Giovanni, at 55 years old, puffs as he hammers his hammer into one of the cobblestones that make up the floor of Rome. That’s how it is 6 hours a day, sold out among faithful and tourists because there is no time to lose: the surroundings of the Vatican have to be perfect in three weeks, for the start of the Jubilee.
“But when I return home it doesn’t hurt at all!” the worker boasts with an ironic tone, in a pause that is certainly necessary, despite the fact that the work takes place against the clock.
Next December 24, Pope Francis will officially begin the Jubilee for, throughout the following year, offer forgiveness of sins to everyone who makes a pilgrimage to Romewhile the Vatican expects the arrival of at least 30 million faithful throughout this event.
Therefore, the Roman authorities are now busy, at the ends in repairing the often battered and leaky soil of the city and the surrounding areas of the Holy See, in a considered attempt to avoid scares and stumbles among the pilgrims.
The iconic ‘sampietrini’
But the traditional Roman paving is, like everything in this city, unique and historicmade up of an infinite number of cubic basalt cobblestones extracted from its volcanic peripheries and which are popularly known as ‘sampietrines’since they were used for the first time back in the 1700s to cover St. Peter’s Square.
Therefore, the maintenance of this giant black stone checkerboard, which some random official has quantified at around 65 million tiles, more or less, requires special care, executed by those who still master this craft, as a form of liturgy.
The City Council launched last summer the ‘Sampietrinos Plan’ with 30 million euros to fix the most central streets of the Eternal City and now the work has reached the ‘Borgo Pio’, one of the beautiful neighborhoods of the Vatican surroundings.
There, among bars and sacred and profane souvenir shops, a team of five men, led by foreman Giancarlo, spends the day with eyes on the ground.
The boss tears out the old ‘sampietrinos’ with the -blessed- help of an excavator, two workers clean and polish them if required and three nail them back into the ground: they place them on a layer of gravel, with four taps of the hammer They insert them and then make sure with a board that they are straight.
Exhausting work
Giovanni sinks his knee into the ground, wisely protected with a cushion wrapped in a plastic bag, and begins to work: “Every day I work about six or seven hours and put in some 2,500 or 3,000 adoquines, “What do I know,” he confesses, vaguely, while in the background a radio brightens the work with the songs of the moment.
“But they pay well,” the man says.born in Romania, although he expresses himself in ‘Romanesco’, the dialect of ‘popular’ Rome, glued to his mouth by paving the city for the last 26 years.
The worker knows that this is an almost artisanal trade, which requires years of instruction and, therefore, he expresses his doubts about his future… well, understandably. Almost no young person dreams of working hard with this job..
However, one of his colleagues is only 27 years old, Virgilio, sitting among mountains of cobblestones, spends hours sharpening their edges with a small hammer so that they can then fit perfectly into the pavement.
“No matter where they put me, I do everything,” this boy from a Roman town explains somewhat timidly into the microphone, promising that, despite the hardness of the job, he enjoys it and wants to keep it.
The works in Borgo Pío are proceeding quickly and without pause and a large part of the street already has a perfectly stable pavement, with the ‘sampietrinos’ aligned and assembled with a resin especial.
Rome will thus be able dazzle the world during the Jubileesummoned by the popes every quarter of a century, restoring the luster to streets where a trip, if not a sprained ankle, often becomes another form of tourist souvenir.
Rafael Alberti already wrote it in his first collection of poems from his Roman exile, cleverly titled ‘Rome, danger for walkers’ (1968): “Try not to look at the monuments, walker, if you walk through Rome, open a hundred eyes, refine your pupils, slave only to its pavement. If you want to live, mutate into a dove.”
By Gonzalo Sánchez and Claudia Sacristán, from EFE