Photography by Giordano Cipriani
Living high above the city, the inhabitants of the hills of Cantagalo-Pavao-Pavaozinho are afforded one of the finest views in Rio looking over the neighbourhoods of Copacabana and Ipanema, across the Rodrigo De Freitas Lagoon and out to the ocean. But you won’t find any estate agents here, talking up the view to sell luxury apartments. Because the hills surrounding Rio are the site for many of the city’s favelas or slums and the communities clinging to these slopes live in poverty, scratching a living while trying to keep clear of the drugs gangs and the police. The favelas are not a new phenomenon. They have grown over the past 100 years as Rio’s population has swelled with the arrival of people from Brazil’s rural interior and what were initially shanty towns built on public land on the edge of the city have developed into urbanized slums. But with the focus of the sporting world turning on Rio over the next few years after the city landed the double-whammy of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics the all-too-visible gap between rich and poor is a concern to sporting and civic authorities keen to project a positive image. But as Giordano Cipriani’s photographs of the favelas of Rocinha and Cantagalo-Pavao-Pavaozinho show, this is a more complicated picture than at first it appears. For all the poverty and crime, these are functioning communities with an increasingly complex infrastructure and a self-sufficient attitude that doesn’t always look kindly on interference from government. Life may be hard but it is generally lived at a furious pace. And the favelas have one final sting in their tail. However much the great and the good of FIFA and the IOC and their corporate sponsors may wish to avert their eyes, they cannot ignore the fact that some of the cream of Brazilian talent has emerged from these favelas, the ambitions of the likes of AS Roma’s Adriano fuelled as they gazed down on their affluent neighbours in the city below.
