La periferia

Our apartment is in Fidenza's centro storico, its historic center. Even though the town was heavily bombed at the end of World War II, and much of the centro (including our building) was constructed many years after the war, Fidenza's downtown still has plenty of old structures and quite a lot of Old World charm.

One of the churches down the street, for instance.

In part because the center is the part of Fidenza we live in, and in part because like any tourist my reflex is to highlight things that look the way I expect a quaint Italian town to look, the images of Fidenza on this blog probably give a somewhat skewed impression of what the city is really like.

In fact the majority of fidentini live not in our immediate vicinity, but in la periferia, the suburbs spread out to the southeast and southwest of the original town. Unlike typical American suburbs, Fidenza's are mostly apartment buildings, not single-family homes. After the war Fidenza became something of a boom town, with a lot of industry (glass, machinery, chemicals, construction), a lot of jobs, and a need for a lot of new housing. Apartments provided an abundance of housing quickly and compactly.

I gather that the large blocks of multiple lookalike apartment buildings were originally public housing, although now a lot of the apartments have been privatized.

However, many of the apartment buildings are one-offs, in a wide range of styles.

A lot of them look unmistakably Italian to me, the way they try to synthesize slickness and the rococo, 

These are mostly buildings I pass on my way to and from the indoor pool where I go to water aerobics.

None of this looks particularly picturesque or Instagrammable, but it also doesn't look at all like the U.S., at least not any part of the U.S. I've ever been to. For one thing, Italians apparently really, really like balconies.

Most locals would rather live out in the periferia rather than downtown, which is no doubt why apartments out there seem to be more more expensive. The streets are wider and quieter, there's plenty of space, and more and bigger stores.

 

This lady was cruising by the glassworks, Fidenza's largest industrial plant, on her way to one of the big supermarkets on the outskirts.

There are smaller stores, too. Above is one of the ethnic markets where we get such non-Italian essentials as oatmeal and distilled vinegar. I am not sure if the place is owned by a person named Heera Ashian or the sign is in some kind of pidgin. 

A big advantage of the suburbs, now that most people have cars, is the abundance of parking. The downtown, with all its pedestrian-only streets, can be a hard place to live if you have to hunt for a parking space all the time. The periferia is much more car-friendly.

Although Fidenza has expanded considerably over the years, there's not the kind of suburban sprawl we see in Northern California, where one town bleeds into the next. Here the suburbs fade out into open space and farmland.

This parkland along the Stirone River is west of town.

This road through fields is south of the apartment buildings shown above.

The town's agricultural past lingers on in the remnants of grand estates that still endure amid the apartment blocks. Some of the stately houses that once presided over the lands surrounding the old city have been subdivided into apartments themselves or turned into banks or offices. But not all.
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This one still seems to be a single-family home, surrounded by vineyards, orchards, and a fence with signs saying "attenti al cane"--"beware of the dog"--although I've never seen a dog there. Just beyond the spacious grounds are apartment buildings and traffic roundabouts.

Apartments have encroached much nearer to this old mansion. It appears to be abandoned, but perhaps an Italian Miss Haversham is still in residence. Perhaps la  periferia isn't entirely devoid of the picturesque.