ROME, Nov 13 — “Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary,” wrote Karl Marx – but tell that to guests at a new five-star Rome hotel in the former seat of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
For decades the headquarters of the biggest Communist party in the West, the imposing building just a few steps from Piazza Venezia in the city centre is now the Thompson Rome by Hyatt.
Its prices are not aimed at the proletariat: rooms range from €550 to €4,000 (RM2,585 to RM18,800) for a suite in high season.
And that makes it just the latest in a wave of five-star hotels opening in the European capital that has some locals looking askance.
“Who could have ever imagined it would end like this?” wrote La Repubblica newspaper at the hotel’s soft opening earlier this month, noting that Italy’s Communists were known as a “spartan lot”.
From the airy new lobby with travertine and marble elements, to its luxury rooms, little remains of the former headquarters.
It was here on June 21, 1976, that the party’s secretary-general, Enrico Berlinguer, stepped out on his office balcony to celebrate the 34.4 per cent of the vote won by the PCI, its best-ever showing.
“One out of three Italians votes Communist!” Berlinguer proclaimed to the ebullient crowd in the street below.
But the glory years did not last and the building was eventually sold by the debt-ridden successor party to the PCI, the Democrats of the Left (DS), in 2000.
Soon after, it was acquired by real estate and finance group Finanziaria Tosinvest, controlled by Antonio Angelucci, a deputy with the far-right League party.
Moving toward modernity
Construction on the original building first began in 1941, after the east-west artery Via delle Botteghe Oscure was widened, but work was interrupted by World War II.
That means it was conceived under Fascism and completed in its aftermath, said architect Renzo Costa, who led the building’s most recent renovation.
“This gives it that transformative significance, the opportunity to become a symbol, to change over time and then turn into a place of future political thought,” Costa told AFP.
“So this is a building that was born with the intention of moving toward modernity.”
Gazing over the entryway is a 1952 bronze bust of Antonio Gramsci – Italy’s most celebrated Marxist who helped found the party before dying in prison in 1937 under Mussolini.
Originally designed by Italian sculptor Gio Pomodoro, the entrance still boasts his stone relief sculpture covering an entire wall, with a hammer and sickle and Paris Commune sign.
The open, almost raw space retains a vintage feel, with 1940s-era armchairs, brass and glass sconces, and a bronze welcome desk whose pointed edges echo the large star incorporated into Pomodoro’s stone floor.
But you will find no mention of the building’s past on the hotel’s webpage.
Italians tend to know the building’s history and are curious, said hotel manager Arturo Reguero Gomez.
Other visitors, not so much.
“They need to know Italian history a bit better,” he laughed.
Place of capitalism
As well as the PCI, the parties that dominated Italian politics last century – the Christian Democrats and the Italian Socialist Party – all occupied nearby buildings in the heart of Rome.
“They were powerful machines that kept the system running, with many officials; they needed to occupy buildings,” said ex-PCI member Claudio Velardi, chief of staff in the late 1990s to Massimo D’Alema, Italy’s only former Communist prime minister.
Ugo Sposetti, a former PCI senator and DS treasurer, said at one time about 360 people worked at the headquarters.
They included medical staff and 40 people as security and drivers.
Berlinguer had two armoured vehicles, he said.
But twenty years ago, the area had already transformed into a “place of capitalism”, with the arrival of multinational corporations and other firms, Velardi said.
Some are not pleased by the new opening.
A group of activists briefly burst into the lobby this week, calling for more low-cost housing instead of private hotels in Rome.
But architect Costa defended the transformation.
“This building was an abandoned building.
“Today it provides jobs for about a hundred people... So we carried out a restoration that respected its pre-existing state,” he said.
“We didn’t come in here, gut everything and turn it into, I don’t know, a supermarket, right?” — AFP
