December 1932. A mark in time and a plan drawn on blank paper. A genesis. A date so recent that it could still exist as part of living memory. The dark pencil traced the regular shapes of streets and squares that soon became a new city, built by the fascist regime on reclaimed land that had once been a territory of insidious marshes. The city bore the mark of its fascist roots, glorified in marble and toponymy and in its architecture, shapes, and urban memory. Littoria, as it was called, was built in central Italy as a metonym of the regime.

June 2015. I am back in the place I call ‘home’, as an anthropologist. A city with multiple epithets: ‘Latina, città del Novecento’ [Latina, city of the Twentieth Century], ‘La città nuova’ [The new city]; reminders of the city’s place in history and of its recent past. The name Latina has replaced Littoria, which has neither been erased nor forgotten and it survives in documents, on monuments, engraved on cast iron manhole covers, and in the collective knowledge of the city’s past.

Everyone knows. Everyone knows that Latina’s ordinariness exists through and because of its disordered temporality. Everyone knows that living in and with the city also means being familiar with the vertiginous feeling Latina exudes. The vertiginous is immanent and it is ordinary. It is a low hum, a constant vibration that goes at times unnoticed, but it is never not felt. It is essential in making Latina what it is. I, too, know that.

I was born in Latina and lived there for the first 17 years of my life. First as inhabitant and then as anthropologist, I have walked the length of the city’s wide streets, becoming intimate with Latina’s orderly map. I have learned how to call ‘home’ a place that is both hyper-historical and without history.

Latina remains suspended in the unresolved tension between its genesis and the void that preceded it. The foundation of the city obliterated almost all material and immaterial memories of the marshes and the multiple forms of living that inhabited them. In a country where ancient ruins are a common sight in most landscapes, Latina is perceived as having no history – a city ‘of the Twentieth century’. Its only past is inevitably and indissolubly connected to its very foundation and to the Fascist regime’s imagination and planning, committing it to a spectral hyper-historicism. The city, whose history is incongruous and fragmented, is caught in a disordered temporality that unsettles the linearity of predicted historical trajectories (cf. Knight, 2021). Nonetheless, without its fragmented and distorted temporality, Latina would not be the same city, it would not be Latina at all.

The city exudes a vertiginous atmosphere, which is not caused by the friction between the controversial and the missing past, but in its inevitability, in the impossibility of imagining or reminiscing alternative visions. There is an immanent ordinariness to Latina’s existence. The discomfort materialises from the realisation that one’s relationship with the city emerges always and inevitably from and through this immanent ordinariness. It is this sense of inescapable familiarity that is unsettling, not the city’s form per se. The vertiginous distortion or illusion; is it the world that is distorted, or our own perception that causes us to lose our focal points? Crucially, we experience a heightened sense of loss of balance, disorientation, and confusion, the sensation that we are out of sync with the world around us. Many of my conversations in Latina were punctuated by confused looks, silences, shrugs. Often people described how, despite having lived there for decades, they had never quite felt ‘at home’, constantly confronting the unavoidable interdependence between intimacy and fragmentation that triggered the feeling of dissonance. My interlocutors’ relationship with Latina, instead of providing refuge or establishing truths, posed more and more questions. One person said she felt rejected by the city, depicting Latina as a personified entity with agency. Someone else described it as a ‘fleeting city’.

The vertiginous becomes in Latina a condition sine qua non that forms part of the very existence of the city.

Rather than being the consequence of a defining event, a crisis erupting out of normalcy as suggested by Knight (2021), the vertiginous in Latina goes almost unnoticed in its ordinariness. It becomes an ordinary affect, the ‘surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, and emergences’ (Stewart, 2007: 2). Ordinary affects ‘can be seen as both the pressure points of events or banalities suffered and the trajectories that forces might take if they were to go unchecked’ (ibid.). The vertiginous, as an ordinary affect, becomes thus a gravitational ‘contact zone’, that is felt through the density of ‘something that needs attending to’ (2007: 5).

When acknowledged, this ‘something that feels like something’ (Stewart, 2007: 2) acquired a strong sense of urgency, to then return to a state of ordinariness. Adele said ‘she has always felt like an outsider. She said for her Latina is an impersonal city because of its architecture, but not only because of that, there is more […]. She said that there is a general feeling of resignation, there are not strong feelings amongst people’. As these tensions surge and wane, they are quietly and uncomfortably acknowledged, while remaining unresolved, re-affirming the recognition that Latina is an erratic place and cannot be otherwise. Any other version would mean the dissolution of the city’s very existence. The city is thus perceived as an illusion, leaving my interlocutors wondering, like Adele above, if the distortion lies in one’s own perception or in the city itself.

Image 1: View of Latina’s main square. Credit: M. Javarone.

May 2016. ‘Doesn’t this city seem to you like the set of one of Fellini’s films?’, my friend suddenly uttered, breaking the silence. The city gazed at us, in the quietness of the dimly lit buildings. We were caught in a momentary recognition that consigned Latina to the realm of illusory imagination, as if the façades of those marbled monuments were empty behind, propped up by wooden beams. A realisation that was quickly forgotten as we resumed our bike ride in the early hours of the morning, leaving the deserted main square behind. Ordinary affects were dispersed again, floating in the night.

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