Salario: Rome's Unsung Hot Neighborhood

Right, our apartment building on the Via Simeto side.
Our place is on the 4th floor above the ground
floor--the one with the "cutout" that is our
terrace.   No market when this was taken.

When we arranged to rent a Rome apartment months ago, we thought we were headed for Parioli, a ritzy area of north Rome known for its fancy avenues (Viale dei Parioli and Viale Bruno Buozzi among them), expensive restaurants, and high-end shopping.

But we're not in Parioli--at least we don't think so.   More likely we're in one of Rome's lesser known districts: Salario.  Our 4th floor apartment is on the corner of Via Salaria--one of ancient Rome's consular roads--and Via Simeto, which is two blocks south of Viale Regina Margherita, the main drag with trams that go all over Rome.  We think Parioli "officially" begins on the other side of Via Salaria.

No, we're not in Parioli.  But what we've found--by sheer good fortune--is one of Rome's most
dynamic neighborhoods.   Curiously, we  had lived nearby a few years ago--just to the north of Viale Regina Margherita, in what's known as Trieste.  But we almost never ventured across the Viale. What a mistake!

Our building is of early 20th-century vintage, but
beneath it are catacombs!  We discovered they are open
one day each year - November 23.

It didn't take long to discover the pleasures of our Salario neighborhood.  It's full of small shops. On one side of our streetside apartment door is a barber.  On  the other side, a sartoria (a shop for sewing repairs of all kids). There's a ferramenta (a hardware store) nearby on Via Simeto, as well as the Rome version of a general store, crammed with stuff (and run, as many of them now are, by Chinese). Via Simeto also has a key shop and a butcher shop and an orto-frutta (fruits and vegetables).

Our "Tigre" grocrery, located in what used to be a movie
theatre (note the U-shaped lettering of the theater).  While
a chain, the Tigre has an informal book-exchange in
a room off the entrance.  

There's a nice wine shop just across Via Salaria--but of course you can buy wine almost anywhere, including at the medium-sized chain grocery store that you can see from our living room window (right).  The 4-star Beverly Hills Hotel (no joke!) is across the street.

The high-end shopping is on Via Po, two blocks down: men's clothes shops that drew the attention of a friend who's lived in Rome for years; a shop that sells only olive oil; a salumeria (a cheese/salami/bread store).  As that friend - who's lived in Rome 30 years - said when he met us for dinner nearby, "How did you find this place?"

Hugs at the market

Dianne with her home-made vignarola

Oh, yes.  There's an outdoor market on our side street (and up the next one) every day but Sunday--cheap clothes, kitchen items, and food: shelled peas and fava beans, trimmed artichokes, you name it.  In 5 minutes, we had bought those ingredients for vignarola - all ready to cook up.

Eating out?  There must be a dozen restaurants within a 10-minute walk--maybe more.  On our block alone there are three, all traditional trattorias serving Rome cuisine; we've tried two and they were both worthy, highlighted by a pasta with seafood and truffles.

Kilo, red meat capital of Rome.  Dianne on the prowl.  

Toward Via Po, we discovered Kilo, an enormous corner restaurant with elaborate outdoor seating--all in hip modernist style--serving meat cuts from animals raised around the world - Danish and Uruguayan beef, not to mention Chianina (from Tuscany), Kobe and "American" meats.  It's full of young people, which we like.  A wine bar called "dietro le quinte" also looks promising.  And there are a couple of popular places for the sushi crowd.

Hip outside cushion seating at "dietro le quinte"

After checking out a dozen "bars" for our morning coffee and cornetto, we finally settled on a somewhat upscale place on Via Po--where you can sit down and read the paper without paying extra. Indeed, the trend here in Salario--and Salario could be trend-setting--is toward larger places with ample seating at no extra charge. Dogs get in free.

An entrance to Coppede'

It would be too much to say that Salario is centrally located. It's well to the north of the Centro, with no subway line nearby.  Still, the famed Via Veneto is less than a mile walk, and the Galleria Borghese is at most 10 minutes.  The fantastical neighborhood of Coppede', named after the architect Gino Coppede', who designed its structures in the 1920s, is 5 minutes away.

A tram got us to Prati (near the Vatican) in about 30 minutes for some jazz at Alexanderplatz  the other night, and in the other direction (east), a tram will take you to the university, to the hip young scene at San Lorenzo, and just beyond to Porta Maggiore, with its enormous aqueducts, a short walk from another hip scene in Pigneto.

Life could be worse!

Bill

Could have been and would have been our
regular coffee bar, but they overcharged us--twice--because they
thought the Americans wouldn't be back or wouldn't notice.  Big mistake.
It's on Via Salaria if you don't want to go there.  

Architect Gino Coppedè in Rome's Center

We've blogged about the 20th century architect Gino Coppedè several times, and included his Quartiere Coppedè at #20 on our RST Top 40 list.  It took us a few years, however, to discover that one of Coppedè's signature buildings is right in the Centro Storico, off Piazza Barberini.  This large palazzo, at via Veneto no. 7, is not his best, in our opinion, but it offers insight into this particular (in the Italian sense of the word) architect if you can't make the trek out to the Quartiere.

classic Coppedè sculptural detail

You can peak inside too.

The palazzo, built in 1927, the year Coppedè died, has his signature sculptural effects and, like Coppedè, defies categorization.  Coppedè has been variously described as an architect in the Art Nouveau, "Liberty" ( a particularly Italian designation falling between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, we think), and barocchetto traditions.  For many years his architecture was not highly valued in Rome.  He was seen  mostly as idiosyncratic.  But there has been a rehabilitation of his reputation, and the Quartiere Coppedè is now a highly prized, and very expensive, residential area.

One of the paired via dei Ramni buildings in the San
Lorenzo district

Not too far out of the Centro, in the San Lorenzo district, are two more Coppedè buildings we had never noticed until recently.  They are on via dei Ramni, a block from the University (La Sapienza).  As of this March, an apartment in one of them was for sale.  See the video here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21aOIwsjSmM

Back to Piazza Barberini and via Veneto:  there is no dearth of visual stimuli - Bernini's Triton fountain, his bee fountain, the Capuchin crypt nearby that was a subject of a recent post, the Cinema Barberini designed by Marcello Piacentini, the Hotel Bernini Bristol with its rooftop bar, a view of Palazzo Barberini.  But, if you take time to look up at the corner of via Veneto and Piazza Barberini, we think you'll find the view worthwhile.

Look up at the corner.

And a reference to Fascism

Dianne
See also a nice photo essay in English at this site:  http://photographictravelsinitaly.blogspot.com/2009/06/coppede.html

The Trieste Quarter: Home to Modernism and Postmodernism

The quartiere of Trieste, to the north of Rome's center, between via Salaria and via Nomentana, is best known to tourists and architectural enthusiasts for the extraordinary collection of electicism known as Coppede', after the architect, Gino Coppede', who designed the unusual structures in the 1920s.

But there is more to Trieste than Coppede'.  As a relatively young and wealthy quartiere, Trieste also has a number of worthy modernist--and postmodernist-buildings.  Indeed, we found two at one intersection, where via Salaria crosses via Adige (on one side) and via Bruxelles (on the other).  We call it Trieste, but to be precise, one side is in Trieste, the other in Parioli. 

On the southeast corner of the intersection is a 1930s-era modernist building, architect unknown, but worthy of Luigi Moretti.  It's a narrow, asymetrical structure, sited on an oddly-shaped piece of land. 

An unusual round open loggia

It now houses the Sri Lankan embassy, which recently installed a Buddha in the white loggia, above.

The building makes substantial use of the open logia, including an unusual round open loggia.

Even more unusual, and doubtless more controversial among architects and architectural historians, is an apartment building on the intersection's northwest corner.

Built in the 1960s or 1970s (we would guess), it's modern but not modernist,  playful in a postmodern, experimental way: the vortex-like stanchion at the corner (left), the hole on an upper floor, a projecting cap at roof level, the intersecting of unusual shapes. 

Postmodernist play with shapes and forms

When you've seen Coppede'--and don't miss it (it was number 20 on RST's Top 40)--have a look at this intersection.  It's only a 5-minute walk.

Bill

The Gates of Rome: The Postwar Era

Some of these gates are best seen--and photographed--at night. 

A window barred--but elegantly, c. 1910

From the point of view of crimes against the body, Rome is a safe city, with very low numbers of assaults, rapes and murders.  Property crime--things like thefts on the bus, breaking and entering with intent to steal the television set--is more frequent.  Romans--and Italians generally--are understandably anxious about property crimes and eager to protect their homes from invasion.  Hence Romans prefer the upper floors of apartment buildings, where they feel--and are--less vulnerable, and those who must live on the ground or first floor commonly install bars on windows. 

Fenced in, completely

Some have been known to fence in an entire terrace or balcony (right).  Portieri--the guys who sit in little rooms ready to jump out and prevent you from snooping around in that lovely interior courtyard--are less common than they once were, but they're still at work here and there, and they still serve as a deterrent to crime in many buildings.   If a thief does manage to get to your front door, he must deal with multiple sets of multiple-bolt locks on an order that even a hardened New Yorker would have trouble imagining.  Opening one of these doors with the keys requires not only a good memory--for which key fits which lock,  which of the locks, if any, is a fake, which lock to unlock first, how many turns to make--but also a non-arthritic wrist and some time to waste. 



A fanciful gate, in Coppede'

This concern for home safety has one benefit (well, maybe more than one): the iron gates that guard many buildings--the first line of defense, especially in the absence of a portiere--are works of art.  Some are centuries old, veritable masterpieces of the Italian renaissance.  Others, as in the Coppede' neighborhood in the quartiere of Trieste, evoke the medieval sensibilities of Gino Coppede', the architect who built the area, or offer a touch of the "liberty"/art nouveau style that was in vogue in the decades before and after 1900. (The Coppede' neighborhood came in at #20 on RST's Top 40.)

Then there are the modern gates of the between-the-wars Fascist period, with their strong vertical and/or horizontal lines.  No nonsense. 










Here's another, from the 1920s, with touches of the medieval: that spear to the right, the grate-like general appearance.  Nestled in the center, the modernist letters CP (Case Popolari/Public Housing).  This gate is in the planned community of Garbatella (RST's #16 on its Top 40), south of the center. 







And after the war?  Nothing worth looking at, right?  Wrong.  We (and that really means Bill, that master of the perverse perspective) have been enjoying the gates and doors of the 1950s and 1960s.  Yikes!  At least that's when we think they were made; they don't come with dates. 

Angles, colored glass, lovely shadows.  Note the floor.  This
gate is "busier" than most.  You can see it in Piazza Vescovio.

They're easy to recognize: they're "modern" in the sense that they (usually) aren't busy with detail, and they don't resemble Victorian wallpaper.  But the designers of these postwar examples have moved on just a bit from the stark lines favored in the Fascist era.  Lines are bending (photo at top).  New angles.  Playfulness.  One senses a search--not always successful, we admit--for something beyond the stark order of modernism.









Playful, yet bold and powerful.  Straight out of the 1950s, and strong and masculine.  In postwar, modern Garbatella, not far from the Metro. 

Sensational.  Gorgeous.  You could be in Miami Beach.  But it's Monteverde. 

We found this gem in the quartiere of Trieste, while walking to our
apartment from Piazza Bologna.  Wasted on a parking lot, but dazzling.
We're thinking Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome. 

There's Fuller with his dome. 

Bill






 

RST Top 40. #20: The Strange World of Coppede'

It was not long after we met in the winter of 1993--he was a graduate student in my class in the American Studies Department at the University of Rome, La Sapienza--that Massimo realized that Dianne and I had rather odd touristic tastes; while we enjoyed the standard fare, we savored the funky and unusual. And so began a series of journeys, with Massimo presenting some of his native Rome's more curious sites. On one occasion, we motored around the city in the morning darkness in pursuit of all-night bakeries, where we ordered our pastries directly from the baker, through a back door. On another--a dreary, rainy day--Massimo drove me to an early modernist shopping center somewhere on the fringe of the city, a place so little known he's forgotten he took me there and that I've been unable to locate.

And then there was Coppedé. It was nearing midnight when Massimo stopped the car in a piazza somewhere in the the north of Rome, and we got out. My first impression--and hardly an original one--was of an architecture both playful and, at that hour, menacing (the piazza appears in Dario Argento's 1980 horror film, Inferno)--and, above all, original. I had never seen anything like it anywhere--echoes of Spain's Gaudi, perhaps, but much more, too--and certainly not in Rome. And that's why it's #20 on Rome the Second Time's Top 40. The piazza's Palazzina del Ragno (spider) is at upper left. Below right, that's Dianne in her Fidel cap, demonstrating the playful side of Coppedé.

There is much more to it than I saw that night: 15 buildings by the architect Gino Coppedé, for whom the Quartiere Coppedé is named, and some 40 buildings in all, amounting to what one critic has described as an "urban hallucination." Despite the name, Coppedé is not an official "quarter." It's actually at the southwest end of Quartiere Trieste, 2 blocks northeast of Piazza Buenos Aires, which is on viale Regina Margherita, and about 4 blocks west of via Salaria.

It would be delightful to come across Coppedé by chance, as writer Martha Pichey did in 1987, compelled to make sense of the lions' heads, Latin inscriptions, giant bees, and other decorations that, well, don't make much sense. For the majority who prefer to plan, perhaps the best entrance to the area is through the massive arch on via Dora,
not far from Piazza Buenos Aires. Start there, move on to Piazza Mincio (where Massimo took us), then amble. There are other Coppedé works on via Brenta (#s7, 9, 14 and 16), via Ombrone (#8-10, 11), via Serchio (#2) and via Olana (#7). The forest is lovely, but don't miss the trees: the gates, fences, ceramic urns, winged serpents, hanging lanterns, a sundial, and other ornamentations that lend Coppedé that air of weird excess. One way to enjoy the area is to try to pick out elements of the great variety of styles Coppedé employed, including baroque, Moorish, gothic, Renaissance, and--yes--Babylonian. The photos below are of Piazza Mincio's Villino delle Fate (fairies), so named because of its extravagant decoration.

There is no easy accounting for what Gino Coppedé accomplished here, but it won't hurt to know something about the architect. He was born in Florence in 1866, where his father had a workshop, Casa Artistica, where Gino and his brother learned to carve the decorative flourishes that Firenze's upper class favored for their fireplaces and armoires. By age 24 he had combined that practical training with two advanced degrees: one from the Professional School of Industrial and Decorative Arts, another from the city's Academy of Fine Arts. Coppedé's first home project was outside Genoa, where a Scot, Evan McKenzie, hired him to "reconstruct" his substantial villa.
Completed in 1904, the conversion brought him instant recognition and s spate of other home projects for ambitious and intrepid Genoese elites. The Rome adventure began in 1919, when Genoese financiers, familiar with his work, hired him to design 18 palaces and 27 smaller villas--early condominiums, essentially, designed to be sold to civil servants and professionals. By 1926, less than half had been built. Aside from the Quartiere, Coppedé had only one other Rome commission--a simpler building at 7 via Veneto, completed in 1927, the year he died.

Most scholars would describe Coppedé's work as an example of art nouveau (called liberty in Italy), while noting that that the Quartiere's bold and extravagant use of the style is in a certain way perverse, given that construction took place long after art nouveau had reached its peak and while modernists forms and expressions were in ascendancy in architecture and design.

One authority notes that Coppedé's version of nouveau rejected the sexualized motifs common in France and Germany for playful but more stolid and moral expressions having appeal to Italy's middle class.

At the risk of scandalizing our architectural-critic readers, it seems not unreasonable to use the word "postmodern" to describe the quartiere. Although "postmodern" is usually employed to mark the decline of pure modernism and the rise of a more eclectic style of pastiche in the 1970s, it could be argued that Gino Coppedé was there first, toying with an emergent modernism, holding the nascent rationalism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus at arm's length while insisting on the vibrant variety of architecture's history.


Bill

Tooting the horn for Rome and...

Rome the Second Time is now on Facebook (thanks to a Rome fan, Michael Calleri). A group of Rome lovers are friends of RST on the newly created group.

Already some good comments there, including someone who likes the Corso Trieste ("Africa") area in northeast Rome, an interesting and little-visited area. Adjacent is the fascinating Coppede' neighborhood - worthy of a photo here (1920s Art Nouveau).

And you'll see editorial reviews of Rome the Second Time on the updated amazon.com page (along with a new reader review...you're all welcome to add reader reviews!).

RST also recently hit #1 in Kindle Family Travel, #2 in European Tourist Destinations and Museums and #2 in Italy - behind only Rick Steves. All this with a downturn in travel AND books (well, is Kindle a book?). Goes to show, I think, that people are looking for alternative and frugal travel.

End of commercial. Dianne