Campo dei Miracoli

There are Roman addresses that promise more than they deliver, and addresses that deliver far more than they promise. Via Poggio Verde 455 belongs to the second category, and the fact that the place is called Campo dei Miracoli doesn't help you see it: the name makes you think of the square in Pisa, or of Collodi's fable, and instead neither the leaning tower nor the Cat and the Fox have anything to do with it. We're in Corviale, on the southwest outskirts of Rome, Municipio XI, a couple of kilometers from the Grande Raccordo Anulare, and the Campo dei Miracoli is a sports center. A very particular sports center, built with wood and clay instead of concrete, born in 2009 inside one of the most discussed public housing neighborhoods in Europe, and over the years become one of the few things in Corviale that people talk about without having to lower their voice.

I'll say it right away, because it's only fair that readers know where they're setting foot: the Campo dei Miracoli is not a monument, not a museum, not a Baroque church. It's the operational home of a nonprofit amateur sports association called Calciosociale, and its full legal name is Campo dei Miracoli - centro sportivo Valentina Venanzi. You don't buy a ticket and you don't walk in during continuous hours to admire something. And yet it's one of the most interesting places in this quadrant of Rome, and the reason is entirely architectural, social and, let me say it without rhetoric, civic. Anyone who comes all the way here finds a building that was included in Open House Roma, the international architecture festival that opens the doors of notable buildings free of charge in 20 cities of the world, from London to New York. It doesn't happen to many suburban soccer fields.

In the lines that follow I tell three things in order: what exactly the Campo dei Miracoli is and how it works. What Corviale is, the neighborhood that contains it, with its astonishing urban planning history and a thousand years of Roman countryside behind it. And what there is to really see around it, because the quadrant between Via Portuense and Via di Bravetta hides 17th-century farmhouses, nature reserves, catacombs, a 19th-century fort that is a place of national memory and a papal hunting estate that belonged to the chapter of St. Peter's. The bulk of the surprise, for those coming from outside, is right here.

Campo dei Miracoli: where exactly it is

The address is via Poggio Verde 455, 00148 Rome. Via Poggio Verde is one of the four streets that bound the Nuovo Corviale residential complex, together with via Ettore Ferrari, via Marino Mazzacurati and via dei Sampieri. It means the Campo dei Miracoli lies literally in the shadow of the Serpentone, the building 986 meters long that since the 1980s has become, in the Italian collective imagination, the very symbol of the Roman periphery. Anyone arriving for the first time has an almost obligatory reaction: they look at the kilometer-long concrete wall running beside them, then look at the gate of the sports center, and understand that the contrast is not accidental but is exactly the point.

From an administrative point of view we are in the urban zone 15F Corviale, which extends over the suburb S. VIII Gianicolense and belongs to Municipio Roma XI. The zone borders the Buon Pastore to the north, the Colli Portuensi to the east, the Trullo to the south and the Magliana to the west. It's a quadrant that Romans from the center know little and cross even less, and that nevertheless has a surprising density of history: under the asphalt and under the meadows are the ancient Via Portuense, the estates of the Vatican chapter, the creeks that run down to the Tiber and the remaining woods of the Silva Maesia, the forest that in the classical age occupied the whole right bank of the river from the Urbe to the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The relationship with Via Portuense

Via Portuense is the backbone of the whole quadrant and is a real consular road, not a modern ring road with a grand name. It connected Rome to Portus, the imperial port of Claudius and Trajan at the mouth of the Tiber, and gave its name to the Portuense quarter (Q. XI, one of the first 15 quarters created in 1911 and officially established in 1921) and to the suburb S. VII. The Campo dei Miracoli is a little uphill from the Portuense, on the hill that rises toward the Casetta Mattei: anyone arriving by car from the Raccordo or from the city almost always takes the Portuense and then climbs.

The mental coordinates for getting oriented

If I had to explain the location to someone who only knows postcard Rome, I'd put it like this: take Piazza San Pietro, draw a line southwest for about 10 kilometers, go past Monteverde and Villa Doria Pamphilj, cross the Colli Portuensi, and you're on the plateau that slopes down toward the Tiber between the Portuense and the Bravetta. From some points on this plateau you can see the dome of St. Peter's very well, far off, small and sharp. It's a detail that the 17th-century designers of the villas here had calculated precisely, and one that anyone walking in the Valle dei Casali Reserve still finds intact today.

How to Get to Campo dei Miracoli

No subway line reaches Corviale, and this is one of the neighborhood's long-standing problems. The two Rome subway lines, A and B, pass far away, and the whole area depends on surface buses and on the regional railway that runs along the Tiber. The easiest way to get there by public transport is to go to Roma Trastevere station or Magliana station and take a bus from there toward Corviale-Casetta Mattei. The buses run along Via Portuense and then climb along Via della Casetta Mattei or Via Poggio Verde, and the stops are a few dozen meters from the gates of the sports center. Lines change fairly often and it's best to check them the same day on the Rome public transport app, because detours for roadworks are a constant in this area.

By car it's easier than it looks. From the Grande Raccordo Anulare the exit to take is the one for Via Portuense, then you head up toward Corviale following the signs for the Casetta Mattei shopping center, the landmark everyone in the area knows. Parking is not a problem, and that's one of the rare pieces of good news you can give a driver in Rome: there's room here, the urban planning of the 1970s had provided for an entire underground level of parking beneath the Serpentone, and the perimeter streets are wide.

How Long It Takes from the Center

From the historic center you realistically need between 40 and 60 minutes by public transport, depending on the connection, and between 20 and 35 by car outside rush hour. It's not a trip you improvise in half an hour between the Pantheon and Trastevere. It's a half day, and it should be planned as one. The good news is that within a three-kilometer radius there's enough to see to amply justify the trip, and I talk about it at length further on.

A Practical Warning About Hours

The Calciosociale office is open to the public Monday to Friday, in the morning from 9 to 13 and in the afternoon from 16 to 19:30. These are office hours, not ticket office hours. Campo dei Miracoli is a working sports facility, with training sessions, leagues, school groups and educational activities, and access for people who aren't enrolled has to be arranged. The phone number and email address are published on the association's website, and a call before setting out saves you an hour on the bus.

What Campo dei Miracoli Really Is

Calciosociale was founded in 2005 as a nonprofit amateur sports club. Its founder is Massimo Vallati, a former soccer player and former ultras member, who decided to apply a simple and rather radical idea: if soccer is the most powerful social and media phenomenon we have, then changing the rules of soccer is a way to try to change the rules of the world. In 2009, with the work of volunteers, institutions, companies and citizens, that idea took physical form: Campo dei Miracoli was born, on a public area that had been completely abandoned, inside the Corviale neighborhood.

The formula the association uses to define itself is "we turn soccer fields into gyms for life," and the motto is even sharper: only those who take care of things win. Taking care of the environment, of relationships, of yourself. Put like that it may sound like an advertising campaign slogan, but it's actually the literal translation of a sports rulebook that exists, that is applied every week and that awards real points in the standings. I'll come back to this shortly, because it's the most interesting part of the whole story.

The Numbers of the Experience

The association reports about 3,000 young people and families involved, nine calciosociale experiences active in Italy and four in Europe. In Italy the method has reached, besides Rome, Montevarchi and Empoli in Tuscany, Naples in the Scampia neighborhood, Quartu Sant'Elena in Sardinia and Carsoli in Abruzzo. Every year twinnings and summer camps are organized that connect the different experiences, and Campo dei Miracoli in Corviale works as the mother house of the whole network.

It's Not a Commercial Facility, and It's Worth Saying So

It's worth being clear on a point that creates endless confusion in Rome: Campo dei Miracoli is not a private sports center that rents the little field by the hour to groups of friends on Thursday nights. It's the home of a third-sector organization that lives on donations, on the 5 per mille, on projects funded by public bodies and foundations, and partly on companies using the facility for events, meetings and training activities. Anyone who wants to support the work can do so, anyone who wants to visit the facility can ask, anyone who wants to enroll a child in the soccer school can do so. Anyone who simply wants a field to rent is probably at the wrong address, and also has the wrong idea of the place.

The Rules of the Game Played at Campo dei Miracoli

Here the story gets fascinating, and I ask you to follow me because it's not a folkloric oddity. It's an educational system built with a certain precision. At Campo dei Miracoli soccer is played with rules rewritten from scratch, and all the rules have the same declared purpose, which is to favor taking care of relationships over simple sports competition.

The teams are mixed: boys and girls play together, of any age, origin and religion. There is no referee: the players make the decisions, which means every doubtful foul becomes a negotiation and every negotiation becomes an exercise. Penalties are taken by the weakest players, and this is the rule that throws people the most when they hear it for the first time. In normal soccer the strongest player takes the penalty, here it's taken by whoever has the least technique, and the team has to deal with this asymmetry instead of getting around it. And above all the matches are not played only on the field: they are also played off the field, where points are earned through acts of active citizenship, through the recovery of degraded spaces, through meetings and workshops on legality, inclusion and protection of the environment.

What Really Changes, in Practice

The result is that the league standings don't reward whoever scores the most. The journalist Domenico Iannacone, who dedicated two episodes of his television program on Rai 3 to Campo dei Miracoli, said it better than I can: "On this field, where everyone can play, the winner is not the one who scores the most but the one who takes the most care of things and of others." It's a sentence that sounds like a manifesto and is instead the technical description of a rulebook.

The Tournament Changes Theme Every Year

Each edition of the championship is dedicated to a theme, and the teams take the names of people connected to that theme. In one edition the thread was protection of the environment, and the kids wore on their jerseys the names of women and men who fought for it. In 2026 the theme is freedom of the press, and the teams carry the names of journalists and reporters who paid with their lives or fought to tell the truth: Enzo Baldoni, Simone Camilli, Ilaria Alpi, Pippo Fava, Mario Francese, Elena Milashina, Sai Zaw Thaike and others. Whoever wears that jersey has to know who the person was whose name they carry on their shoulders, and this is part of the game as much as the ball.

The Architecture of Campo dei Miracoli: A Building Without Concrete

Now we get to the part that interests anyone who loves architecture, and that justifies the trip by itself. The Campo dei Miracoli headquarters is built with wood, clay, hemp and reed, with solar panels and a geothermal system. The association says it with a formula that has the merit of brevity: there is no concrete in Campo dei Miracoli. And it's a statement that takes on a very different weight when you consider that the building stands exactly under 986 meters of reinforced concrete walls, that is under the involuntary monument to the Italian faith in concrete.

The center is described as the first experiment in social architecture in a Roman periphery, and it was built according to bio-architecture criteria. Precisely because of these characteristics it was included in the program of Open House Roma, the international architecture festival developed on four continents and in 20 cities, which once a year opens the doors of hundreds of notable buildings free of charge and offers guided tours. And it received the Prize for Eco-Sustainable Development at Ecomondo, the international fair dedicated to projects that stand out for innovation and effectiveness in sustainable development.

The Dimensions of the Spaces

The main interior space measures 18 meters by 38, with a height of 7 meters. These are the dimensions that make it possible to host events of a certain scale, and they are also the dimensions that an architect immediately reads as a single undivided volume. The multipurpose room measures 9 meters by 5.60 and has a geothermal system, which means a stable temperature in winter and summer without frenzied energy consumption. The entire interior floor is covered with natural beech parquet.

No Architectural Barriers

A detail that usually goes unnoticed and that here is structural: the building has no architectural barriers. The combination of the absence of barriers and the variety of sports that can be played means the facility is truly accessible to anyone, and not in the advertising sense of the term. In a neighborhood where the fourth floor of a nine-story building has been an accessibility problem in itself for decades, this is not a decorative detail.

The Bark Roof of Campo dei Miracoli

If I had to choose a single element of Campo dei Miracoli to tell someone who will never come here, I'd choose the roof. The building's gray concrete roof measures 900 square meters, and on those 900 square meters 5,000 pieces of tree bark have been applied. The bark is normally a waste product of woodworking: it ends up in fireplaces and stoves. Here it was stripped, aged, varnished and turned into a covering material, creating what the association claims as the first roof in the world made entirely of tree bark.

The most moving part is the method. Every piece of bark was worked by hand by people and associations from all over Italy, from the south to the north: kids, children, volunteers and residents of the neighborhood. Every piece of bark is different from all the others, because that's how bark is, no two trees are identical, and together they make up a single surface. It took months and months of work. The result is that the residents of Corviale look at that roof and know that they made part of it themselves, which is a much sounder definition of urban redevelopment than quite a few master plans.

Why a Roof Matters More Than a Facade

In Corviale the roof has an additional meaning that people arriving from outside don't grasp right away. The Serpentone is 37 meters tall, and from many apartments on the upper floors you look down. That means the roof of Campo dei Miracoli is not a stage backdrop for passersby: it's the surface that hundreds of families see every day from the kitchen window. Covering it with wood instead of leaving it gray was a choice made for them, not for visitors. It's architecture designed from the point of view of the person looking at it from above, and I know few other Roman cases where this was done consciously.

The Playing Fields of Campo dei Miracoli

The soccer fields of the original facility are two: a 7-a-side field that measures 41 meters by 31 and an 8-a-side field that measures 55 meters by 35. They are eco-sustainable surfaces, made with a Limonta patent and with an infill of cork, coconut and linseed oil. None of the three words belongs to the usual vocabulary of artificial turf fields, and the choice is consistent with everything else about the building.

For the new fields the association adopted a different and equally interesting route: the use of materials that come from recycling end-of-life tires. It's the principle of the circular economy applied to a soccer field, and it's not a local invention but a practice that several Italian sports clubs have adopted in recent years. Among the supporters of the project, in fact, there is also the consortium that handles end-of-life tires in Italy.

Why the Dimensions Matter

A 7-a-side field of 41 meters by 31 and an 8-a-side field of 55 by 35 are not regulation stadium dimensions, and they don't have to be. They are the dimensions needed to let children and kids play in small groups, where everyone touches the ball many times per match. It's exactly the logic of the training method that the facility's soccer school adopts, FUNiño, that is play on reduced fields with reduced teams, which is the method in which players like Xavi, Iniesta and Messi grew up in Barcelona's cantera. Anyone who knows youth soccer teaching knows that the difference between a kid who touches the ball eight times in a match and one who touches it 80 times is everything.

The 11-a-side Field of Campo dei Miracoli

For years the facility's limit was one of age even before it was a sports one. Kids who grew up in the soccer school had to leave once they passed 13: without an 11-a-side field you can't take part in federation tournaments, and the educational path begun at Campo dei Miracoli was interrupted at exactly the age when interrupting it does the most damage. Building a regulation 11-against-11 field, in a periphery, without ordinary public money, was the project the association pursued for a decade, also funding it with a fundraising campaign in which you could literally buy the sods of the lawn.

On February 26, 2022 the 11-a-side field was inaugurated. It's the first regulation 11-a-side soccer field in Corviale, and for the neighborhood it has a meaning that goes beyond sport: it means teams come here instead of leaving from here. President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella took part in the inauguration morning, and his words to the kids were reported by the association and deserve to be read in full: "What emerges from the rules of Calciosociale is the importance of making the moment of play, of meeting, a place of friendship that develops, that grows, a place of mutual respect among all people, a movement of trust. Don't lose these habits, kids. Don't lose these criteria, always help each other, have trust in each other. Because if this takes hold in society, then it always takes hold among adults too."

Who Made the 11-a-side Field Possible

The network of supporters of the 11-a-side field says a lot about the hybrid nature of this experience, which brings together public bodies, sports federations, banking and insurance foundations and private companies: Ater Roma, Sport e Salute, Regione Lazio, Istituto per il Credito Sportivo, the Italian Football Federation, the end-of-life tire consortium, Fondazione Ania, Acea, Acqua Lete, adidas, Unicusano and Duferco. In a country where basic sports facilities have been stalled for decades, a field built with this combination of forces is a case study.

Women's Soccer

One of the three declared pillars of the 11-a-side field project concerns girls. The soccer school has been for boys and girls from the beginning, and with the new field the association has set up a campaign explicitly aimed at breaking down gender stereotypes in access to soccer. Anyone who has spent time on periphery fields in the 1990s knows how unthinkable this was then, and how far from taken for granted it still is now.

The Curva dei Miracoli

On October 21, 2025 the Curva dei Miracoli was born at Campo dei Miracoli, presented by the association as the first anti-mafia curva in Italy. It's not just one more set of bleachers: it's a choice of language, and for anyone who knows the world of Italian organized fan groups it's a rather bold choice. The curva, in soccer vocabulary, is the section where the fans organize, and over the last 40 years it has also been the place where dynamics of violence took root and, in some cities, criminal infiltration. Taking that word and turning it upside down, an ethical, positive and joyful curva where people dance, sing and produce a culture of legality, is an operation that makes sense only if it's done by someone who knows that world from the inside. The founder of Calciosociale, let's remember, is a former ultras member.

The curva also has a banal and important practical function: it increases the seating, and so allows Campo dei Miracoli to welcome more people during matches. Cheering becomes a community matter for the kids, and the neighborhood's Sundays gain a place to be. In an area where outdoor gathering places can be counted on the fingers of one hand, a new set of bleachers is worth more than it seems.

What You See from Up There

From the curva you see the field, obviously, but you also see the profile of the Serpentone closing the horizon to the north. It's one of the most effective views of contemporary Rome: in the foreground a green lawn and little kids, in the background a kilometer of reinforced concrete from 1975. No comment is needed, the image speaks for itself.

The Soccer School of Campo dei Miracoli

The facility's educational activities are built on two legs. The first is the Accademia del Talento, which the association defines as the first soccer school founded on the principles of calciosociale. Alongside technical training and athletic preparation, the kids follow once a week an educational path on fair play, inclusion and anti-racism, and are placed in the calciosociale tournament. The declared goal is to raise champions in sport and in life, a formula that would be unbearable if it weren't accompanied by a rulebook that translates it into points.

The second is the Miracoli Football Club, the boys' and girls' soccer school that represents the evolution of the first. Members take part one day a week in the calciosociale championship and for the rest follow training with the FUNiño method. The technical company that outfits Miracoli FC is adidas, which chose Calciosociale at the time of the European soccer championship also hosted in Rome, and became its technical partner.

Who Can Enroll

The educational activities are aimed at children and kids from 5 to 17 years old, and one of the explicit goals of the 11-a-side field was precisely to widen this range by making continuity possible beyond age 13. Information on enrollment is requested from the office, during public opening hours.

Volunteering

Anyone who is 18 and wants to lend a hand can apply as a volunteer. The areas are the calciosociale tournament, the activities of the Accademia del Talento, fundraising and communications. The procedure involves a written application and an interview with the staff, which is a polite way of saying that volunteering here is not an afternoon of charity but a commitment with a calendar.

The Projects That Run Through Campo dei Miracoli

A sports center that was only a sports center wouldn't have a list of projects funded by ministries, foundations and the European Commission. Campo dei Miracoli, instead, is the operational base of a remarkable number of initiatives, and it's worth going through them because they tell you better than any description what really happens inside those gates.

CROSS, the European Project

CROSS, an acronym for Cohesion and Re-integration Opportunities through Social Soccer, was funded by the EACEA agency of the European Commission under the "Collaborative Partnership" call of the Erasmus+ Sport program, with funding of 398,125.60 euros. The project built a network in five member countries, with Calciosociale as lead partner, together with the University of Rome Tor Vergata, College West Anglia in England, Debreceni Honved SE in Hungary, SC Levski in Bulgaria and Stockle Sport and Care in Germany. That an association born in a Roman periphery acts as lead partner of a European consortium across five countries is not routine business.

The Spirituality Triangular

Carried out with the Department for Equal Opportunities through UNAR, the Triangular connected three associations from three cities that are very different in size, region and makeup of the foreign population: Rome with the Corviale neighborhood, Empoli and Quartu Sant'Elena. At the end of three months of shared work, more than 100 kids from Sardinia, Tuscany, Marche and Piedmont met at Campo dei Miracoli to discuss integration and mutual understanding, also through the cultural and culinary heritage of the minorities involved.

Gyms for Life

The project organized simultaneous tournaments in Grosseto, Empoli, Rome and Modica, with more than 300 participants divided into mixed teams made up of boys and girls between 11 and 18 and of women and men up to 70. The off-field matches were urban space recovery actions. The funding came from the Office for Sport of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

Periphery Organizing

An educating community project that brought together Corviale, Tor Bella Monaca and Tor San Lorenzo, with about 10 partners including the University of Rome Tor Vergata, and that applied the method of community organizing: training local leaders and building civic coalitions for urban regeneration and inclusion. The funder was Fondazione Con i Bambini, the body created to fight child educational poverty.

Calcio d'inizio

240 middle school students from the "Margherita Hack" and "Antonio Gramsci" comprehensive institutes were hosted at Campo dei Miracoli in a series of meetings built around three activities: calciosociale matches, a radio workshop in which the kids produced podcasts in interview form, reflecting on the differences between traditional soccer and the rules of calciosociale, and a self-production workshop in which they made a low-environmental-impact liquid detergent and learned to sprout lentils and sow tomatoes. The project was funded by the Ministry of Education as part of interventions aimed at the areas of greatest socio-cultural deprivation in the country after the health emergency.

The Legality Festival at Campo dei Miracoli

From May 27 to 29, 2022, 30 years after the Capaci and via D'Amelio massacres, Campo dei Miracoli hosted the Festival of Legality and Spirituality: three days of workshops, conferences, debates and concerts. The pairing of the two words, legality and spirituality, is not accidental and is explained by the organizers with a sentence worth repeating: to build a fairer society we have to start again from taking care of ourselves and listening to others.

The program of those three days gives the measure of what a periphery soccer field can become when someone decides to use it well. On the morning of May 27, students from 15 schools were involved. At 10 the State Police's marching Fanfara performed inside the 11-a-side field. Next the students watched demonstrations by the dog handlers and the bomb disposal experts and a performance by the Fiamme Oro Youth Sports Group. The afternoon was devoted to the presentation of a book written by a State Police official, a match between law enforcement and Calciosociale kids, and an evening concert.

The Second and Third Days

On May 28 the morning was devoted to the elderly, with a meeting on how to protect yourself from scams, then on cyberbullying and road safety, with the association for road victims named after Elena Aubry, Fondazione Ania and representatives of the Traffic Police. In the afternoon the kids met investigators engaged in anti-mafia operations, a four-team tournament was played and in the evening there was a meeting with Luigi Verdi of the Fraternità di Romena. May 29 opened with a ceremony in memory of the people who gave their lives for legality and justice, and ended with a match.

Why a Festival Like This Is Held on a Sports Field

Because the sports field, in a neighborhood like this, is one of the very few neutral places that exist. It's not a school, not a parish, not a party headquarters, not a shopping center. It's a space where a 15-year-old kid and a police officer in uniform can be within the same perimeter without either of them feeling on someone else's turf. Anyone who works in the peripheries knows how rare this is and how much it costs to build.

The Recognitions of Campo dei Miracoli

In 2012 Calciosociale was invited to Brussels, to the seat of the European Parliament, to tell its experience as an example of an integration project to export to European capitals. In 2014, during the Italian presidency of the European Union, the experience was named an Italian Best Practice for Sport and Social Inclusion. These are institutional recognitions, the kind you note on a résumé and forget the next day, but in this case they had a practical consequence: they opened the way to the European funding that allowed the projects to grow.

On the non-institutional side, the organization joined the international network of Ashoka, which selects innovative social entrepreneurs and is active in 90 countries: the fellows elected worldwide number about 3,700, of whom about 20 are in Italy. In October 2020 Calciosociale also entered the Periferiacapitale program of the Charlemagne Foundation, dedicated to associations in Rome's peripheries, together with 17 other organizations.

The Architectural Recognitions

They have already been mentioned but are worth repeating because they are the ones that matter most to visitors: inclusion in Open House Roma and the Prize for Eco-Sustainable Development at Ecomondo. The first certifies that the building is worth visiting for architectural reasons, the second that its construction choices have a value that goes beyond the single case.

Visiting Campo dei Miracoli: What to Expect

I'm honest to the end, because I don't want anyone to take a bus for an hour and then be disappointed. Campo dei Miracoli has no ticket office, no marked visitor route, no bookshop and no explanatory panels. It's a living sports facility, where dozens of children train every afternoon and where the league matches are played on weekends. Anyone who shows up at the gate without notice will find, at best, someone kind who explains that they're working.

The right way to visit is different, and it's twofold. The first is to call or write to the office in advance and ask: the association explicitly states that anyone who wants to see the facility is welcome, and groups are received. The second is to wait for the annual edition of Open House Roma and check whether the center is on the list of open buildings: in that case the visit is free, guided and designed precisely for people who want to understand how the building is made.

The Third Way, Which Is the Best

There is, though, a third possibility, and for me it's the one that gives you the place for what it is: go on Sunday, on a league match day, and sit in the curva. There's no ticket, no turnstile and no museum aura. There are boys and girls playing together, adults arguing over a foul with no referee, a set of bleachers singing and a kilometer of reinforced concrete in the background. In 20 minutes you understand more about Italian soccer, and about Rome's peripheries, than from 20 articles.

Campo dei Miracoli for Companies, Events and Groups

Part of the facility's income comes from companies and organizations using the spaces for meetings, conferences, seminars, training, team building activities and events. The dimensions already given (the interior space of 18 meters by 38 with a height of seven meters and the multipurpose room of 9 by 5.60 with a geothermal system) should be read for what they are: the concrete possibility of holding a company meeting inside a wood and clay building with a bark roof, instead of in some ordinary conference room in an EUR hotel.

The activities offered to companies include internal tournaments between departments, pizza and Roman pinsa classes and shared experiences with the association's kids. The declared logic is that the field becomes a metaphor for the workplace: colleagues are teammates, the manager is the coach, and the rules of calciosociale (mixed teams, no referee, penalties for the weakest) produce in three hours of play an amount of friction and negotiation that no communication course can simulate. Anyone who organizes corporate training will understand right away why it works.

Ways to Support

Besides using the spaces, a company can support the association with voluntary cash contributions or with donations of goods and services: technical equipment and materials for the children's activities, advertising space for awareness campaigns. An individual can donate directly, allocate the 5 per mille or apply as a volunteer. All the options are explained on the association's official website, calciosociale.it.

Corviale, the Neighborhood That Hosts Campo dei Miracoli

Now let's lift our eyes from the field and look at the context, because without the context Campo dei Miracoli is incomprehensible. The residential complex that towers over it is officially called Nuovo Corviale, takes its name from the urban planning zone in which it was built and Romans call it il Serpentone. It houses about 4,500 residents, is owned by ATER of the City of Rome (the former Autonomous Institute for Public Housing) and is, without exaggeration, one of the most famous and most debated residential buildings in the world.

The design began in 1972 and was entrusted to a group of 23 architects coordinated by Mario Fiorentino, with first-rate names such as Federico Gorio, Piero Maria Lugli, Giulio Sterbini and Michele Valori. The idea was not to build a big barracks-like block: it was exactly the opposite. Fiorentino wanted to react to the Roman urban development of the 1960s, the kind that had produced entire neighborhoods without services, the infamous dormitory neighborhoods. Nuovo Corviale was supposed to be self-sufficient, a complete fragment of a city able to offer services to the whole community that would live in it. His words: "The new Corviale is a large residential unit, a single building complex that contains and expresses the complexity and richness of relationships proper to the city."

What the Original Plan Called For

The list of planned services is impressive even today: four open-air theaters, the district offices, a library, schools from kindergarten to middle school, health services, a market, a meeting hall with 500 seats, and an entire floor, the fourth, reserved exclusively for commercial and craft activities, with a panoramic view over the green of the Agro romano. 1,200 apartments of different sizes, integrated with shared spaces, with walkways, courtyards and common rooms for each lot. On paper it was the most ambitious attempt at public housing ever made in Italy.

The Critics' Verdict

The architect Franco Purini gave a particularly lucid reading of the project: "Fiorentino had a conception of living as a heroic movement, he wanted his gigantic living machine to be a kind of community that would regulate itself by making collective interests prevail over individual ones. Fiorentino, however, arrived too late, when by the end of the 1970s postmodernism had taken hold in architecture, which on the contrary exalted the individual and his private needs instead." And then the verdict: "Corviale is the most important work built in Rome in all the 1970s and one of the most significant architectures produced in the world in those years." It's not a courtesy compliment: it's the recognition that here a game of international scale was played, and it was lost for reasons that have little to do with architecture.

The Dimensions of the Serpentone You See from Campo dei Miracoli

The numbers of Corviale should be stated precisely, because they are the reason for its fame. The main body is 986 meters long, 37 tall, has nine floors plus the underground parking level and is divided into five lots, with walkways, courtyards and common spaces inside. The second body, on the west side and parallel to the first, is also 986 meters long but nine tall, divided into five lots of three and five floors, and is connected to the first by five bridges located at the five access axes. The third body, separate and located on the east side, is rotated 45 degrees relative to the other two, is 253.4 meters long and has a variable height between 19 and 23 meters.

Inside the courtyards, along the whole length, runs another row of low dwellings of two or three floors, which face the courtyards on one side and the countryside behind on the other. The entire complex is made of reinforced concrete walls. 1,200 apartments on record, plus an uncountable number of dwellings that sprang up illegally in the common spaces and in what was supposed to be the gallery of shops on the fourth floor.

Why a Kilometer

The question everyone asks looking at the Serpentone is: why so long? The answer has to do with topography and ideology together. The slab follows the ridge of the hill and draws a sharp boundary between the built city and the Agro romano: urban on one side, countryside on the other, without the fringe of little villas and sheds that has devoured all the other Roman peripheries. It was a statement of urban planning principle: the city ends here, and it ends with a gesture, not with a smudge. The paradox is that the gesture worked: even today, behind Corviale, the countryside really begins, with its farmhouses, its ditches and its nature reserves. If the area has kept so much green, part of the credit, unintended, goes to that wall a kilometer long.

The Difficult History of the Neighborhood Around Campo dei Miracoli

The works were assigned to a single construction company, Salice II, and began in 1975. They advanced amid difficulties and delays, and in 1982 they stopped because the company went bankrupt. In the same year Mario Fiorentino died of a heart attack, without having seen his project completed. The urban legend that has circulated for 40 years, according to which he took his own life out of remorse for having created a monster, is simply false, and anyone who repeats it does a wrong to the memory of a serious architect.

The first dwellings were delivered in October 1982 and the residential block was finished in 1984. But already a few months later the illegal occupations began: about 700 families, and the phenomenon continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, while the services planned to complement the housing were not built. The fourth floor of the central slab, the one that was supposed to house shops and craft workshops with a view over the Agro, was occupied and turned into housing. The situation lasts to this day.

The Mechanism of Decay

It's worth looking at it closely, because it's a mechanism that has repeated itself across half of Italy. A project that rests entirely on the presence of collective services is delivered without the collective services. Families arrive and find only the homes. The spaces meant for common life stay empty and, being empty, get occupied by people who don't have a home. At that point building the services becomes impossible, because it would mean evicting hundreds of people. The project flips into its opposite in less than five years, and the blame is put on the dead architect, who is always the most convenient defendant.

What Is in the Central Spine Today

Slowly, the completion works have gone ahead. The central part, the so-called "services spine" between the two slabs, has been completed and today houses some offices of Municipio XI, a center for mental distress run by the health authority, Group XV of the local police and the cultural and arts center "Il Mitreo". The spine has also become home to a group of craftsmen evicted from workshops in the historic center, a fact that is both poetic and bitter. Inside the complex there are the City of Rome's business incubator, a health clinic, a senior center, a supermarket and several cooperatives and social and business activities.

The Redevelopment of Corviale Seen from Campo dei Miracoli

For decades the most popular proposal was demolition, supported repeatedly by architects and politicians of very different leanings. Nothing was ever done about it, for the banal reason that 4,500 people live inside and that demolishing a kilometer of public housing without having as many homes ready is a rhetorical exercise, not a plan.

In 2008 ATER and Regione Lazio presented a plan built on two interventions. The first is called Km verde and is signed by the architect Guendalina Salimei: it calls for the complete renovation of the fourth floor, with the demolition of what was built illegally and the creation of 103 new apartments in place of the services imagined by Fiorentino. Work began in January 2019 and continues. The second is the winning project of the 2015 international competition Rigenerare Corviale, by the team coordinated by Laura Peretti Architects: a new masterplan for the public space of the whole area, the creation of the services originally planned for the fourth floor, the redesign of vehicle and pedestrian circulation and a new permeability between city and countryside. The most interesting point of that project concerns the entrances to the building, which would go from five to 27, and the area of the central "fracture", intended to become a piazza.

27 Entrances Instead of Five

This detail is the key to everything. A building a kilometer long with only five entrances is, in effect, a barrier: to get to the other side you have to look for one of the five gaps, and anyone who doesn't live there has no reason to go in. 27 entrances turn the same building into a fabric you can cross. It's the difference between a wall and a city, and you get it with doors, not with bulldozers. Campo dei Miracoli, in its small way, has already done the same thing by other means: it has given people from outside a reason to come in and those inside a reason to go out.

Il Mitreo and the Other Cultural Outposts near Campo dei Miracoli

In the central spine of Corviale there is a cultural and arts center called "Il Mitreo", which over the years has hosted exhibitions, artist residencies and public art projects. It's one of the Roman cases where contemporary art has settled permanently in a periphery without being an operation dropped from above for a single season. Together with Campo dei Miracoli, the craft workshops and the business incubator, it forms a network of outposts that over the last 20 years has changed the perception of the neighborhood in a slow and real way.

People who work on urban policy use a term to describe this phenomenon: social infrastructuring. Put better: in a place where services are missing, the places that people build by themselves become the service. It's not a solution, it's a stopgap, and it would be hypocritical to tell it as a happy ending. But it's the reason why in Corviale, today, you can bring a school class.

The Schools of the Area

The comprehensive institutes of the area, including the "Margherita Hack" and the "Antonio Gramsci", which have worked with Calciosociale, are the other decisive outpost. Anyone who knows the peripheries knows that the school, in these contexts, is the only institution of the State that opens every day at the same time and that everyone recognizes. The fact that a sports center works systematically with the schools of its own area, instead of just collecting enrollments, is the technical reason the experience took root.

Corviale in the Movies, a Stone's Throw from Campo dei Miracoli

The Serpentone is probably the most filmed Italian residential building of the postwar period, and the list is long enough to deserve a chapter. In 1983 it appears in Sfrattato cerca casa equo canone by Pier Francesco Pingitore, with Pippo Franco. In 1984 in I predatori dell'anno Omega by David Worth, one of those postapocalyptic films in which Corviale plays itself without needing any set. In 1993 in Dove siete? Io sono qui by Liliana Cavani. In 2001 in La banda by Claudio Fragasso, where the complex has a central role in the lives of the protagonists.

Then, in the new century: the medium-length film Il palazzo by Katharina Copony from 2006, the documentary Il silenzio del Corviale by Marco Danieli from 2008, Et in terra pax by Matteo Botrugno and Daniele Coluccini from 2010, Scusate se esisto! by Riccardo Milani from 2014 with Paola Cortellesi in the role of an architect in charge of the redevelopment, Zeta - Una storia hip-hop by Cosimo Alemà from 2016, and in 2017 the American film American Assassin by Michael Cuesta. In 2021 the complex was the main location of the six episodes of the series Christian, directed by Stefano Lodovichi and Roberto Cinardi and broadcast the following year.

Corviale in Music and on Television

In 1991 the complex ended up in the "Italia Bella" segment hosted by Marco Messeri within the program Avanzi. In 1995 the Roman zany rock band Santarita Sakkascia dedicated a song to it called simply Serpentone. It's mentioned in Eclissi di periferia by Max Gazzè, on the 2001 album, and in the single Ventre della città by Mario Venuti from 2014. In 2017 it was used as the backdrop for the video of Bye Bye by Annalisa.

The Problem of Being a Location

There is a less cheerful side to this whole filmography, and it's worth saying. In the vast majority of cases Corviale is used as a visual synonym for decay, crime or apocalypse. For those who live there, seeing their home handed back to them in this form for 40 years has a cost that no film production has ever reimbursed. That's also why the bark roof of Campo dei Miracoli matters: it's the first image of Corviale that someone built for the residents instead of about the residents.

The Countryside Behind Campo dei Miracoli

Here begins the part that, for a visitor, is worth the trip as much as the sports center. Behind the Serpentone there is no other periphery: there is the Roman countryside, protected by two regional nature reserves and dotted with farmhouses, towers and villas that have five centuries of documented history. Anyone who arrives at Campo dei Miracoli with an afternoon ahead can walk for kilometers inside a landscape that in the rest of Europe would be marked with brown signs.

The reason for so much surviving green is administrative and recent: in 1997 Regione Lazio established two protected areas that almost touch, the Tenuta dei Massimi Nature Reserve and the Valle dei Casali Nature Reserve, both managed within the City of Rome's system of protected areas. Together they cover a piece of the Agro romano that starts from behind Villa Doria Pamphilj and reaches almost to the Tiber.

The Tenuta dei Massimi Reserve

It extends between the Pisana and Ponte Galeria areas, and is an area of high natural value, still largely cultivated. There are small Turkey oak woods with specimens of cork oak, which in Lazio is always a presence worth a stop. The fauna is that of farming systems: among rodents the wood mouse, among birds the kestrel, the black kite, the barn owl and the great spotted woodpecker. Attached to the reserve is the Bosco Somaini, which is the most precious piece of the whole area and whose story I tell two paragraphs from now, because it's a story that begins in the 1500s and involves an entrepreneur from Como and 90 Venetian families.

The Valle dei Casali Reserve

Also established in 1997, it lies between the Gianicolense and Portuense neighborhoods, bounded by Via del Casaletto, Via dei Silvestri, Via di Bravetta and Via Portuense. It's the natural continuation of Villa Doria Pamphilj, from which it is a few meters away: anyone who knows Rome's great historic park and doesn't know that it continues in this form is usually rather surprised. The landscape is a plateau that slopes down toward the Tiber with a series of hills and ditches. The flora includes Mediterranean pines, maples, palms, poplars, willows and broom, and along the paths you meet olive trees and mulberries, witnesses to the agricultural vocation of the area. The fauna includes hedgehogs, foxes, weasels, kestrels, buzzards, crows, pheasants, starlings, blackbirds and, in recent years, nesting colonies of rose-ringed parakeets and monk parakeets: the green parrots that by now are part of the background noise of Rome.

The Casetta Mattei, the Estate That Was Here Before Campo dei Miracoli

Before there were Corviale, Campo dei Miracoli and the shopping center, here there was a single immense estate, and it was called la Casetta. It's one of the most beautiful land stories of the Agro romano, and I tell it in full because it explains why the landscape around the field is the way it is.

The estate appears explicitly in the sources only from the end of the 15th century, when it was already the property of the chapter of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. How it came into it is not known with certainty, but it probably was part of the vast parcels of public land that the Emperor Constantine had donated to the Church of Rome in the 4th century. The estate took its name from a small farmhouse with a fortified tower from the 13th century that stood at its center, and it was covered in large part by dense woods: the last vestiges of the ancient Silva Maesia, the forest that in classical times occupied the right bank of the Tiber from the Urbe to the sea.

The Popes' Hunting Reserve

Those woods were home to wild boar and deer, and for this reason the estate was used above all as a hunting reserve by the pontiffs, who had their extra-urban residence not far away: the Villa della Magliana. It's a detail that changes the perception of the whole area. The hills behind Campo dei Miracoli are not a forgotten remnant of countryside: they are a wood that was preserved for centuries precisely because the popes went hunting there, and so no one could cut it down. While all the surrounding estates were being cleared to make room for pasture, the Casetta stayed intact.

The Passage to the Mattei

After the Sack of Rome in 1527 the chapter of St. Peter's found itself having to pay for the damage done by the Landsknechts and the ransoms of hostages, and was forced to sell off most of its land holdings. Pietro Antonio Mattei, a member of one of the richest families of the Roman nobility, took advantage and bought many of those estates at a good price, among them the Casetta. From then on it was called "Casetta dei Mattei", and the name has come down to us: in the shopping center, the street and, colloquially, the neighborhood.

Under the Mattei of the Paganica branch the wood, the "macchia Mattei", lost its central role in the estate's economy, also because the most prized game had gone extinct from excessive hunting, and the land was converted to agriculture. But the land here never paid: the abundance of water produced marshes that ruined the harvests and encouraged malaria. The Casetta building, on the other hand, was enlarged and improved until well into the 1700s, turning from a fortified farmhouse into a true noble residence, with a monumental entrance staircase, wide loggias and a chapel with a bell tower where Mass was celebrated on feast days. It became an important stop on the route between the city and the sea, and was even given a station for changing horses, which the popes also used in their travels.

The Catasto Alessandrino and the Dimensions of the Estate

In 1660 Pope Alexander VII required all landowners of the Agro romano to provide an updated survey of their estates, for the compilation of the Catasto Alessandrino. The owner at the time, Muzio Mattei, had a new map drawn up, and thanks to that document we know exactly what the estate was like in the mid-1600s. Total area: 685.5 rubbi, equal to about 1,267 hectares, one of the largest in the entire Agro romano. It was crossed perpendicularly by Via Portuense and by the course of the Magliana, which divided it into four cadastral sectors: the Quartaccio to the northeast, the Quarto della Pisana to the northwest (where the Casetta stood), the Quarto di Valle Lupara to the southwest and the Quarticciolo della Torre to the southeast. Mostly meadows, a few vineyards, and the reduced but still considerable wood on both sides of the Portuense, with an extent substantially identical to what it keeps today. Near the main building you could still see three arches of an ancient Roman aqueduct, now lost.

Monaldo Leopardi and the 70 Farmers from the Marche

At the beginning of the 1800s the estate passed to the Antici Mattei. In 1802 Pope Pius VII imposed a heavy surtax on land left uncultivated, and to avoid it the Mattei granted the estate in emphyteusis to a company of Count Monaldo Leopardi (yes, Giacomo's father), who was the brother-in-law and fellow townsman of Carlo Teodoro Antici. Monaldo found the estate half abandoned and the Casetta inhabited only by the caretaker. To put it back into production he brought 70 experienced farmers from his lands in the Marche, who planted vineyards, built buildings, began clearing the woods to sell the timber and started the channeling to drain the land. After a few months many contracted malaria, some died, and the others asked to go home and were allowed to. This attempt also failed.

The Visit of Pius IX, and Why the Orphanage Was Not Built Here

In 1815, after the Napoleonic seizure of the family's property, the estate was sold to the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia. It stayed unused for 30 years, until in 1846 it drew the attention of Pope Pius IX, who wanted to found in the Agro a welcome and agricultural training institute for the orphans and the poor of Rome. The advisers' opinions were divided, and so the pope decided to go and see for himself: on December 30 he went to the Casetta accompanied by the physician Agostino Cappello, the professor of natural sciences Pietro Carpi, Don Carlo Torlonia and the commendatore of the Hospital of Santo Spirito, Enrico Orfei. They made a complete survey, tested soils and waters, and in the evening, after setting into the building's wall a plaque in memory of the papal visit, they returned to the Quirinale. Two days later the two scientists delivered an opinion that rejected the estate across the board: too much humidity, waterlogging, malaria, and the precedent of all the failed attempts. The agricultural institute was founded elsewhere, along the same Via Portuense, on an estate of Cardinal Vannicelli Casoni that was renamed Vigna Pia in honor of the pontiff. The name still exists today in Rome's street names.

Borgo Somaini and the 90 Venetian Families

After the unification of Italy the estate was again taken away from ecclesiastical ownership, broken up and sold: in 1900 it was divided among seven different owners. The turning point came between 1922 and 1930, when, as part of the reclamation of the Agro romano, the western half of the old estate, about 600 hectares, including the wooded areas and the Casetta, was bought by the industrialist from Como Francesco Somaini, who founded a farm there. To cultivate it he settled 90 Venetian families and built a real village for them, with homes, farm structures, community buildings, a school and a church: Borgo Somaini. Thanks to the work of these settlers and to modern technology, the waters were finally drained and channeled and the land yielded for the first time in its history. The old macchia Mattei began growing again after a century of cutting, and took the name bosco Somaini. The farm specialized in plant nursery work and dairy cattle breeding, and was one of the main suppliers of the Centrale del Latte di Roma until 1954, when it was dissolved.

What Remains Today

In 1997 most of the still agricultural areas of the old estate entered the Tenuta dei Massimi Nature Reserve, including the Casetta Mattei building, which stayed in a state of decay for a long time and was then bought by a private company that renovated it in the 2010s. The eastern half of the estate, on the other hand, was urbanized: in 1972 one of the plots of the old Quartaccio was expropriated by the Autonomous Institute for Public Housing to build Nuovo Corviale. Put differently, the Serpentone you see from Campo dei Miracoli stands on a piece of the popes' hunting estate. And the ditch that runs down to the bottom of the valley, a left tributary of the Magliana, is still called Fosso dei Mattei today.

Villa York and the Farmhouses Around Campo dei Miracoli

A few kilometers from Campo dei Miracoli, in the territory of the Valle dei Casali, stands one of the most notable 17th-century complexes of the Roman periphery: Villa York, whose entrance is at Via di Bravetta 725. The villa has a perspective view of the dome of St. Peter's that increases its scenic value, and it is a short distance from Villa Doria Pamphilj, the Complesso del Buon Pastore and Casal Ninfeo.

The origins go back to 1647, when Zenobio Baldinotti bought a former ecclesiastical estate called "Casal di Marcello" and started building a Baroque villa and the church of Santa Chiara, using the work of Pietro Paolo Drei. In 1697 the property passed to the marchesa Girolama Bichi Ruspoli, who promoted a new season of embellishments, entrusting the painted decorations to Giovanni Ulisse Cariaci. It then passed to Prince Benedetto Giustiniani until 1804, and then to the figure who gave it its name: Cardinal Henry Benedict Stuart, Duke of York, grandson of James II of England and last representative of the Catholic branch of the Stuarts, excluded from the English throne after the Glorious Revolution. The villa was his until 1808.

From Aristocratic Villa to Farm

In the 1800s the property passed to the Silvestri and Troiani families and the villa was converted into a farm, losing its representative role. It then ended up in the assets of Federconsorzi, becoming caught up in the long bankruptcy proceedings of that body. It was sold to private owners in February 2017 and since 2022 it has been the subject of a massive restoration that has covered the main building, the Ninfeo and the historic park, with a new function as an events venue. It can't be visited freely, but it's one of those places worth knowing exist when you pass along Via di Bravetta.

The Other Farmhouses of the Area

The list of historic farmhouses and villas in the Gianicolense suburb is long and surprising for anyone who thought there was only concrete here. The Torretta dei Massimi on Via della Pisana is a square-plan tower from the 12th century, built over the remains of a luxurious Roman villa of the 1st century BC. The Casal Ninfeo on Via dei Gattilusio is a 17th-century farmhouse with its monumental nymphaeum. The Casino Consorti, also called Casino Lanfranco, on Vicolo Silvestri, dates to 1646 and was designed and frescoed by the master Giovanni Lanfranco, one of the greats of Roman Baroque. That a work of his is found here, and not in a palace in the center, is one of those facts that rearrange your ideas about this city. The Villino Cantone on Via della Casetta Mattei is a 17th-century farmhouse. The Serenello, or Villa di Sant'Isaia, on Via dei Martuzzi, is a villa of the same century. The Casale al Divin Maestro on Via Portuense is from the 1800s. On the hill of Monte Cucco, on the Portuense side of the reserve, stands the Torre Righetti, a belvedere or hunting lodge from which you overlook the whole Tiber valley.

The Complesso del Buon Pastore

It deserves a paragraph of its own, because it's one of the least known and most impressive pieces of 20th-century Roman architecture. Built between 1929 and 1943 on Via di Bravetta at the corner with Via Silvestri, it is the work of Armando Brasini, the architect of monumental Rome under the Fascist 20 years, author among other things of Ponte Flaminio and of the sanctuary of the Immaculate Heart in Piazza Euclide. The Buon Pastore is an enormous, theatrical block, and for anyone arriving from the countryside of the Valle dei Casali the apparition is memorable.

Forte Bravetta and the Memory of the 20th Century near Campo dei Miracoli

A short distance away, at the end of Via di Bravetta, between Via Aurelia and Via Portuense, stands one of the 15 forts built around Rome between 1877 and 1891 to defend the new capital. Forte Bravetta was begun in 1877 and finished in 1883, covers 10.6 hectares and is built over the remains of the Roman villa of Lucius Fabius Pollio. But the reason its name is in the history books has nothing to do with military architecture.

During Fascism the fort was used as a place for carrying out the death sentences of the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State. On June 17, 1932 the republican Domenico Bovone and the anarchist Angelo Sbardellotto were shot there, accused of having planned attacks against Mussolini. Between October 11, 1943 and June 3, 1944, during the German occupation of Rome, the shootings of 77 partisans were carried out there on the order of the German military tribunal and by the hand of Herbert Kappler's Gestapo. A monument next to the entrance remembers the martyrs of the Resistance. Between 1944 and 1945 Fascists sentenced to death by the High Court of Justice were also shot there.

The Parco dei Martiri

On September 9, 2009 the "Parco dei Martiri" was inaugurated next to the fort, a municipal garden of 10 hectares open to the public and dedicated to the victims of Nazi-Fascism. During the ceremony an olive tree was planted, a symbol of peace, donated by the Jewish National Fund and coming from Jerusalem. At the reopening to the public in June 2011 the decision to allocate the fort's buildings to a Museum of Memory was recalled.

Why Put Forte Bravetta in a Sports Itinerary

Because four kilometers from a soccer field where a league dedicated to freedom of the press and legality is played, there is the place where 77 people were shot for having resisted. It's not a coincidence to stress with emphasis, it's simply the geography of this area. Anyone who brings a class of kids here and does both stops in the same morning has given a civics lesson that no book can give.

Il Trullo and the Catacombs of Generosa, Not Far from Campo dei Miracoli

Going down toward the Tiber you enter the urban planning zone of Il Trullo, which borders Corviale to the north. The name comes from a Roman tomb of the 1st century placed along the bank of the Tiber, which bore the inscription Trullus de Maximis, and from a 17th-century hunting lodge on the hill of Montecucco whose shape recalled that of the trulli of Puglia. The tomb was called first Turlone, then Torraccio, finally Trullo dei Massimi, and appears to have been the property of a certain Massimo called "Donne Rogata" in the 13th century. It is on Via delle Idrovore della Magliana and it's still there.

But the archaeological highlight of the area is the catacombs of Generosa, on Via delle Catacombe di Generosa: an early Christian cemetery of the 4th century on a rise in the Magliana, with an underground basilica, where the bodies of the brothers Simplicius and Faustinus were buried, killed during the persecution of Diocletian in 303. The two martyrs are the patron saints of the German city of Fulda, which twinned with the Magliana and dedicated a street to it, the Maglianastrasse. It's the kind of detail that shows how little we know our own religious geography: while tourists line up at the catacombs of Via Appia, here there is a complex from the 4th century that almost nobody visits.

The Borgata of Il Trullo

The Borgo del Trullo, one of the official borgate of Rome, was built between 1939 and 1940 by the Istituto Fascista Autonomo Case Popolari to a design by the architects Roberto Nicolini and Giuseppe Nicolosi, under the name "Costanzo Ciano". It was meant to take in Italians who had emigrated abroad and been repatriated on the initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and to serve as temporary residence for citizens of the Monti rione displaced by the demolition and the building of Via dei Fori Imperiali. It took the name Borgata del Trullo with a resolution of February 2, 1945. Here is another of those Roman chains that nobody tells: the families evicted to open Via dei Fori Imperiali ended up here, 11 kilometers from the Colosseum.

The Land of the Arval Brothers

Il Trullo can properly be called an agricultural village, because from the very beginning of the Roman empire the Arval priests worked the land here, the college that every year in May celebrated the festival in honor of the goddess Dia, deity of agriculture and cultivated fields. The sacred grove and the temple of the goddess Dia were in this area, along Via Campana-Portuense, and the Acts of the Arvals, carved on marble slabs and found right here, are one of the most important epigraphic sources we have on Roman religion. Anyone who plays soccer at Campo dei Miracoli does so a few kilometers from the place where for centuries people prayed for the wheat to do well.

La Magliana and the Popes' Castle, in the Area of Campo dei Miracoli

West of Corviale is the Magliana, which takes its name from the watercourse that runs through it. Its history begins in 1480, when Cardinal Raffaele Riario had a building constructed in honor of the Duke of Saxony, to rest there after the exertions of hunting. Pope Innocent VIII found the place pleasing for the amenity of the terrain and the beauty of the landscape, renovated the existing buildings and built a villa, known as the Castello della Magliana. It is the extra-urban residence of the popes we talked about when telling the story of the Casetta Mattei: when the pontiffs went hunting in the woods that are today the bosco Somaini, in the evening they slept here.

The popes who followed enlarged the castle and embellished it with a garden and a chapel dedicated to St. John the Baptist, decorated with frescoes from the school of Raphael. From that dedication comes the name of the hospital that stands nearby. Around the middle of the 1700s the papal villa, by then in ruins, was abandoned. Since 1957 it has been owned by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which has taken care of its restoration.

A Clarification on the Word Magliana

It's worth making because in Rome the confusion is general. By the name Magliana the population has always meant mainly an area of the Portuense district, specifically the urban planning zone Pian due Torri, much more populous than the Magliana zone proper and also crossed by Via della Magliana. The crime reporting tied to the banda della Magliana referred to that name, but some of the members of the group lived in the buildings built in the early 1970s at Pian due Torri, which the real estate jargon of the time called "Nuova Magliana". These are distinctions that seem pedantic and yet they weigh on how an entire area has been told for half a century.

The Churches of the Area Around Campo dei Miracoli

The parish church that serves Via Poggio Verde area is San Paolo della Croce, on the same street as Campo dei Miracoli: the parish was established on July 1, 1977 by decree of the cardinal vicar Ugo Poletti, and the building is from 1983. Not far away, on Via dei Buonvisi, is the church of San Girolamo a Corviale, from 1960: it's the church that was there before the Serpentone, and this says a lot about the fact that here, before the public housing, a community already existed.

On Via della Fanella is the Convento delle Mantellate al Corviale, from the 1800s, with its cloister. On Via Portuense at the corner with Via della Casetta Mattei is the Cappella Fantini, from the 17th century. Going down toward Il Trullo and the Magliana you find the church of Santa Maria del Rosario di Pompei alla Magliana, from 1915, the church of San Raffaele Arcangelo from 1953 (whose parish was established on February 1 of that year by decree of the cardinal vicar Clemente Micara) and the chapel Gesù Maestro in the generalate house of the Pie Discepole del Divin Maestro on Via Portuense, built between 1967 and 1969.

The Churches of the Gianicolense Suburb

Widening the radius just slightly, the repertoire grows richer: the church of the Santissimo Crocifisso on Via di Bravetta, whose parish was established on October 21, 1937 and which keeps several works by Publio Morbiducci, including the large crucifix above the main altar. Santa Maria della Perseveranza on Via della Pisana, a parish since October 27, 1959. The Sacra Famiglia at Villa Troili, a parish since January 31, 1962. The church of the Santi Martiri Coreani on Via degli Aldobrandeschi, attached to the Pontifical Korean College. San Bruno on Via della Pisana. The Natività di Maria on Via di Bravetta, a parish since November 28, 1981. And the deconsecrated church of Santa Chiara inside the park of Villa York.

Why the Dates of the Parishes Tell a Story

Look at them in a row: 1937, 1953, 1959, 1962, 1977, 1981. These are the dates on which the diocese of Rome chased the expansion of the city toward the southwest, decade after decade, almost always arriving after people had already settled. Every decree establishing a parish is the ecclesiastical certification of a piece of periphery that has become populous enough to need a priest. The sequence is an X-ray of Roman expansion more precise than quite a few master plans.

A Day Around Campo dei Miracoli

Anyone who wants to make good use of the trip can build a day that makes sense, and I suggest it in this order. Early morning: the Valle dei Casali Reserve, entering from Via di Bravetta side, a walk among the farmhouses with the dome of St. Peter's in the background. Midmorning: Forte Bravetta and the Parco dei Martiri, with the plaque of the 77. Toward noon you go up to Corviale, walk the perimeter of the Serpentone to really understand what 986 meters of building means, and arrive at Campo dei Miracoli.

Afternoon: if it's a league Sunday you stop in the curva. Otherwise you go down toward the Portuense and continue with the catacombs of Generosa and the Castello della Magliana, which are a few minutes by car. Anyone with energy left can finish at the Tenuta dei Massimi Reserve, on the bosco Somaini side, which at sunset is one of the most beautiful and least frequented places in the municipality of Rome.

What to Put on Your Feet

Real walking shoes. The area is hilly, the reserve paths are dirt and after rain they turn muddy with a speed that always surprises. In summer you need water, because the refreshment points inside the protected areas are few and far apart. In winter the wind on the plateau is what it is: here there are no buildings of the center to act as a windbreak.

With Children

The combination works well: the sports field, a park, a wood and a catacomb are a program that holds up to age 12 without complaints. The Serpentone, then, has a hypnotic effect on children and kids: the question everyone asks is "but how long is it?", and the answer, almost a kilometer, settles them for the rest of the day.

When to Go to Campo dei Miracoli

The calendar of Campo dei Miracoli follows the school and sports calendar: from September to June the facility is alive every day, with training in the afternoon and league matches on weekends. From June the summer camps and the twinnings with the other Italian calciosociale experiences begin, bringing kids here from Tuscany, Campania, Sardinia and Abruzzo. It's the period when the place is most crowded and most interesting to see, even though the Roman heat of July on a field in full sun is not an experience for everyone.

There are two dates to watch for anyone who wants to see the building and not just the field: the annual edition of Open House Roma, which usually falls in spring, and the public events the association organizes, such as the festival dedicated to legality. In both cases the entry is designed for outside visitors, which is the best condition for understanding the place without disturbing the people who work there.

League Sundays

If I had to name a single moment, I'd say a league Sunday morning between October and May. You see the mixed teams, you see the handling of fouls without a referee, you see who takes the penalties, you hear the curva. And you understand, looking at the stands, that the audience is made up of neighborhood families, which is after all the difference between a social project dropped from above and one that has taken root.

A Curiosity About Campo dei Miracoli

The curiosity concerns the name, and it's subtler than it seems. Campo dei Miracoli, in everyone's Italian, is the place in Collodi's tale where the Cat and the Fox convince Pinocchio to bury four gold coins by promising him that during the night a tree loaded with coins will grow. It's the perfect image of the scam: the place where something multiplies by itself, without effort, by magic. And the scam, in that story, works precisely because the puppet believes it.

Taking that name and sticking it on a sports center built in a Roman periphery is a remarkable gesture of irony, because here the miracle works exactly the opposite way: nothing has grown by itself. There are 5,000 pieces of tree bark stripped and varnished by hand by volunteers, children and residents of the neighborhood to cover 900 square meters of concrete roof. There are years of fundraising in which the sods of the lawn were sold to build a regulation field. There is an association born in 2005 that took four years to reach its first gate. The miracle, here, is the name given to work when nobody expected it.

Then there is the second part of the name, the one almost nobody says because it's too long: the full name of the facility is Campo dei Miracoli - centro sportivo Valentina Venanzi. It's a dedication, and it remains in the official name, in the legal address and in the association's documents. Those who frequent the field know it. Those who arrive from outside read it on paper and keep going. It deserves to be written out in full at least once.

Something Nobody Tells You About Campo dei Miracoli

That the league standings are decided off the field. Everyone tells the strange rules (mixed teams, no referee, penalties for the weakest) because they make an impression and can be summed up in a line. Almost nobody tells the rule that really counts, which is that a substantial part of the points is won through actions that have nothing to do with the ball: recovering a degraded space in the neighborhood, taking part in a meeting on legality, following a workshop on the environment, taking care of something that belongs to everyone. A team can win all its matches and finish second. In fact, it's meant to happen.

The practical consequence is that the championship lasts all week even if it's played on Sunday, and that the word "training" covers activities that no other sports club would call that. It's also the reason the method has attracted European and ministerial funding that would never have reached an ordinary youth soccer tournament: from the point of view of someone evaluating a project, what happens off the field is measurable, replicable and transferable. The ball is the pretext, and whoever says so offends nobody: they are the first to say it.

The second thing nobody tells is more uncomfortable. The real test is not the children, who adapt to any rule in 10 minutes: it's the adults. Taking the referee away from a match of adults means forcing them to discuss every contact, admit a foul they committed, accept the word of an opponent. Anyone who has played soccer in Italy knows it's the hardest thing you can ask. The companies that come here for training find it out within a half, and almost always with some embarrassment.

The Advice I Give You for Visiting Campo dei Miracoli

The first piece of advice is banal and decisive: call ahead. It's not a museum with opening hours, it's a sports facility with an office open Monday to Friday, morning and afternoon. A phone call avoids arriving in the middle of a training session of 30 children with the best intentions and the worst timing. The association explicitly writes that anyone who wants to see the facility is welcome, but being welcome and showing up without notice are two different things anywhere in the world.

The second piece of advice concerns the order of the visit, and on this I'm categorical: the Serpentone first, then the field. Arrive on foot along Via Poggio Verde and walk at least a long stretch of the building's perimeter, looking up. 986 meters can't be understood from a car and can't be understood from a photograph. They're understood by walking, when after five minutes at a normal pace the wall still hasn't ended and you start asking yourselves how much is left. Only after that physical experience does the bark roof of Campo dei Miracoli take on the meaning it has. Do it in the reverse order and it will seem to you simply a pleasant building.

The third piece of advice is not to come only for the field. Plan on half a day and add at least one stop among the Valle dei Casali Reserve, Forte Bravetta with the Parco dei Martiri and the catacombs of Generosa. The trip from the historic center is long enough to deserve a program, and this area gives back much more than it promises from the bus window. Bring walking shoes and, in summer, enough water.

Another Well-Known Fact, Yet Rarely Cited

That Corviale is the symbol of the decay of Rome's peripheries everyone knows: it's the most established commonplace in Italian urban planning of the last 40 years, repeated in thousands of articles and in about 20 films. What is cited much less is the judgment of serious architectural criticism, and it's the opposite judgment. Franco Purini, who understands quite a lot about Roman architecture, wrote that Corviale is "the most important work built in Rome in all the 1970s and one of the most significant architectures produced in the world in those years." Not "an interesting but mistaken project": the most important.

The equally well-known and equally rarely cited fact is that the project was never completed. The Nuovo Corviale that exists is half of what was designed: the homes were built and not the services. The four open-air theaters are missing, the meeting hall with 500 seats is missing, the market is missing, the planned schools are missing, and above all the fourth floor is missing, the entire level of shops and craft workshops facing the Agro romano that was supposed to be the economic and social engine of the building. That floor was occupied a few months after delivery, by people who didn't have a home, and it's inhabited still today. Judging Corviale by how it turned out, saying the idea was wrong, is equivalent to judging a symphony by listening only to the string section.

And finally the legend, which is the most cited thing of all and the most false: Mario Fiorentino did not take his own life out of remorse for having created a monster. He died in 1982 of a heart attack, while the construction site was stopping because the building company went bankrupt. The legend has circulated for 40 years because it's a story too good to verify, and it's exactly the kind of tale that gets built about peripheries when it's more convenient to have a single culprit than a collective responsibility.

The Right Photo to Take at Campo dei Miracoli

The photograph that sums up everything is taken from the bleachers, that is from the Curva dei Miracoli, and the composition is already given: in the foreground the green of the field with the kids playing, in the background the horizontal profile of the Serpentone closing the frame from one edge to the other. It's a photograph that comments on itself because it puts in the same frame the two Romes that are almost never seen together: the reinforced concrete of the failed utopia and the lawn of a smaller utopia that did work. If you have a wide-angle lens, this is the moment to take it out.

The right light is that of late afternoon. The Serpentone runs north-south on the ridge, and in the middle hours of the day it gives back a flat, washed-out surface. Toward sunset the raking sun carves out the walkways and the concrete walls, and the facade becomes a grid of deep shadows. The same goes for the bark roof, which in full light appears as a uniform brown surface and in raking light reveals that it is made of 5,000 different pieces: only at that moment does the photograph tell the work behind it.

If instead you're looking for the less obvious framing, move away. Go up toward the Casetta Mattei or enter the Valle dei Casali Reserve and look for a spot where the Serpentone can be seen from a distance, from the side, with the countryside in the foreground and the dome of St. Peter's on the right in the background. From there you understand what no close-up photograph can say: that the wall a kilometer long is the boundary between the city and the Agro romano, and that Campo dei Miracoli was born exactly on the line of that boundary. An obvious and always necessary recommendation: inside the field you photograph the spaces, not the minors, and the children playing should be left out of the frame.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

The first event doesn't concern the field but the land it rests on. On December 30, 1846 Pope Pius IX walked these lands in person, accompanied by the physician Agostino Cappello, the professor of natural sciences Pietro Carpi, Don Carlo Torlonia and the commendatore Enrico Orfei, to decide whether to found here the agricultural institute intended for the orphans and the poor of Rome. They made a complete survey, tested the soils and the waters, and in the evening set into the wall of the Casetta Mattei building a plaque in memory of the visit. Two days later the advisers' opinion rejected the estate because of humidity and malaria, and the institute was founded elsewhere, at Vigna Pia. Even earlier, the popes who slept at the Castello della Magliana hunted in these woods. And between 1922 and 1930 90 Venetian families settled here, built Borgo Somaini and made productive for the first time lands that nobody had managed to cultivate in five centuries.

Then the recent history begins. In 1972 the Autonomous Institute for Public Housing expropriates a plot of the old Quartaccio to build Nuovo Corviale. Work starts in 1975 and stops in 1982. The first homes are delivered in October of that year and the residential block is finished in 1984. In 2005 Calciosociale is born as a nonprofit amateur sports club. In 2009, on an abandoned public area, Campo dei Miracoli is born. In 2012 the association is called to Brussels, to the seat of the European Parliament, to tell its experience. In 2014, during the Italian presidency of the European Union, the experience is named an Italian best practice for sport and social inclusion.

The most recent dates are three. On February 26, 2022 the first 11-a-side soccer field in Corviale is inaugurated, the goal pursued for a decade, in the presence of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. From May 27 to 29, 2022, 30 years after the Capaci and via D'Amelio massacres, the field hosts the Festival of Legality and Spirituality, with 15 schools involved, the State Police's marching Fanfara, meetings with anti-mafia investigators and matches between law enforcement and kids. On October 21, 2025 the Curva dei Miracoli is born, presented as the first anti-mafia curva in Italy. And in 2026 the championship is dedicated to freedom of the press, with the teams named after journalists killed or persecuted for having told the truth.

Who Has Passed Through Campo dei Miracoli

The highest name is that of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, whose words to the kids on the morning of the 11-a-side field's inauguration have become a kind of internal constitution of the place: the importance of making play and meeting a place of friendship and mutual respect, the invitation not to lose those habits and to always help each other, because when this takes hold among the kids it then takes hold among adults too. It's not a courtesy phrase: it precisely describes the rulebook applied on that field.

Through here has passed Domenico Iannacone, who dedicated two episodes of his Rai 3 program to Campo dei Miracoli and left its two most quoted formulas: "On this field, where everyone can play, the winner is not the one who scores the most but the one who takes the most care of things and of others," and the sentence of a boy from the neighborhood, "I see it with different eyes than you do. I see this place as magical. For us this is home." Through have passed the students of 15 schools during the legality festival and the 240 middle school kids of the "Margherita Hack" and "Antonio Gramsci" comprehensive institutes. Through have passed State Police officers with the dog handlers, the bomb disposal experts, the fanfara and the Fiamme Oro youth sports group. Through has passed Luigi Verdi of the Fraternità di Romena. Through have passed more than 100 kids of different cultures who came from Sardinia, Tuscany, Marche and Piedmont for the spirituality triangular.

And then there is the least visible and most significant passage: that of the European partners of the CROSS project, who came from England, Hungary, Bulgaria and Germany, together with the researchers of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, to study how a method born in Corviale is applied in completely different contexts. A periphery association acting as lead partner of a European consortium across five countries, with almost 400,000 euros in funding from the Commission, is a reversal of roles worth noting. For once it's not the periphery that goes to learn in the center: it's the center that comes to take notes in the periphery.

Quick Questions About Campo dei Miracoli

Where Is Campo dei Miracoli

Campo dei Miracoli is at Via Poggio Verde 455, in Corviale, on the southwest periphery of Rome, in Municipio XI. It has nothing to do with the square in Pisa: it's a sports center, home of the Calciosociale association, and it sits right under the Serpentone, the public housing building 986 meters long. It is a little uphill from Via Portuense, on the hill that climbs toward the Casetta Mattei.

How to Get to Campo dei Miracoli

No subway line reaches Corviale. By public transport you get to Roma Trastevere station or the Magliana one and from there take a bus toward Corviale-Casetta Mattei, with stops a few dozen meters from the gates. Lines change often, so check them the same day. By car you exit the Grande Raccordo Anulare onto Via Portuense and head up toward the Casetta Mattei shopping center. Parking is not a problem.

Can You Visit Campo dei Miracoli

Yes, but not like a museum: there is no ticket office and no visitor route, it's a working sports facility. The right way is to call or write to the office first, because access for people who aren't enrolled has to be arranged and groups are received. Alternatively you wait for the annual edition of Open House Roma and check whether the center is among the open buildings: in that case the visit is free and guided.

What Are the Office Hours

The Calciosociale office is open to the public Monday to Friday, in the morning from 9 to 13 and in the afternoon from 16 to 19:30. These are office hours, not ticket office hours. The phone number and email address are published on the association's website, calciosociale.it. A call before leaving saves you from arriving in the middle of a training session and from making an hour-long bus trip for nothing.

When Is the Best Time to Go to Campo dei Miracoli

The best time is a league Sunday morning between October and May. You sit in the curva with no ticket and no turnstile and you see the mixed teams, the fouls handled without a referee and the penalties taken by the weakest players. If you're interested in the building, with its wood and clay structure and its bark roof, aim for Open House Roma, which usually falls in spring.

What Is There to See near Campo dei Miracoli

The area offers enough to fill half a day. You'll find the Valle dei Casali Reserve, with its farmhouses and the dome of St. Peter's in the background, Forte Bravetta with the Parco dei Martiri, the catacombs of Generosa and the Castello della Magliana. Before entering the field, walk a stretch of the Serpentone's perimeter. Bring walking shoes and, in summer, enough water.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

Planning a trip to Rome? The English guides for visiting the city are on ItalyPlanner.com.