Walking Around in Rome
San Lorenzo

 
A lovely lady who lives in a small country town said to me recently that whenever she is in Rome, she feels stoned. This might well be from breathing the exhaust fumes to which she is unaccustomed but she has a point. Rome is, without doing anything in particular, exhilarating!

In my walks the feet do not alway guide me towards the best know monuments. I have become good friends with an artist who lives and works in the district called San Lorenzo. Here is the parallel world of free thinkers and pleasure seekers which Paolo Pasolini might have dreamt about. Girls and boys come to San Lorenzo because there is a dishevelled look which decorates the places where people transgress - the wild side. Yet living here is underscored by a pulpable sense of quartiere. It is a word that infuses the idea of neighbourhood with natural civility and amity. Hypocrisy exists as elsewhere, to the extent that in this the most democratic of all Roman neighbourhoods, the more successful artists, the better known personalities, the harder working shopkeepers are envied. Despite the general friendliness of the bars and night joints, the pub keepers know in the end where the Euro is being made. Certain legal controls are overlooked but not the economic ones.

San Lorenzo is immediately outside of the centro storico divided from the messy Stazione Termini area by the magnificent remains of the old Roman Wall. However its purpose has by now been inverted. The wall serves to keep the invading hordes in. None dare to venture out. San Lorenzo with its reputation as a hive of communists and drug users is not on the tourist map.

The sights here the visitors miss are not necessarily important according to the conventions of the Grand Tour but starting with Porta Maggiore one comes across remarkable visions such as the simplicity of this eternally flowing water of an antique fountain.

The surprising thing is to find that in the interior of the wall are spaces where people still live and so by definition it is not really a relic at all.

Roma, 2 12 2006