Islamic Rome: Grand showpiece and quiet struggles
The Islamic presence in Italy dates to the eighth century, but it surely wasn’t till 1995 that the formally acknowledged Nice Mosque of Rome opened in Parioli, a neighborhood that’s a brief hop by taxi from the Borghese Gallery. The mosque, the biggest in Europe, is a gleaming, low-slung trendy construction that artfully bridges East and West. A fountain close to the doorway refreshes a plaza whose pavement echoes the dazzling geometry of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, and the rows of twinned pillars resulting in the travertine-clad sanctuary recall Bernini’s monumental colonnade at St. Peter’s Sq..
The inside is a examine in curving traces, with low-hanging round chandeliers ringing the central dome, intricately tiled partitions and a wealthy Persian carpet swirling throughout the ground. You enter to the sound of fowl track, you pray in a luminous rotunda, and also you emerge from the compound right into a pine and cypress grove on the fringe of upscale Parioli. Besides when a prepare rumbles by, it’s a lush, hushed precinct.
Perhaps too hushed. Rome’s fast-growing Islamic neighborhood, a lot of them immigrants from Morocco, Bangladesh, Albania or Senegal, resides on the opposite facet of city in gritty, bustling piazzas close to the Termini rail station. For many Roman Muslims, attending Friday providers within the Nice Mosque would require taking a break day from work.
“The Nice Mosque is a showpiece, an emblem, a spot of delight,” notes Imam Yahya Pallavicini, president of COREIS (the Italian Islamic Non secular Neighborhood). “However the metropolis’s Muslim residents usually tend to pray at smaller unofficial neighborhood mosques, usually situated in non-public houses or garages.” On a typical Friday on the Nice Mosque, lots of collect in an area constructed for hundreds.
The issue that up to date Muslims have to find state-sanctioned Roman homes of worship brings to thoughts the plight of Rome’s first Christians. Not like Jews and adherents of Mithras and Isis, Christians have been violently persecuted — and a few of Rome’s earliest church buildings, together with St. Peter’s, are martyriums: websites the place saints have been slain for his or her beliefs. The church buildings of Santa Sabina, Santa Prassede, Santa Pudenziana and Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura have been additionally sanctified by struggling. With their crystalline mosaics and skinny, pure mild, these humbly elegant basilicas conjure the time when a wierd, fervent, unyielding new cult rose from the ashes of empire.
All ages, each religion, each pilgrim makes Rome sacred anew.
