The “Lucha Y Siesta” center in Rome barely fended off an eviction. Now the collective wants to develop a vision for a better coexistence in the city.
If you climb out of the Lucio Sesto subway station into the light, you stand on Via Tuscolana – one of the major residential and shopping streets in the south of Rome – between honking cars, jostling passers-by, street vendors, sneaker shops, bars and pizza-sushi-kebab- Parlors. Above everything, the facades of multi-storey apartment buildings rise up, shielding themselves from the street with complicated doorbell systems and video surveillance. But just a few hundred meters further on, in a side street, a leafy garden gate is open. It is the entrance to the Lucha Y Siesta women’s shelter. Three elderly women sit at a round table under a tree in the autumn sun. They are discussing a school project. Two of them are teachers from the neighborhood who come over often. “Our gate is always open,” explains Egilda Orrico, an activist.
She and two other women are carrying chairs into the courtyard in front of the 19th-century house, which is painted in Roman red. Tomorrow is the big assembly, the first in times of the pandemic. It should be about the future of the project. It’s not an easy subject. Because Lucha Y Siesta is a women’s refuge where women who are exposed to physical and other violence or special emergencies get help and a place of refuge.
But it is much more than that: a meeting place, a cultural center, a network of independent women’s groups, a tailoring shop, a summer cinema and a place where political discussions are held and decisions are made democratically. But it was also an occupied house for a long time – a place where there is lucha , in Spanish the fight, and siesta , the relaxation. A complex and unique model that obviously works. In thirteen years, 2000 women have received help here.
The city administration of Rome has not particularly appreciated this commitment in recent years. Under the newly elected mayor Virginia Raggi, Lucha Y Siesta was threatened with eviction. The municipal transport company Atac, owner of the building that had been vacant for years, announced the sale. In February 2020, the residents were forcibly evacuated because the electricity should be turned off. After negotiations, women from other institutions were accommodated in the house by the city. Nevertheless, the police broke in in January 2021 and took down the residents’ personal details.
“There was no dialogue and no sensitivity to the situation of the women who were housed here,” says Egilda. By her side, she and the other thirteen women from the collective that describes itself as transfeminist, had the center-left government of the Lazio region and also former parliamentary speaker Laura Boldrini. They set up a committee to help raise the amount to buy the property. Supporters mobilized in Rome, but also throughout Italy. Artists made pictures, drawings and comics available for auction. But it still wouldn’t have been enough. In the end, the Lazio region stepped in and auctioned the house for use for Lucha Y Siesta last September. “This ends a time of uncertainty and something new begins,” explains Egilda. You and the others have decided, as a non-profit association, to take the path of institutionalization that the legalization of the living situation brings with it. You arm yourself for this with a self-government declaration that is currently being written.
The situation has also changed at the municipal level. The newly elected mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri from the Democratic Party, was supported by various left-wing alliances. He has half of his advisory board, the communal ministerial round, so to speak, with women. And now there is an activist from Lucia Y Siesta on the city council. These are new signals, but there are also tons of problems to be solved.
In Rome, as in all of Italy, the police have been reporting an increase in femicides, the murder of women, for years. In Italy there were 57 victims this year, according to the Femminicidio Italia initiative. In the lockdown year 2020, calls to the emergency number for women at risk of violence rose by almost 80 percent across the country compared to the previous year. In the capital, the higher risk of domestic violence is also reflected in the labor market figures. The statistical institute ISTAT reports that in the first nine months of 2020 the number of women employed, which is already low in comparison to other European countries, fell by 42,000, while that of men only fell by 19,000 For the sociologist Chiara Saraceno, observing Europe means a serious step backwards in terms of domestic stress and conflict potential. “We are being thrown back a hundred years,” she says.
Lucha Y Siesta is not only attended by women from violent situations, but also by homeless people like Lucica Irimie. She had been put on the street as a poorly paid and uninsured geriatric nurse in a private household. In the women’s shelter she tended the garden and the beds and left a plant clinic for the others before she returned to Romania. Often women from Africa who have escaped the so-called tratta, the human trafficking of the Nigerian Mafia, also live in the house. The activists do not provide any information about their current guests, as they call them. The same rules apply here as in other women’s shelters, even if the gate to go in and out is open.
Cinzia Turanti, who is taking the tour of the house and is just opening the door to the colorful playroom, nevertheless reveals a secret: “We had our first birth here two months ago.” The little girl is called Noura and has a two-year-old sister. There are currently six women, three teenagers and four children living here. In pre-Covid times, Lucha Y Siesta could accommodate 14 women, making it the largest facility of its kind in the city. Because in the whole of Rome there are only 34 places to live in women’s shelters; according to the rules of the Istanbul Convention on the Protection of Women from Violence, there should be 300.
The ground floor of the house is entered through a reception room with orange walls and a green sofa. Next to it is a lounge with tables and an empty room. Conferences, yoga lessons, theater rehearsals and other meetings can take place here. It is a space for everyone. Next to it is the playroom – for the children in the house and those who come to visit. Cinzia is particularly proud of the library. “We get wonderful books as gifts,” she says. On the shelves are novels, volumes of poetry, history and art books, phrasebooks and guides – all neatly arranged and labeled. And above all a wall painting with the sentence by Virginia Woolf: “There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set before the freedom of my spirit.”
There is a kitchen on each of the two floors and each family or living group has its own bathroom. “We renovated everything here ourselves,” says Cinzia. The residents live on the first floor and take care of themselves. But they receive all the necessary psychological and legal support. Unlike other institutions, your stay is not limited to six months. “They can stay until they’re ready to go,” says Cinzia. This process can take three years under certain circumstances.
Even during the lockdown and the impending eviction, the advice center remained open, at least by phone. It is only occupied by women who have appropriate training or many years of experience. In the extreme phase of the pandemic, many people from the neighborhood were simply looking for someone to talk to. “During this time we had to close the gate because of the Covid regulations, but many rang the bell anyway,” says Michela Ciculli. She belongs to the collective, but has now also been elected to the new municipal council of the city of Rome. For them, the roots of the women’s refuge in the quarter are the most important protection for the women who live here. “We belong to the neighborhood, but the neighborhood also belongs to us,” she says. She tells of a neighbor who visits almost every day and a man from the street who writes poems about Lucha Y Siesta. And the people from the bar across the street often drop by with cornetti.
“We don’t want to be a closed off reality, but rather the center of a democratization process,” explains Michela. This distinguishes the project from traditional women’s shelters, which protect their residents by keeping the address confidential. It should be a women’s refuge, but also a laboratory in which the idea of common property is opposed to the privatization of public property and where self-help counts more than social welfare. That is why Lucha Y Siesta cannot be limited to one place.
The women are internationally networked, especially with the Spanish movement Marea Violeta, which had mobilized against the planned anti-abortion law of the former government of the conservative Rajoy. Lucha Y Siesta also served as a model for a project in Senegal: the Keur Maritou women’s and children’s home in Pikine, a community on the outskirts of Dakar. But the pandemic has made direct contact more difficult, as it is everywhere.
In the meantime, things are going on in Rome. In another part of the city there is already another apartment for women that is part of the project. Lucha Y Siesta has also opened a new, external advice center. And Michela Ciculli, the new city councilor, would like to make good use of her mandate. In the coming months she wants to ensure that women and groups can meet in the various districts of the city to report on what is missing there and how they themselves assess the situation. “It would be a first step,” she says, “and maybe after a long time there will be another dialogue between the women and the city.”
