Maggiolina’ s program included music, cinema and lectures with international masters. This event brought many people to tango. After that event, the first stable milonga arose on Monday nights. The day have been difficult for many. But, it marked a shift from the unstable situation to a more organized one. The success of this evening led to the birth in 1994, of the Tangobar, the first and for many years only place in Italy devoted exclusively to tango, holding daily lessons and weekend evenings. At the same time, another group of pioneers organized the Tangopolis Association, and launched Thursday at San Lorenzo, in a loft of the former Pastificio Cecere industrial building.
So, it became clear that if you wanted to involve new enthusiasts it would have been better to move to a more central location. A couple of years later, the initiative moved to the skating rink on Colle Oppio, a place that is definitely much more popular and more visible.
Despite so much effort, the tango community remained small, so small that there was only one milonga on New Year’ s Eve in all of Italy. FAItango was born from this experience. It was not unusual for people to travel from a city to city, meeting ever-new dancers. At first, Turin, Trieste and Bologna, and then Naples, Cagliari and Catania became favorite places to go.
During the winter, there was dancing, but by the beginning of summer the everythind had closed. So, the very first street tango was born in the EUR district, on the staircase of the Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro, which Romans call the Colosseo Quadrato. One night, each week, the tanguèros could be found dancing under the stars on this wide marble stairs to the music of a portable stereo or even directly from the car systems. The place was easy to find, but secluded, because at night it was used only as a large parking lot. photos by Antonio Lalli)
Because it was not easy for the most to keep theit passion alive during the week, many, especially men, found it hard to study with the necessary commitment, and abandoned tango after their initial enthusiasm.
For more than a decade, it was therefore a struggle to reach the so-called critical mass— the number of habitual tangueros that would make a qualitative change to a higher level of tango. Sometimes, it was possible to galvanize the tangueros for months and months. Shows like Tangox2, Forever Tango and Tango Pasión had
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