Starlings, olives and the idealised fascist landscape: Tracing the time-spaces of a more-than-human Rome

This article seeks to make sense of the Italian city of Rome as a more-than-human city through tracing a particular set of temporal and spatial relations that constitute and connect the worlds of humans and the European starling ( Sturnus vulgaris ) in the city. It will explore these geographical relations through the practices and materials of human and starling lives and consider the ways in which city space is formed through shared spatial logics, processes of social organisation and boundary making between humans and starlings. It will also argue that olives play a fundamental role in mediating human-starling relations in the city not least through their significance in articulating the circulation of temporal-spatial connections between present day Rome, the idealised fascist landscapes created under the rule of Benito Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s and ancient Augustan Rome at the beginning of the first century CE. These three temporal moments will primarily be articulated through three related sites: a columbarium discovered in 1984 beneath the Villa Doria Pamphili in western central Rome, the reclaimed Pontine marshes of the Agro Pontino to the south-east of Rome and the streets of the present-day city centre. Through this temporal-spatial framework I will explore how starlings have inscribed themselves into the spatial politics of Roman life, how they map the city through the extension of their bodies through space and how the entangled spaces of Rome represent both the wilful agency of starlings and the wildness of the city. In doing so I seek to compliment and extend recent thinking about the constitution of the more-than-human city in two particular ways: through observing specific sites where human-starling worlds co-operate, overlap, abrade or conflict and through recentring the role of the temporal in tracing the geographies of the more-than-human city.