell.
As I exit the dining room, one man -- with missing teeth, bristly gay whiskers, and a worn leather jacket -- is shouting at Santoro.
"I didn't wait all that time in the wrong line for nothing," he says, waving his hands in the air.
"You have to sign in before you eat," Santoro says.
"I'm sorry, but I'm not that hungry," he says, crumpling his blue ticket and throwing it into the air.
Walking down the hallway together, I ask his name.
“Joe,” he says.
Standing outside, Joe suggests we go to the supermarket instead.
"Why should I have to stand in line?" he says. He spends six Euro on some fish for himself and food for his dog Charlie, a mutt he found on the motorway with a hole in its head and nursed back to health.
Joe’s life on the street began at the age of eleven when he ran away to London from his home in Manchester. Years later, he followed music festivals across England with the Hell’s Angels, where he earned the nickname Joe the Spanner for his mechanical expertise.
“We were getting stoned, tripping on acid and pure sunshine,” he says.
Then Joe set off on a voyage across Europe performing clown shows that lasted him more than twenty years. Along the way, he learned eight languages, “six perfectly, two just okay.” In Holland, he fathered a child named Billy von Hasz (“Billy from Hate”) whom he has never seen.
“I feel sorry for him,” he says. “Sorry he had a fucking mother.”
In Paris he sat barefoot on the steps of the Notre Dame for four hours asking passerby to wash his feet.
He made it to New York once and he lived in the Avenue C squat near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.
“I was robbed of everything I owned my first day in the city. So I begged enough change for three apples. I juggled those apples for half an hour in front of that supermarket and made thirty five dollars.”
He thrusts a fist to his face like a microphone and sings,
We were tramps, tramps, thieves and tramps . . . Joe punctuates almost everything he says with a song lyric he can never remember.
“I took a look around,” he says, “but I didn’t find anything different. I lived a shit life with shit people in a shit place.”
These days, Joe finds himself in Rome because lax Italian laws make living on the street a little easier than in other European countries.
“I wake up in the morning with nothing,” he says. “I don’t hide from the rain. I sleep in the rain.”
Tonight Joe begs in Piazza Santa Maria in front of a gelateria.
“Spare some change for a poor guy broke on his ass?” he says, engaging a drunken American couple stumbling by. The woman stops, reaches into her purse, and hesitantly pulls out a fifty Euro bill.
“Mary, no!” her husband shouts, grabbing her by the wrist and shutting her bag.
“What the hell are you doing?” Joe says.
“I’m protecting her,” the man says, dragging the woman away by the arm.
“Just think of all the beer and spliffs we could have bought with that,” Joe says, baring a toothless grin.
“Do you know who sings this one?” he asks, holding out his microphone.
Waiting in an army of salvation, wasting my time in a welfare line . . . I think it was a black girl.”
Photo by Jake.
