By Gustavo Pé D´Arca
Editorial Note
This travel narrative is rooted in the experiences of a Summer Lab course taught by RUFA – Rome University of Fine Arts. The course offered a uniquely immersive and inspiring environment, where participants engaged directly with the streets, art, and culture of Rome. It was a magical and appealing experience that transformed the narrator into both a photographer and a storyteller, blending observation, creativity, and reflection. Through the lens of the camera and the voice of the narrative, this piece seeks to capture not only the city’s vibrant layers but also the personal journey of discovery and artistic growth fostered by the course.
Prologue – The First Glimpse of Rome
After a long flight that blurred time zones and expectation, I caught the train into Termini station. Its brakes screeched louder than the cicadas droning in the July heat outside. I stepped down onto the platform, and the air wrapped around me like a second skin—
thick, warm, unapologetically Roman. Rome had arrived in full force: the sound of scooters darting between taxis, church bells colliding with impatient horns, the chatter of voices weaving through every corner. The station spilled me into the city as if onto a stage rehearsing for centuries.
On the corner, a bar promised shade. I slipped inside, and the shock of cool marble under my palms grounded me as I leaned against the counter. The barista, moving with practiced precision, slid an espresso ristretto in front of me. One sip, and the bitterness ignited every nerve ending awake. It was Rome condensed into a single shot: sharp, unapologetic, unforgettable.
Outside, ochre walls caught the afternoon sun, their paint cracked like skin weathered by centuries. Ancient stone stood beside neon signs, creating a collage of eras. “Rome is the capital of the world,” Goethe once wrote, and in that moment, I understood his conviction. The city wasn’t one era or one voice—it was all of them, layered, painted, overwritten.
I had come for a summer course on street art photography, a lab that promised to reveal the hidden voices of Rome’s neighbourhoods. Yet as I watched the walls glow in the evening light, I felt a quiet tug toward something more. Perhaps this trip wouldn’t just change the way I took pictures. Perhaps it would change the way I saw—and listened.
Chapter 1 – San Lorenzo: The Classroom of Walls
“Don’t just look at the wall—listen to it. Every mural has a pulse.” The professor’s voice echoed across the square in San Lorenzo, hand raised toward a wall splashed with cobalt blue and crimson red. Behind him, the neighbourhood unfolded in fragments: university students lounging on steps, stray cats weaving through graffiti-tagged alleys, the metallic rattle of a tram threading through the chaos. San Lorenzo was no postcard Rome. This was a district scarred by bombings during the war, rebuilt in brick and concrete, then reclaimed by artists who refused silence.
I raised my camera hesitantly, squinting through the lens. The mural in front of me wasn’t polished; its edges jagged, a woman’s face emerging from streaks of paint like a ghost demanding recognition. The instructor moved closer, tapping the wall lightly. “This isn’t decoration. This is testimony. In Italy, we call them murals—murals. Not just art, but voices painted in color.”
The word lingered: murals. Heavier than “graffiti,” alive, political, demanding attention. I whispered it under my breath, as if learning a password into another Rome. A fellow student leaned toward me. “It feels like the walls are arguing with each other,” she said, pointing at overlapping tags.
“They are,” the instructor replied. “Nothing here stays still.” The faint tang of spray paint drifted toward us, mingling with the aroma of espresso from a nearby café. My fingers brushed the chipped plaster, rough and hot from the sun. I pressed the shutter. The click wasn’t just a photograph—it was an attempt to capture the rhythm of a neighbourhood refusing to be polished, refusing to be silenced.
Walking deeper into San Lorenzo, I realized I wasn’t only documenting walls. I was entering conversations already in progress—arguments scrawled in colour, declarations that someone existed, resisted, belonged. And in framing them through my lens, I felt the first stirrings of my own voice joining theirs.
Later, seated on a cracked stone step, I reflected on what I had learned in this first immersion: rebellion could be both subtle and loud, permanent, and fleeting. The walls whispered history, but also demanded presence. And in listening, I felt my own perspective beginning to shift—more attentive, more patient, more willing to embrace complexity.
Chapter 2 – Testaccio: Bread, Paint, and Memory
By the second morning, the city felt less overwhelming, though the July heat had already begun its climb before I reached Testaccio. The neighbourhood rose ahead, quieter than the frenzy around Termini, its narrow streets shaded by old sycamores. This
was not the Rome of emperors or popes—it was the Rome of workers, of markets, of meals that began humbly but ended gloriously.
Our group gathered at the edge of the Testaccio Market, where bright awnings stretched like sails above rows of stalls. The smell of ripe peaches mingled with the iron tang of butcher shops and the yeasty perfume of fresh bread. I walked between vendors shouting prices, each voice competing with the next. In my hand, a warm supply—a fried rice ball stuffed with mozzarella—greased my fingers. I bit into it and felt the string of cheese stretch like a thread tying me to the place itself.
Just outside the market, a wall exploded in colours: a mural of clenched fists, painted in bold orange and green. Our instructor urged us to frame it with the daily life around it. “Street art here,” he said, “isn’t separate from bread or wine. It grows from them.”
As I raised my camera, an old man approached, his shirt rolled up to his elbows, a basket of figs in one hand. His skin was weathered like parchment, his eyes sharp under thick grey brows. He stopped to watch me photographing the wall.
“You see these fists?” he said in Italian, his voice gravelly. “Once, this was all factories. Smoke, sweat, broken backs. Then silence, when they closed. The fists remind us—we don’t forget.” He set down the basket and gestured with wide, deliberate movements, as if every word carried the weight of history.
I asked if I could take his picture. He straightened slightly, holding his basket close, as though posing not just for me but for Testaccio itself. When I lowered the camera, he smiled faintly. “First, we had work, then emptiness. Now these walls shout again.” The phrase clung to me: le mura gridano di nuovo—the walls shout again. The mural behind him, paired with his words, seemed less like paint and more like memory resurfacing. Testaccio wasn’t simply preserving its past; it was repainting it, demanding to be heard.
Later, as we sat at a café with the tang of tomatoes and basil hanging in the air, I scrolled through my photos. Between the colours of fists and the curve of the old man’s shoulders, I realized something about Testaccio: art wasn’t here to decorate silence. It was here to interrupt it.
And as I looked at the image frozen in my camera, I wondered whether, in my own way, I too was learning how to interrupt silence.
Chapter 3 – Colosseo: Stones and Sprays
By the third day, the sun was merciless. Rome shimmered in waves of heat, its cobblestones almost glowing. Our group walked slowly toward the Colosseo, its massive arches rising from the earth like the ribs of an ancient beast. Even in the throngs of tourists—guides waving umbrellas, children licking melting gelato—there was a hush of awe. The stones themselves seemed to radiate authority, as though whispering: We were here long before you, and we will be here long after.
Yet only a few streets away, another Rome revealed itself. Narrow alleys, shaded by balconies strung with laundry, held walls layered with tags and stencils. A spray-painted figure in neon pink crouched under the shadow of the Colosseum’s arches, as if to
remind the empire’s ghost that new voices still claimed this ground.
I trailed behind the group, camera pressed to my face. The contrast was striking: the rough texture of marble eroded over centuries, and just meters away, the slick shine of fresh paint still smelling faintly of aerosol. I touched both—a finger gliding over the warm, pitted stone, then brushing the smooth plaster of the wall. Two eras speaking, two testimonies colliding.
“People always think graffiti is new,” the instructor said as we gathered in a shaded corner. He pointed toward faint scratches carved into the Colosseum’s inner walls— initials, crude shapes, names etched by visitors centuries ago. “But look—Romans were
tagging their city long before cans of spray paint existed.”
The thought lingered. Street art wasn’t an intrusion on history—it was its continuation. The urge to leave a mark, to declare I was here, stretched like a thread across millennia. A group of teenagers passed us, one carrying a backpack bulging suspiciously. They
laughed, glancing at us with a mixture of mischief and defiance. A few minutes later, a fresh line of paint appeared at the corner of the alley—fast, almost careless. I caught the hiss of the spray can before they vanished.
The smell of paint cut through the air, sharp and chemical, contrasting with the sweet scent of roasted chestnuts sold by a vendor nearby. I raised my camera quickly, catching the wet shimmer of the new tag before the sun baked it dry. A fellow student shook her head. “Isn’t it vandalism, though?” she asked softly.
The professor smiled. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s dialogue. These stones spoke once, and someone answered. That’s history too.” I thought of the Colosseum—once filled with gladiators and crowds—and how time had reduced it to silence. And then, of that wet spray, loud and unapologetic. Which one, I wondered, would outlast the other?
That night, scrolling through my photos in the dim light of my room, I realized the city wasn’t asking me to choose between the old and the new. Rome thrived in the friction between them. And so, perhaps, did I.
Chapter 4 – Pigneto: Rome’s Rebel Heartbeat
By the fourth evening, the city seemed to exhale differently. Gone was the solemnity of the Colosseum’s stones; in Pigneto, the streets pulsed like veins under neon lights. If San Lorenzo was a classroom of walls and Testaccio a kitchen of memory, Pigneto was a stage where Rome danced in defiance.
We arrived just as twilight fell. Murals glowed under the streetlamps—faces of revolutionaries, dreamlike figures stretching across entire facades, political slogans sprayed in thick black letters. The colours seemed sharper in the dark, as though the night itself was amplifying them.
Bars spilled onto sidewalks, tables crowded with young Romans sipping Aperol spritz and smoking. The air was alive with contradictions: the sweet smell of orange peels crushed into cocktails mixing with the sharp tang of cigarette smoke, the echo of a jazz saxophone bleeding into electronic beats from a nearby club.
“Andiamo avanti!” a man shouted to his friends as they passed us, his voice carrying over the music. Let’s move forward. The phrase caught my ear, almost like the city itself whispering its motto. Rome, a city so rooted in the past, was always moving forward in places like this.
We ducked into a narrow alley where murals stretched wall to wall. A stencil of Pasolini— Pigneto’s adopted poet—stared back at us, cigarette dangling from his lips. Our instructor paused in front of it. “Pasolini called this neighbourhood una borgata ribelle— a rebellious suburb. He would still recognize it today.”
I lingered behind, drawn by a mural of a woman’s face painted across the side of a crumbling building. Her eyes were enormous, her lips cracked by the uneven plaster beneath. As I photographed her, a local man emerged from a bar, cigarette glowing between his fingers. “You like her?” he asked in Italian, his accent thick and his grin easy. “Molto,” I replied, fumbling my basic vocabulary. Very much. He laughed, exhaling smoke into the warm night. “She’s our guardian. We say she watches the street when the police don’t.” His tone carried pride and a hint of mischief. He stubbed his cigarette against the wall, leaving a faint mark below the painted lips. “Pigneto doesn’t need rules. It needs stories.”
I watched him disappear into the bar, his words hanging in the air like the saxophone’s fading note. The mural seemed to gaze at me differently now, less as an object of beauty and more as a witness of lives unfolding. Later, seated at a small table, I sipped a bitter Negroni. The ice clinked against the glass, cold against my fingertips. Around me, conversations erupted in bursts of laughter, hands gesturing wildly, voices overlapping like instruments in an orchestra. It was chaotic and vibrant, and for the first time, I felt less like a visitor and more like part of the rhythm.
Pigneto wasn’t a place to observe quietly; it demanded participation. And in that noisy, glowing night, I felt my own walls breaking down. Rome was no longer only a gallery of past wonders or even a workshop for my photography—it was alive, messy, demanding, and somehow, it was teaching me to be the same.
Chapter 5 – Garbatella: Faces on the Walls
By the fifth day, my camera felt less like a tool and more like an extension of my hand. We met in Garbatella under a sky so bright it turned every pastel building into a canvas. This neighborhood was unlike the rest: not chaotic like Pigneto, nor industrial like Testaccio. It felt like a village tucked inside the city, with narrow streets winding between gardens and courtyards, balconies heavy with geraniums, laundry flapping gently in the breeze.
The walls here were quieter, but not silent. Large murals stretched across apartment blocks—portraits of women with cosmic hair, children holding birds, abstract shapes bursting like fireworks. They didn’t shout like San Lorenzo’s slogans. Instead, they seemed to breathe with the community, woven into its daily rhythms.
In a shaded courtyard, I noticed a woman watering plants in terracotta pots. She was in her sixties, with silver hair tied loosely at her neck, a loose cotton dress brushing against her knees. Her movements were deliberate, almost ceremonial—the way she tilted the watering can, the gentle way she touched each leaf. “Buongiorno,” I greeted, lowering my camera. She looked up, her eyes the same color as the lavender blossoms she tended. “Buongiorno, ragazzo.” Good morning, boy. I asked, haltingly, about the mural on the wall behind her: a massive painting of a child holding a kite, its tail curling into the sky. She smiled, resting the can against her hip. “That one?” she said. “We call him il custode, the guardian. The artist painted him during the pandemic. He reminds us that hope must always fly higher than fear.” Her hands, damp from the watering can, left small wet crescents on her dress as she gestured toward the mural. She explained how the residents had welcomed the artist, bringing coffee and sandwiches as he worked. “The walls speak because we feed them,” she said simply.
Her words struck me as more than metaphor. In Garbatella, art wasn’t something distant, to be admired in galleries or photographed for portfolios. It was part of the air people breathed, stitched into daily rituals.
She noticed my camera and tilted her head. “Take a picture, if you like. But don’t forget— pictures are not enough. You must carry it here.” She tapped her chest, just above her heart. I raised the camera and clicked, capturing her framed by flowers and the kite soarin above her. Yet even as the shutter closed, I knew she was right: the real image was not in my lens but in the imprint she had left on me.
Later, sitting on a low wall, I felt the texture of Garbatella’s bricks beneath my palms warm, rough, uneven. Around me, the air was alive with smells of simmering tomato sauce drifting from open windows, the distant hum of conversation, a child’s laughter echoing through the courtyard. It was domestic, intimate, ordinary—and that ordinariness was its magic.
I realized that what I had been chasing through my camera wasn’t just art on walls. It was connection: between past and present, between strangers and stories, between myself and the places I walked. The woman’s words still lingered—pictures are not enough— and I began to understand that my photographs, while precious, were only one layer. The deeper work was learning how to carry Rome inside me.
Epilogue – Layers Within
On my last evening in Rome, I returned to Garbatella alone. The course had ended, the group dispersed, but I wasn’t ready to let go. The sun was sinking, painting the sky in streaks of rose and gold. Shadows stretched long across the walls, softening the sharpness of murals I had come to know like companions
I stopped in front of the child with the kite—the custode the woman had told me about. His painted eyes looked upward, eternally fixed on the tail of hope curling into the sky. I stood there with my camera hanging at my side, silent. For once, I didn’t lift it. Rome had taught me something my lens alone could not: that every wall carries a story, every crack a memory, every layer of paint a voice refusing to be erased. Goethe had called Rome “the capital of the world,” and now I understood—not because of its ruins or its grandeur, but because here, time itself refuses to be linear. The ancient and the modern don’t replace one another. They stack, overlap, collide, like layers of graffiti on a single wall.
And I, too, had been layered. The nervous student who arrived at Termini had learned not just to photograph but to listen. In San Lorenzo, I heard the pulse of rebellion. In Testaccio, I tasted the memory of survival. In the shadow of the Colosseo, I touched the continuity of human marks. In Pigneto, I felt the rhythm of voices insisting on the present. In Garbatella, I carried the imprint of a woman’s wisdom: pictures are not enough.
As I pressed my palm against the wall beneath the painted kite, the surface was warm, gritty, alive. I closed my eyes and inhaled: basil from a nearby kitchen, exhaust from a passing scooter, faint cigarette smoke. All the scents of Rome folded into one. The city
was not just around me; it was inside me. Travel, I realized, is not about moving from one place to another. It is about becoming porous enough to be changed, to let the layers of another world settle into your own. Rome had given me that gift. When I finally walked back toward the metro, the murals slipped into shadow behind me. But their voices followed.
The walls had spoken, and I would carry their echoes always.
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.