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.  

Grass comes to Rome

Captive grass in Piazza Venezia

There is no grass in Rome.  Not until recently, anyway.  For years what passed for grass in Rome consisted mostly of weeds, trimmed now and then (mostly then).  The "grassy" spaces in public parks and piazzas consisted of dirt, stones--and trampled weeds.

Piazza Cavour

Things have changed.  Grass has arrived!  Here and there, the keen observer will see signs of the emergence of a new grass aesthetic.  Piazza Venezia now has two grass-as-spectacle areas, both featuring grass so perfect, and so perfectly maintained, as to provoke envy in any American suburban homeowner.  The Scotts Turf Builder look, the grass protected from the public by short, decorative fences.  Casa del Jazz offers a grass lawn, populated by signs telling you not to walk on it.  There's plenty of grass in EUR (after all, it was built as a suburb), but also plenty of weeds.  And elegant Piazza Cavour, behind the grandiose Palace of Justice, has some very nice grass. 

Real grass in Piazza dei Rei di Roma.  Not for dogs or humans,
according to the sign.

Piazza dei Re di Roma has some natural grass that actually looks like grass, though there, and elsewhere, the "grass aesthetic" also includes artificial grass--some sort of astroturf (love that spaceage term), immune to dogs. 

Rotary project, Trieste

In upscale Trieste, the Rotary Club maintains a small plot of genuine grass, perhaps so that children can grow up knowing what it is. 







  

They painted the grass green

In Piazza Sant' Emerenziana, in the neighborhood  known familiarly as the "Quartiere Africano," city authorities spruced up a huge subway ventilation unit by covering it with grass and then, as the grass lost its color in the heat, spray-painting it green.   

Keep off the grass couch!

Even the Rome art world has come to appreciate grass.  A fellow of the American Academy showed the way several years ago with a work of grass so tempting that Dianne assumed, incorrectly, that it was designed to be walked on.  More recently, the Casa dell'Architettura (also known as the Aquario,
because it's a former aquarium), showed off a grass-covered sofa, chair, end table, and lamp.  For those who have everything!

Bill

Artificial turf in Piazza dei Re di Roma.  Twenty years ago, the piazza was a dump.

Alberto Moravia: Critic of the New Rome

For all its virtues, Rome has spawned only a few novelists of the first rank:  Carlo Emilio Gadda, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia.  Gadda and Pasolini brought the city into their books; Rome's streets and neighborhoods, the city's fabric, are more than settings--they are protagonists.

Moravia's work is of a different sort.  Although his novels are set in Rome, the city is by and large only a backdrop for the personal, psychological issues with which he was most absorbed.  "Particularly in his 1950s literature," writes Victoria G. Tillson in the Annali d'Italianistica (2010), "the Italian capital functions as a leit-motif, serving as a solid point of reference from which the author could explore modern humankind's battles with alienation and malaise.  Moravia's Rome, in its blandness and sameness, reflects the accompanying feelings of indifference and boredom often suffered by his protagonists." 

Moravia lived on the top floor.  It's likely he
didn't appreciate the building.

It strikes RST as perverse that the words "blandness" and "sameness" could be used to describe Rome, even a writer's perception of Rome.  To be sure, Moravia lived his last decades in one of  Rome's less dynamic neighborhoods--Prati--but that hardly explains his virtual dismissal of a city that others (Federico Fellini, to name only one) found so compelling, so full of life.

Corviale.  Shades of Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green. But
unusual for Rome.   

The truth is that Moravia was fond of Rome--but mostly the old Rome, the Centro, and to a lesser extent, the mostly failed efforts at Garbatella and Monte Sacro to create "garden cities."  For the "new" Rome--the sub-urban Rome begun by the Fascist regime and pursued by the postwar Christian Democrats--Moravia had little but contempt (to use the title of his 1963 novel).  Unlike his close friend Pasolini, he wasn't attracted by Rome's many public housing projects, or by their residents.  One can only imagine what he must have thought of Corviale, the gigantic monolith, home to thousands, built in the south of Rome in the 1970s. 

But it wasn's just the "projects."  He seems to have disliked all, or most, big and modern apartment complexes, of the sort that in the postwar years populated large areas of the Piazza Bologna

A massive housing complex in the Trieste zone.  Overbearing,
but it feeds the commercial life of the area, and the
curving façade and Fascist-inspired entrance
are not without interest. 

neighborhood, Tuscolano, Flaminio (the buildings constructed for the 1960 Olympics), Trieste, Marconi, Centocelle and, yes, his own Prati.  In a 1989 interview, he reasoned that despite the harm done by the Fascists, the real culprits were  the "Christian Democratic city councils.  The horror began with those city councils and with the building speculation."  In the process, the look and feel of the city was, Moravia believed, irreparably damaged. 

That's all quite understandable, and especially so in the two decades after 1955, when architectural modernism had run out of ideas and postmodernism had yet to make its mark.  In the world of design, it was an especially awkward period, yielding much that was ungainly and "brutal"-ist, little that was elegant or inventive.  Too many ordinary buildings. 

In essence, Moravia was profoundly nostalgic for the old Rome, and sharply critical of the new one.  As Tillson notes, he "seems to have hoped that Rome, by the mid-1970s, would have relented in its modernizing processes and accepted its distinctiveness among world cities, as one that ironically lives better in its past than in its present."  Most tourists, we think, would share those sentiments, having little interest in Rome's suburbs, its outlying neighborhoods, its periphery.

As our readers may know, we don't share Moravia's concerns.  We're fascinated--too fascinated, some may feel--by the very neighborhoods and structures that Moravia lamented.  He was, we think, a creature of his time: rooted in Rome's past, unable to see its future.  Unable to appreciate the magic that sheer density, responsibly generated, with an eye to community, can produce.  At Piazza Bologna, Trionfale, Trieste, Tuscolano, Boccea and a dozen other places, the new Rome is on display.  

See for yourself.  Bill

Rome's Scaffolds and Cranes

Crane working at the top of the Spanish Steps

Costly scaffolding, Piazza Verbano, quartiere Trieste

Most of the buildings in Rome have a stucco exterior.  It's a durable material, and its insulating, cooling properties make it ideally suited to Rome's sultry summers.  But it deteriorates over time, and when repairs are needed, up goes the scaffolding.  Romans would seem to be expert not only in the art of stuccoing, but in assembling scaffolds; indeed, there's a school in Tor Vergata where students are trained to assemble scaffolds ("impalcature") on which workers can do their jobs in safety. 

More Trieste work

Nonetheless, work once done on scaffolding is increasingly being done without scaffolding--or without much of it.  The competition is from cranes.  As one of our Italian sources explained, companies erecting scaffolds in public space--along a sidewalk in front of a building--pay high fees.  Cranes do their work and leave; no fee to be paid, or only a small one for the limited scaffolding required to protect pedestrians. 

Crane over our terrace

We had first-hand experience of the crane in 2006, when we lived in the quartiere of Appio Latino.  Our apartment was on the ground floor (not the Italian ideal), but it had a lovely terrace; upper floors had only balconies.  Unfortunately, the condominium ("condominio") chose to repair the balconies while we were there.  Had they used scaffolding to do so, it would have covered half our terrace.  Instead, they brought in a crane, which for several weeks hovered over our umbrella, doing its work.

Bill

Expensive scaffolding at a corner bar in via Nomentana.  At right, Waldo.

Bart Simpson: Favorite of Rome's Graffiti Writers

"The Simpsons" family is as well known in Italy as the Obamas or the Kennedys.  And among Rome's graffiti writers, it's to be expected that the favorite would be Bart, with his alternative sensibilities and air of youthful rebellion.  We found this example on via Lariana in the quartiere of Trieste.  Bart looks happy and satisfied.  And we think we know why.  Bill