Wednesday,
July 02, 2008
English Collegues
Scoff at Marco Niada's " The
The
ANNOTICO Report
Romans
founded
From zero
population to 60,000, it was sacked by Boudicca (AD60-61), restored, but later
reduced to barely 3,000 after
It
took until the 1300s to get the population back to 60,000 locals, by which time
they were under Norman management.
Marco
Niada, an Italian correspondent long resident here is
the author of " The
Interestingly
his English colleagues scoff at him, and suggest that title will surely go to
Niada in engaging in perhaps some hyperbole,
tries to make the point that
I
wouldn't want to ask the international natives what they thought of those colonialistic and imperialistic ideas.:)
A
new book says
Michael
White
July
1, 2008
"The
strength of this town is the foreigners." Which town?
Outsiders'
perspectives are usually worth hearing, so I started taking notes. Niada's assertion was that
Italians feel
slightly proprietorial about
From zero
population to 60,000, it was sacked by Boudicca (AD60-61), restored, but later
reduced to barely 3,000 after
"London
was created by Romans, destroyed by the locals," the author
explained. It took until the 1300s to get the population back to 60,000
locals, by which time they were under Norman management.
If that sounds
unflattering, it isn't. Niada's book is called The New London, Capital of the 21st Century
(it's all in Italian, by the way, including the title) and his argument is
that the city's fortunes have waxed and waned over 2,000 years, but that it
always works best when it is outward-looking, connected to the wider world.
It makes better
sense of its disproportionate domestic size: "It needed the outer world
to sustain its size," as our visiting foreigner put it.
All this is
probably familiar to geographers, but not to me. I vaguely knew that London
was the largest city north of the Alps in the age of Imperial Rome, substantial
in a way that Lutetia - Paris - was not; also that
the Roman road network was the best we had until the late 18th century (there
is always an upside to empires) when improvements resumed. Plumbing?
Let's not even think about comparisons, at least not before those Poles
arrived.
Anyway Marco's
thesis (I've known him for years. He is very kind, and with his wife raised
funds to build a school in Afghanistan) is that London started opening up to
become a big city again under Elizabeth I, took off in the 17th century, became
a world-trading hub in the 18th century and industrially dominant in the 19th
century - until the Germans and Americans got cracking.
It reached 1
million inhabitants by 1800, 7 million by 1900 and then declined to the point
where a quarter of its inhabitants were telling pollsters they wanted to leave
by 1990, the same year Mrs Thatcher did.
Since when globalisation - and the luck of language and time
zones which allow traders to deal with both
Niada seems to believe that
what he calls "
But poor and
middling people have come too, including Italians. In 1800 they were political
refugees, later craftsmen, then poor people - until
In the latest
surge entrepreneurs as well as Venetian waiters (coincidentally I was served by
one in a
Marco says
Italian influence is felt in the language - zucchini instead of courgette? - and via the better
coffee. They have also helped make us more relaxed.
Hmm. Not sure about that
either. There is a downside to huge numbers of incomers, especially among
poorer locals who compete for jobs and resources, those who do compete.
I also am aware
that
In any case Niada's flattering account was promptly deflated
by a local, James Blitz, a former
Capital of the
21st century? You must be joking. That title will surely go to
But he also
revealed that Niada, who works for the
financial daily 24 Ore, commutes to his office on a smart Italian Vespa 250cc. On his journey he likes to count the
other Vespas and to analyse
the stylish clothes which their riders are wearing.
"Only an
Italian would do that."
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