THE ROOM OF MEMORY
The human crawl spaces
Report on hygienic and sanitary conditions concerning the human crawl spaces in Doria Palace (1954)
Due to the almost complete destruction of the buildings by the war, the population left the shelters and took refuge, in part, in the uninhabited Doria Palace, which was spared from destruction. The palace is made up almost entirely of large rooms that up until then had been used as granaries, and therefore had no fireplaces and only a few windows on one of the walls. The Civil Engineering department organised these rooms, partitioning them up to a height of 2 metres and allocating one room to each family, as is done in stables to separate one horse from another. All these rooms are without sunlight, and the last ones at the back are also without light.
Families, needing to feed themselves and having no fireplace available, are forced to light fires in the room with the inevitable harmful consequence of saturating it with smoke and carbonic acid. I note, that given the type of separation of the rooms, what is said and done in each of them is easily overheard by the neighbours. Marital relations are not to be excluded from this; with what benefit to minors, I do not know. The Civil Engineering department have put in a maximum of two toilets per floor, so each one, as there are 343 tenants, must serve approximately 50 tenants. The inconvenience and inadequacy of these services is demonstrated by the faeces and urine that can easily be found on the stairs and the stench that can be smelled when entering the homes, caused by the full chamber pots waiting for the darkness of the evening to be emptied. The north façade of the palace is plastered with faeces, thrown into the void from above due to the lack of toilets and blown by the wind into the windows of the floors below, before forming a thick layer of slime in the vegetable garden below, where, especially in this season, one can imagine what putrid gas fumes are released into the air for the enjoyment of the inhabitants above. In the building there are practically no washbasins in most rooms. The building is covered by a terrace that is in poor condition due to the neglect in which it has been left.
Thus, when it rains, the water seeps in and literally floods the top floor, forcing the tenants to live like fish, and with what benefit to their health, I do not know. The tenants of the palace are mostly from the poorer classes and, by instinct, not very fond of cleanliness. This negative tendency is facilitated and exacerbated by the fact that to get water, apart from reaching the public fountain, they must climb approximately 170 stairs to reach the top floor. If this state of affairs could be explained and tolerated in the immediate aftermath of the war, it is neither right nor humane that it should continue for much longer, if one does not want to face an epidemic. Ten years have now passed since the end of the war, and it is high time to provide accommodation for the many poor tenants, whose capacity to endure has its limits. The palace has never been disinfected as the municipality is poor and lacks equipment and skilled personnel. This report was drafted by me at the request of the mayor. In handing it over, I strongly urge you to inform the competent authorities of the measures that will be necessary and urgent to alleviate the unhygienic and primitive conditions of the 343 tenants who, like everyone else, have the right to safeguard their own and their children’s health.
An analytic list of these poor forgotten ones is enclosed.
The Health Officer – Valmontone Signed Dr. Remo Natalizia
