Increasing plurality and neglected pluralism. Religious diversity in the suburbs of Rome

The chapter offers an interpretation of the social and political constraints that affect the way religious diversity is addressed and prevented from blossoming into a pluralistic shared frame in Italy. We move from the renewed attention devoted to the 'spatialization of religion’ with the aim of presenting a contextualized understanding of ‘lived religious diversity’ in the urban space of Rome and critical reading of the normative – cultural and political – responses that are emerging around this phenomenon. Drawing on the data collected within the research project NEW2US at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, the analysis shows how, although attracted to a space – Rome –that is ideally generous towards the expression of ‘the religious’, recently established minorities struggle to carve out living spaces for themselves, and mostly remain segregated along the city’s margins. The ethnography that has been undertaken within the south-east area of Tor Sapienza digs into the deep and fatal intertwinement between radical alterity, marginality, and social tensions in order to give a possible explanation as to why in the Italian case religious pluralism is not yet entirely legitimated to consolidate as a means of action in the social and political sphere. Multiple religious perspectives are there to stay and their visibility is more and more evident. What is still lacking is a shared significance of that pluralism. Although in Rome it is a rather new phenomenon, the cases discussed in this chapter show that religious pluralism is conceived under a mainly religious/secularist dichotomy, either as a loosely knit pattern of competing revelations or as the sheer fragmented survival of a lost enchanted world.