A Curated Walk Through the City’s Outskirts
By Gustavo Pé D’Arca
I never enter Rome through its monuments. I arrive through its margins—where the city breathes in dialects, graffiti, and the scent of late-night carbonara.
Rome, for me, begins in Garbatella, where staircases curl like question marks and balconies host conversations between laundry and memory. It’s a neighborhood that doesn’t perform its beauty—it whispers it. The walls here are not ruins; they’re rehearsals of resistance. I walk slowly, as if each corner were a stanza. Garbatella teaches me that architecture can blush. The buildings lean into each other like old friends, and the courtyards feel choreographed—part theater, part confession. I once saw a woman watering her plants while reciting Dante. No audience, just ritual. That’s Rome.
From there, I drift into Pigneto. It’s not a transition—it’s a rupture. Pigneto pulses. It’s Rome’s jazz riff, its cinematic cutaway. Pasolini’s ghost still lingers here, sipping espresso and watching the city misbehave. The murals shout, the bars hum, and the streets feel like they’re waiting for a scene to unfold. Pigneto doesn’t ask to be understood. It asks to be felt. And I do. I feel it in the way the light hits the tram rails, in the way strangers become characters, and in the way silence is never empty—it’s just waiting for the next line.
San Lorenzo is where Rome remembers. Not with nostalgia, but with grit. The walls here are wounded and proud. They carry the weight of history without romanticizing it. I walk past the university, where students smoke and debate, their voices rising like protest songs. There’s a mural of Totti next to a quote about truth and war. It’s not ironic—it’s Rome’s way of saying that football and philosophy share the same sidewalk. I sit at a café where the espresso is served with political commentary. The waiter tells me that poetry is useless unless it’s angry. I nod, not because I agree, but because in San Lorenzo, even disagreement feels like intimacy.
Esquillino is Rome’s kaleidoscope. It’s where languages collide and cuisines flirt. The market is a choreography of spices, fabrics, and gestures. I buy cardamom from a man who tells me he arrived in Rome twenty years ago and still dreams in his mother tongue. I ask him what Rome means to him. He says, “It’s a city that lets you be foreign and familiar at the same time.” That sentence stays with me. I write it down. I will use it later, maybe in a film, maybe in a manifesto.
Testaccio is my final chapter. It’s where Rome eats and remembers how to feel. The old slaughterhouse is now a museum, and the air smells like both history and pecorino. I walk past the Pyramid of Cestius, absurd and perfect. A reminder that Rome never needed permission to be strange. At a trattoria, I order coda alla vaccinara and listen to the waiter describe the recipe like a love story. “You have to wait,” he says. “You have to let the meat surrender.” I think about surrender. About how Rome never gives itself fully, but always leaves you with a taste. I leave Testaccio with sauce on my fingers and a poem forming in my throat.
This is my Rome. Not the postcard, but the footnote. Not the marble, but the graffiti. It’s a city that refuses to be summarized. You have to walk it, listen to it, argue with it. You have to let it interrupt you. And when you do, Rome becomes not a destination, but a dialogue.
This article is part of the practical work carried out by students on the Master’s Degree in Travel Journalism at the School of Travel Journalism.