Modern Rome, 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler
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About this ebook
BEST TRAVEL GUIDEBOOK 2014 in eBOOK AWARDS. Seen the Coliseum and the Vatican? Tired of ancient history? Looking for a more authentic, more contemporary experience? Walk the new Rome, without the tourists. Rome with the Romans.
Following the success of their alternative guidebook, Rome the Second Time, authors Dianne Bennett and William Graebner offer four new Rome walks, all outside the city’s tourist core, all easily accessible by Metro or tram, and all in neighborhoods where Romans live and work.
Modern Rome: 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler features more than 100 hyperlinks, 63 photos, and 4 detailed maps.
“Garbatella—Garden City Suburb” is a guided tour through one of the world’s most engaging and mysterious planned communities, a 1920s creation featuring curving streets, enchanting stairways, interior courtyards, and some of the most unusual public housing ever built.
“EUR: Mid-Century Spectacle” features a dramatic locale, now a center of Rome’s business community, but planned and constructed in monumental style to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1922 Fascist March on Rome.
On the opposite end of the city, a walk through Flaminio introduces Rome’s sensational 21st-century, starchitect-designed cultural centers, and across the Tiber, the suggestive site of the 1960 Olympic Games, the Foro Italico, a virtual “Mussolini theme park” built by the Duce in the 1930s.
A fourth, stairways walk begins in Trastevere’s back yard, winding up, down, and around Rome’s 8th hill, the Gianicolo, traversing a 17th-century villa, a compelling 1941 monument to the Italian unification movement, and one of the smallest and most charming temples in all of Italy.
Pack your bags. Bring your curiosity.
William Graebner
Dianne Bennett and Bill Graebner have been spending 2-3 months each year in Rome since 1993, when he was a teaching Fulbright at the University of Rome and she fell in love with the city. She’s a tax attorney and he’s a widely published historian. They don’t own a place in Rome—they’ve lived in a dozen Rome neighborhoods—but they do have a Malaguti 250, a big scooter that allows quick and easy access to Rome’s wide-ranging attractions and to the hills and mountains beyond. Besides Modern Rome, they are the authors of Rome the Second Time: 15 Itineraries that Don’t Go to the Coliseum. They also maintain a blog, www.romethesecondtime.com, and a Facebook page.
Read more from William Graebner
Patty's Got a Gun: Patricia Hearst in 1970s America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coming Of Age In Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Modern Rome, 4 Great Walks for the Curious Traveler - William Graebner
MODERN ROME
4 GREAT WALKS
FOR THE
CURIOUS TRAVELER
DIANNE BENNETT AND WILLIAM GRAEBNER
CURIOUS TRAVELER PRESS
Copyright © 2013 by Dianne Bennett and William Graebner
ISBN-13 978-0-615-88113-3
Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.
Cover photo: Entrance to Museo della Civiltà Romana, EUR
info@curioustravelerpress.com
716.353.3288
CONTENTS
Preface
Walks
1 Garbatella: Garden City Suburb
2 EUR: Mid-Century Spectacle
3 From Mussolini to MAXXI: The Changing World of Flaminio
4 The Stairs of Trastevere
Appendix
More Walks from Rome the Second Time: 15 Itenerariers that don't go to the Coliseum
Praise for Rome the Second Time
More about the authors
About the blog, www.romethesecondtime.com
Recommended Rome blogs
PREFACE
WHY A NEW VOLUME
Our first book, Rome the Second Time: 15 Itineraries That Don’t Go to the Coliseum, as well as our blog—www.romethesecondtime.com—made us long for more. We sat around, sipping a fiano or a falanghina in our favorite wine bars, talking about the walks we didn’t include in the book, and the limitations of a blog. How could we have left out Garbatella, we kept asking ourselves, especially the year we lived next door to this fascinating social experiment of a neighborhood? Did we, devotees of 20th-century modernism, really omit (except for brief mention in a Monte Mario itinerary) the Foro Italico and all of EUR? And our 2008 sojourn in Flaminio, where we wrote most of Rome the Second Time, underscored the appeal of that nascent district that, in just a decade, emerged as modern Rome’s cultural center.
And so began the debate—he said/she said—should we update Rome the Second Time? Should we publish an entirely new book? And finally the decision to publish three itineraries as a separate eBook only. Three, you say, but there are four! Yes, another debate. After traipsing up and down hidden stairways in Los Angeles, following a trend on the West Coast to do stairway
walks in the great cities there, we concluded we could do the same for Rome. As do many of our ideas, this one began as an experiment, then was to be a blog post, and finally became the fourth walk in our new eBook, though capturing it under modern
is a bit of a stretch.
It’s now about four years and dozens of walks and drafts later. This small volume took hundreds of hours of work, both at the keyboard and on the streets of Rome, as well as months of research, in English and Italian sources.
Restricting this new, small volume to four itineraries called for restraint. Yes, we left out Tuscolano and Pasolini’s beloved Mandrione. Yes, we wanted to incorporate the architecture of 21st-century Roman Catholic churches. Yes, we could have done something special with the city’s emerging avant-garde arts community, its intriguing spaces located in Portonaccio, Casaletto, Torpignattara, and Pietralata, among others. There’s no limit to Rome’s layered wonders.
We’ll leave you with a very Italian phrase. The Italians wish everyone buon or good
something, whatever it is. For concerts, buon ascolto (good listening); for eating, buon appetito; for traveling, buon viaggio. And so, to our readers: buon walking.
PHOTOS
All photos are by William Graebner and Dianne Bennett.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In Rome the Second Time, we thanked the many Rome friends and colleagues who shared with us the wonders of the Eternal City. With this small book, we thank them once again. We add especially for Modern Rome our debt to Professor Pia Schneider, Rome Program Resident Director, Iowa State University, who gave us a delightful walking tour of Garbatella, from the perspective of someone who lives there and has taught its architecture and social spaces. We have learned a great deal from Paul Baxa and his recent book, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome, and from Gianni Rivolta’s Garbatella: Tra storia e legenda. We thank our readers, the followers of Rome-the-Second-Time’s Facebook group and of our blog, www.romethesecondtime.com, whose ideas and comments inspired us to write this new book and helped keep Rome fresh to us. Finally, we reserve never-ending gratitude for our dear friend in Rome, Massimo Vizzaccaro, not only for his gentle correction of everything we say and do that’s not quite right—no mean feat—but also for being willing to be the native Roman reader of our efforts, yet one more time. We asked Massimo simply to read the draft for our Italian errors. He did so much more than that, checking our research and, now and then, sharing with us, and ultimately with our readers, the connections between our narrative and the Rome he knows so intimately.
AUTHORS
William Graebner is a widely published author of books on American history, including Patty’s Got a Gun, about Patricia Hearst. Dianne Bennett was managing partner of Hodgson Russ LLP, Buffalo’s largest law firm. When not in Rome, getting around on their Malaguti 250, a large scooter, they live in Buffalo, New York, and Los Angeles, California.
WALKS
WALK 1
GARBATELLA: GARDEN CITY SUBURB
Garbatella, an early 20th-century suburb of Rome, is one of our favorite places. At once monumental and intimate, this sprawling, complex, planned community is unique to the city. It speaks eloquently, and with unparalleled charm and drama, of the political, economic, and social contradictions of the era that began with the end of World War I. More than a monumental housing project (although it certainly was that) or a delightful, creatively conceived planned