Certain Space and Indefinite Places: Sacred Territories and Religious diversity in Rome, Between Global Flows and Marginalisation.

The paper offers a reconstruction and interpretation of the growing religious diversity in Rome and its relationship with the urban space. We look at the presence of multiple places of worship for different traditions and communities as the outcome of an ambivalent process. Paradoxically, a least since modern times, with an evident intensification in the last half a century, the strong local religious identity of the ‘Eternal City’ brought about an attracting field of visibility for established religions, providing a shared grammar for inflecting diversity into religious idioms. However, once activated, this flow of religious identities drawn by Roman tradition has had to deal with a notion of urban space as a scarce resource. Almost entirely occupied by Catholic institutions, the available spaces of religiosity for other groups are typically segregated at the margins, both social and spatial. Although attracted to a space that is ideally generous to the expression of ‘The Religious’, recently established minorities in Rome must struggle hard to carve out actual living spaces for themselves. This competition often involves public authorities, as in the case of the recent closure of a number of ‘irregularly’ (i.e. working without administrative permission) established mosques in the south east sector of the city. The paper draws on the data collected by the Centre for the Study and documentation of religious and political institutions in Post-secular Society (CSPS) at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. The research project intends to provide a detailed picture of the practices binding communities, places of worship and social/political spaces particularly within the east quadrant of the city.