Valco San Paolo. A Fascinating Walk and a Street We Should Not Have Taken

Valco San Paolo. Most Romans haven't been there, and won't know where it is. We returned in October, 2025, having heard that the Rossellini Film Institute that takes up part of the area had been the site of pro-Pal (pro-Palestine) demonstrations. 

Valco San Paolo occupies several acres inside a bend in the Tevere river, bounded on the other side by multi-lane viale Marconi. Coming from the Marconi neighborhood, we crossed the bridge over the river and, bypassing the first road (Lungotevere Dante), took the 2nd road, via della Vasca Navale. Ahead on the right, some boys were playing basketball and, courtside, a table of after-school high school kids were chatting and looking at their cell phones. 

Just ahead to the left, what remains of a greyhound racing track (fading decoration by the artist Blu), and its modernist signature sign, "CORSE di LEVRIERI." 

To the right, the CINODROMO (dog-racing track).  

A graffiti-lovers paradise.

Just across the parking lot is vicolo Savini, a long straight street that we wouldn't take again. (We took it, and wrote a post on it, 10 years earlier, here.) On one side of the street is a massive, modern, recently-constructed building, running the length of the street, which we assume (we don't know) will house all or part of the Rossellini film campus, now located in other buildings. A few feet down Savini we passed by a colorfully dressed woman, having a walk with a young boy. She greeted us with a healthy "buona sera," which we returned. Ahead, some activity on the street. Dianne advised turning around. We kept walking, taking no photos. A man, noticeably uncomfortable, was delivering a newish automobile. Excited children opened the doors and reclined on the shiny hood.

Across from the long modern building were the homes of people (we assumed) senza fissa dimora (with no fixed residence). As we entered this "neighborhood," a man we had just passed called out, "dove andate?" (where are you going?), said with a genuine smile. I turned toward him and said (my Italian mostly failing me), "un giro," meaning (to me) "we're just taking a walk." Still smiling, he replied "girare!", perhaps to suggest that "taking a spin" on that particular street was a curious thing to do. And it was. We were not threatened, but neither did we feel safe. For a few minutes, we were unusually vulnerable. 

When we reached the end of the street (and the residences, and the activity), I took a photo from a distance of about 100 meters. 

Here, enlarged from the above photo, is the street action we walked through:

At the intersecton, a man was rummaging through some trash.

Turning left, here's what the long modern building looks like from the other side.

Not far ahead was a sports complex linked to the community of Garbatella. Just to the right of the entrance to the complex, a woman entered another area of informal housing of those without "fissa dimora."

Around a bend, several departments of the University of Rome (Roma Tre), including nuclear physics!  

Then, and still on via della Vasca Navale, a mural of Alfred Hitchcock, the first of many that signaled our arrival at R. Rossellini State Institute of Cinematography and Film. 

This one, referring to Robert DeNiro's famous scene in "Taxi Driver," seems to have gotten the line wrong: "You talkin' to me?"

Around another bend (and heading back toward the dog track), several massive pieces of wall art:

Above, "Work kills you because life is perilous" - at least one translation (from us).

Across the street, the entrance to still another encampment, this one looking more permanent, or at least more "fixed." 

And the parking lot, with vans and campers serving as homes:

Up the road and out, and across viale Marconi, to a corner bar and a shared bottle of Peroni.

Another world.

Bill 

Subterranean Rome - an engineering feat from 2500 years ago

 

At one time, one could visit,
but would you want to?

  Rome's - if not the world's - most famous sewer showed up on our RST Top 40 list, admittedly at #40, almost 9 years ago. We're revisiting it today, because it fits into our you-can't-go-there-anyway category; in this case, because it's underground.

Better to view it from the outside, here, today, as it exits into the Tevere.

 The sewer, or Cloaca Maxima (also spelled Cloaxa, as we did 9 years ago, but Cloaca is more common, we've learned since) - meaning "big sewer" - was constructed about 2500 years ago, even before the Romans as we know them. It was designed to canalize water coming down from streams on Rome's 7 hills into the Forum. It ran straight through the Forum and was first open, with small boards as crossing points (must have smelled lovely).

In the photo at right is a reconstruction of what the Cloaca Maxima looked like during the time of the Tarquinian kings (6th century BCE).

When we wrote Rome the Second Time in 2008, we were fascinated by the large mouth of the Cloaca on the Tevere that one can still see today (it shows up in Itinerary 3: The Strange Career of the Tevere, p. 48 in the print copy) - see photo above,"Lo sbocco nel Tevere." There are many views of that 2500 year-old opening, including by Piranesi (etching below), who apparently inspired Goethe to visit the Cloaca in April, 1788. There's evidence Goethe was able to go inside the sewer, though we don't know if he entered it from the Tevere. 

There are more, quite lovely, paintings and etchings at the end of this post.  Amazing a sewer can be so inspirational.

We, who are always finding ways to tie Rome, Los Angeles, and Buffalo, NY, to each other, offer to tie at least Rome and Buffalo together with the tracing above ground of the waterway below-ground. The photo below shows the route of the Cloaca Maxima, above ground, as it would look today. Recently, Bill took the two of us on a route following an important creek in Buffalo, the Scajaquada Creek, where it was placed - a mere 90 years ago -  underground, but can - more or less - be followed above ground. 

So that's our challenge to our readers and to us the next time we are able - to follow the Cloaca Maxima's route above ground.  Part of that route, of course, still wends its way through the Forum, and one can today find evidence of it above ground there, as in this photo:

These (above photo) are the remains of a small "chapel" ("Sacello") to the Sewer Venus ("Venere Cloacina"), evidenced also in a coin of the period (photo right). 

Other fun facts.  Most of the sewer is in use today, 2,500 years later, although not the part that opens onto the Tevere. Etruscans started building it by carving into the very useful tufo (photo left). It was finally (!) covered over in the 2nd century BCE, as Rome grew and there was need for more space. Agrippa (1st century BCE) took a boat and explored it. 

People who were sewer-keepers were proud enough to have this on their tombstones (photo right). 

One of the San Sebastiano stories has him thrown into it. Left, Ludovico Carracci's 1612 painting of San Sebastiano being thrown into the Cloaca

Parts of the Cloaca Maxima are built with the classic Roman marble, travertine (tons used by Richard Meier to construct The Getty Museum in LA - see, I got LA in there - as well as the Ara Pacis structure in central Rome). Photo right.

There have been visits "down there" from time to time, including the photo at the top of this post from the 1960s, as I recall. Now, small robots are used to investigate the caverns, called "robotini" or "archeorobots" - photo left.

Most of the information in this post is from a Zoom lecture by Daniela Pacchiani, a specialist in ancient archaeology, as part of Turismo Culturale Italiano's Roma Inaccessibili ("Inaccessible Rome") series in January and February.

Dianne (more 18th and 19th century paintings below!)

This is a nice "capriccio" or fantastical image
of the Cloaca's opening onto the Tevere. It is 
not too far from the temple, whose ruins are fancifully shown here,
but which are obviously not exactly in this location.

Milton Gendel, photographer: He came to Rome and never left

Picnic at Villa Centinale, near Siena.  Milton Gendel photo.  

Milton Gendel in his Washington Square apartment, 1940s

Milton Gendel's Rome experience began with a certain serendipity.  In 1949, at age 31, the New York City native was ready to return to China on a Fulbright scholarship.  Mao's Communist government intervened--the new regime did not welcome young scholars--and Gendel made his way to Rome instead, the beginning of a 60-year relationship with the city.  He never returned to live in the United States.

Within just a few years, Gendel had become a central figure in Rome's art scene.  In the mid-1950s, he helped found the Rome-New York Art Foundation, located on the Tiber Island beneath Gendel's apartment--the same apartment featured in the opening scenes of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960).  Through the foundation, and as the Rome correspondent for ART News, he played a central role in Rome's "la dolce vita" scene between 1958 and 1962, nurturing the careers of some of Italy's most important artists, including Alberto Burri, Toti Scialoja, Tancredi, Ettore Scola, and Mimmo Rotella.  Among those in Gendel's inner circle were Robert Motherwell, Alexander Calder, and Willem de Kooning.  An early close friend was Rome's architectural theoretician, Bruno Zevi.  Zevi's introduction to Adrian Olivetti led Gendel to employment doing international public relations for the Olivetti firm.

Perhaps best known as a fashion and celebrity photographer, Gendel photographed (among others), Queen Elizabeth II, Salvador Dali, Peggy Guggenheim, and John Paul Getty.  But he was also widely known for his evocative, even poetic (moreso, at least, than the postwar neo-realist aesthetic) photos of Rome, Rome environs, and Italy.

Evelyn Waugh, Lady Diana Cooper, and Georgina Masson.
(Masson's "The Companion Guide to Rome" is our favorite
long-form Rome guidebook.)

Piazza del Popolo, sans obelisk

Church Wedding

The Flying Ephebe, Rome, 1979

In 1972, Gendel moved his studio to an apartment in Palazzo Costaguti in Piazza Mattei.  Then, in 2011, in exchange for transferring his photographic archive to the Primoli Foundation, he gained access to a first floor apartment in Palazzo Primoli, complete with a loggia on the Tevere.  He lived there until his death on October 11, 2018.

Of Rome's many treasures, Gendel was especially fond of the Protestant Cemetery (now called the Non-Catholic Cemetery); the Pyramid of Cestius; the medical museum in the Santo Spirito hospital; and Borromini's church, San Carlo alle Quartro Fontane.

An early Gendel photo, and one of his most famous.  That's Gendel's shadow in the foreground.  

Bill
For more on Gendel, see this excellent interview in Vanity Fair from 2011.  Thanks to subscriber Marilyn Hochfield for alerting us to the VF piece.

Behind the Wall - the Prisons of San Michele a Ripa

San Michele a Ripa from the side away from the Tevere - a feel for its
length and barrier to whatever is inside.

The long building - perhaps the longest in Rome at a third of a mile (500 meters) - faces the Tevere with no openings, looking like an impenetrable mass that holds nothing of interest.  In fact, the complex of buildings, San Michele a Ripa ("St Michael at the river bank" if you want a tortured English translation) has been used since the 17th century for a variety of purposes, from Catholic medical facilities to prisons to military barracks to arts institutions.  On a recent tour we took of part of this Trastevere block, the focus was on the 18th-19th century use of a substantial part of the complex as a prison/reformatory for women and children.

Carlo Fontana's boys' prison.

The women and girls' prison.

The original prisons - one designated for boys and one for girls - were designed by Papal architects of some fame. Carlo Fontana, a favorite of several Popes and designer of many fountains and chapels in Rome, started the boys' facility in 1701.  He was a rather ordinary practitioner of Baroque architecture and used these techniques, admittedly with severity because of the purpose, in the prison.

Ferdinando Fuga, who designed facades for notable Rome churches such as Santa Maria in Trastevere and Santa Maria Maggiore, added the female prison later in the same century.

The prisons have recently been restored and are open to tours.  At the same time that the prisons were considered modern approaches to incarceration (3 guards could monitor all the cells - not quite a panopticon, but similar), the treatment was harsh.  Boys considered "wayward and disobedient" to their parents ended up there with punishment and moral strictures that included rations akin to starvation.  An attorney who prepared a case for the state's Appellate Court stated in 1851 that the boys who emerged after 2 years were skin and bones, full of diseases and would rather be dead.

From the outside (interior courtyard) one can
see how small and high the windows are; no
one was going to get out of here.

Women in the female section often were those in the sex trade, whom the Church wanted to reform, or perhaps just punish.

The city took over this Papal facility in 1871.  With some interruptions (use as a prison for political prisoners from 1827-1870, for example), the complex's use as a reform prison lasted until the end of the 1960s.  In her biography of the great 20th century Italian writer, Elsa Morante, Lily Tuck mentions that Elsa's legal (though not biological) father "worked as a probation officer...at a boys' reform school located at Porta Portese."  This would've been in the second and third decades of the 20th century, and clearly this was the place.

One can admire the architecture and at the same time be horrified by what transpired within these walls.

Art work being restored in the prison hall.

The large halls of the prison now are being used for restoration work on paintings.  There are some tours of these facilities to admire that work, and part of the space now can be rented for business meetings!

An excellent pamphlet on life in the prisons and on the architecture is available in Italian.

Our tour was part of the extensive Ville di Roma a Porte Aperte series sponsored by turismo culturale italiano.  April's focus was on Trastevere.

This plaque, from 1704 states that Clement IX is responsible
for this institution for lost and incorrigible adolescents,
who here are instructed in becoming more subservient (my
loose Latin translation- anyone is welcome to elaborate on it).

Dianne

A Fire on the River: the Two Sides of Rome's Tevere

Looking south from Ponte della Scienza

Early in the morning of June 28, a fire broke out on the east bank of the Tevere, between the relatively new walking bridge, Ponte della Scienza, and Ponte Marconi, downstream.  The fire started in a riverbank encampment (illegal, of course) of some 15 Romanian families, living in some 25 sheds and shacks. Fire departments from Testaccio and EUR responded, but their ability to deal with the blaze was limited by the steep terrain of the riverbank at that point.  Fortunately, no one was injured or died in the fire, but the families were made homeless.

East bank fire, seen from the west bank

Couple enjoying the river and the gazometro from beneath
the Ponte della Scienza, west bank

We found the story sad but also instructive, especially about the complexity of the Tevere as it winds through the city.  On the one hand, about a mile from the site of the fire--beneath Piazza Trilussa--the west bank of the river has been transformed by William Kentridge into one of the century's monumental works of art.

And, on that west bank one can jog or ride a bike on a paved track near water level, about 50 feet below the top of the river bank, for miles, from Ponte della Scienza north.




On the other hand, as one goes south from Ponte Testaccio, people live amid the dense foliage on the east bank of the river.  On that side of the river, there is no regular path for walking or biking, just dirt paths leading down through the weeds into the encampments.

Encampments, east bank, photographed from west bank

Still, parts of the east bank below Ponte dell'Industria (the "Iron Bridge," between Ponte Testaccio and Ponte della Scienza) are accessible, reasonably safe, and compelling in their way.  One approaches from via del Porto Fluviale (a now trendy area for restaurants in Ostiense) takes a curving street--Riva Ostiense--past some new high-end apartments, and out onto a broad street that's full of colorful graffiti of the customary "lettering" style, dramatic equipment once used for loading and unloading ships on the river, the best view in the city of the largest of the gazometri, and the backs of once-active industrial buildings.  One can "exit" over the Ponte della Scienza, a few hundred yards downriver.

The safer part of Riva Ostiense

Farther down.  These structures--industrial detritus from an earlier era--can be seen in the fire photos, above.

Farther on, the area gets dicey and possibly dangerous.  We had assumed that Riva Ostiense was open on the southern end, and it should be, but it isn't, and so there is no through traffic either for autos or pedestrians. Moreover, at some point about a quarter mile downriver from the Scienza bridge, those living on the bank have closed off what remains of the road with green canvas.  So one has to retreat--and the word feels appropriate.

Path leading down to an encampment below

The light blue at the center of the photo is an encampment, likely destroyed in the fire.

Encampment, seen from Ponte della Scienza, looking north.  Probably escaped the fire. 

Rome in a nutshell, one might say.  A nice path for jogging and biking on one side, people living in squalor and poverty on the other, a few hundreds yards from new luxury apartments.  And Riva Ostiense, open to Ponte della Scienza, beckoning to those with just a little sense of adventure, but beyond that, abandonment and no-man's-land, no effort at development or maintenance.

Bill