Livia Filotico

Wild boars have become an increasingly visible presence in Rome, Italy, rummaging through organic waste bins, stealing and receiving food from residents. Once confined to the surrounding woodlands, they now move through the urban fabric, unsettling residents’ ideas of what counts as a city and who belongs in it. My ethnographic PhD project examines how eating and feeding relations between humans and wild boars disrupt dominant logics of purity and control in Rome while allowing for the emergence of a different multispecies logic rooted in partial ingestion and contamination across species. Combining participant observation in one of the city’s most affected neighbourhoods, interviews with those who eat or feed wild boars, and ethological analysis, I observe how food mediates encounters across species—whether through feeding, waste management, hunting, or feeding bans. By following who eats whom, what food is protected or left to rot, and how commensality forges or disrupts relations, this research reveals the impossibility of purity and control in both cities and subjects. Ultimately, it shows how Rome’s dominant ideal of a bounded city—rooted in millennia of mythical and material traces—is unsettled by the multispecies life that humans and boars create together through everyday acts of eating and feeding.