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A Mosque for the Eternal City
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20025 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
1,921 Words |
| Author
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Susan Tenaglia
Susan Tenaglia, currently based in New York City, is a dance
writer, critic, and historian. |
Rome, the capital of Christendom for the Western world, is also becoming the new Mecca of Europe. This spring, the city's newly constructed mosque will take its place beside the Vatican and the Roman synagogue, making the ancient capital a religious and cultural haven for Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike.
Designed by distinguished Italian architect and world-renowned architectural historian Paolo Portoghesi, the mosque rises up from the foot of Monte Antenne, a luxuriant green hill at the northern point of Rome overlooking the Tiber Valley. Driving along what used to be Via Anna Magnani but is now Via della Moschea, most Romans stare with amazement at the peculiar pale-yellow building with its sixteen small domes and one large central dome crowned with a half-moon, and the palm-like, 130-foot-high minaret towering beside it. The mosque is the city's first great monument of the East and represents the beginning of a new and valuable dialogue between Western and Islamic cultures. Still, it will take some time for Italians, whose strong sense of stability and tradition sometimes verges on passivity, to adjust to their modern role as a multireligious and multicultural society.
Place to Dialogue
The project began in 1974 after a visit by then-President Giovanni Leone to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. At the time, there were an estimated 40,000 Muslims living in Rome and 150,000 in Italy (today approximately 60,000 Muslims live in Rome and 180,000 in Italy), and the Saudis thought they should have a place to worship and a cultural center where dialogue could take place between Islam and Christianity. Leone negotiated an agreement whereby the city of Rome would donate the land for a mosque if the Arab nations would finance the construction. Most of the $30 million for the project was furnished by Saudi Arabia. In the same year, a committee of experts chose two projects for the mosque--one by Paolo Portoghesi and engineer Vittorio Gigliotti, liked especially for its magnificent prayer room, and another by Iraqi architect Sami Mousawi. The two designs were combined and finalized in 1976, and it appeared that the project would take off.
From that point on, however, a fierce battle broke out between Rome's municipality and opponents of the mosque, a battle that not only prevented the mosque's construction but jeopardized the plan completely. The controversy began with environmentalists saying that Rome had little enough green space as it was and that the plot should be kept empty (the area was, in fact, used as a public dump). The
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