Totti and the residence, hell in the Repubblica investigation

“Francesco, come and see how life is here”. This is the cry for help launched by one of the tenants of the residence in via Tovaglieri in Rome – in the Tor Tre Teste area – a housing facility owned by Ten Immobile, one of Francesco Totti’s companies. In fact, the three-storey building, once designed to house offices and call centres, is home to over forty people (there are 34 housing units of around 40m2 each) in precarious conditions. The residence of the former Roma captain – as La Repubblica explains in its investigation – is used at the expense of the Capitol to house about thirty families who find themselves having to deal with the housing emergency, forced to live in emergency centers temporary leased by the municipality. Structures similar to the one in via Tovaglieri, where not everyone knows the name of the owner of the building but – after hearing Totti’s name – they would like to ask the historic number for a hand.

The situation

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The situation is explained by a tenant of the Ten Immobiliare residence, who has been living in the building for years. “I’ve been here for four years – she explains to La Repubblica – but for twenty I’ve been in a hell called a housing crisis”. The woman continues the story: “I am a grandmother and a widow, my husband died of a heart attack a year ago and at night the neighbors spit on my doorstep and throw the rubbish on the landing. They take advantage of it because I am a single woman, I have no nothing left to lose”. But relations with the neighborhood aren’t the only problem: “Sometimes there are cockroaches in the apartments, perhaps they come out of the garage under the supermarket”. For the 48-year-old woman, even offering her son accommodation has become impossible: “she can’t stay here for more than 10 days and he too has no home”.

costs

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The residence, which is in far from perfect conditions, is one of the structures used – and paid for – by the Municipality of Rome to counter the housing emergency. To explain it is Fabrizio Ragucci of the Unione Inquilini union: “It is a business of 730 thousand euros a year, each accommodation costs the Municipality 1780 euros, or 50 euros per square metre”. All for apartments with cracks in the walls and ceilings, difficult living conditions and the risk of feeling threatened by the neighbours.