Kif Kif

Via Macerata 54, Roma. The address is one of those that tell you nothing until you actually get there, and then tell you everything: a side street of the Prenestino-Casilino quadrant, a few dozen steps from the Casilina, in that band of the city where the Pigneto stops being called the Pigneto and Torpignattara starts being called Torpignattara without anyone ever having put up a sign to mark the border. This is where Kif Kif has set up house, a multicultural bar with a kitchen, with a considered drinks offering and with a program of events that comes and goes according to the seasons and the energy available: music, book presentations, gatherings, evenings built more on word of mouth than on a press office.

The description that has circulated for years, and that has made the rounds of the city guides, is short and on target: a multicultural bar in the most multicultural neighborhood of Rome, ethnic cuisine, good drinks and occasional cultural events with music, book presentations and much more. Then there is the explanation of the name, which is the part almost everyone quotes and almost no one digs into: “kif kif” is an expression that in the Arabic dialects of North Africa indicates equality among several things. North or south? Kif kif. White or black? Kif kif. Two identical words side by side that, put together, mean “even,” “the same,” “no difference.”

You can build an entire visit on that formula, because it is not a menu wordplay: it is a statement of method, and in a neighborhood like this a statement of method carries weight. In the next pages I take you inside the place and above all inside the block that contains it, because Kif Kif can't be understood without Via Macerata around it, and Via Macerata can't be understood without the story of the pot makers, of the Mausoleum of Saint Helena and of the farming estates of the late 1800s. I talk about how to get there, what to expect, what to photograph, what really happened around here over the centuries and who has passed through, with a clear distinction between what is documented and what is neighborhood gossip.

What Kif Kif is, in concrete terms

The categories under which the place is filed by the city guides are more than one, and the multiplicity is already information: bar, disco bar, wine shop and wine bar, brewery and pub, social space, club, music club. Seven labels for a single address are not a cataloguing error, they are the portrait of a place that changes function depending on the hour and the day. In the early evening it's a bar where you sit down and order something to drink. Later it becomes a place where you eat. On certain evenings a table is moved, a sound system is switched on and it becomes a place where people play or present a book. It is the model of the hybrid space that in Rome spread above all in the periphery and semi-periphery, where rents allow floor areas and uses that inside the walls would not be possible.

The neighborhood the guides assign to it is the Pigneto, but the postal code 00176 and the position along Via Macerata describe a border zone. The difference is not pedantry: the Pigneto and Torpignattara have partly different social and urban histories, and a place sitting on the hinge between the two inherits a double public. On one side the flow arriving for the nightlife of the pedestrianized Pigneto, on the other the dense residential fabric of Torpignattara, with its low buildings born from self-promoted construction between the 1920s and the 1950s and with a social makeup that over the last 30 years has become one of the most plural in the city.

Kitchen, drinks, events: how they hold together

The expression “ethnic cuisine” is one of those that age badly, and it's worth taking apart right away. On a street where third-generation Roman families live alongside Bangladeshi, Chinese, Egyptian, Romanian, Filipino and Peruvian families, the word “ethnic” loses meaning: whose cuisine is ethnic? The formula that works best, and that more honestly describes what happens in places like this, is cuisine of different origins cooked by people of different origins for a public of different origins. There is nothing exotic in a tray coming out of the oven at nine at night on Via Macerata: there is the daily work of a neighborhood that eats what it knows how to cook.

The same principle applies to drinking. A place that is filed at once as a wine shop, a brewery and a disco bar does not have a single-theme list: it has a selection that has to work both for someone coming in at seven for a glass and for someone coming in at one for a beer after a concert. Anyone looking for mixology from an international ranking is probably looking for something else and would do well to go where that is the main trade. Anyone looking for an honest glass in a place where you can sit and talk without shouting, and where every so often something happens on the small improvised stage, finds their format here.

On events we need to be precise: the key word used by those who describe the place is “occasional.” It is not a club with a fixed calendar, it is not a concert hall with a season announced in September. It is a place where the program is born from relationships: a neighborhood association presenting a project, an author coming out with a book who chooses a bar instead of a bookstore, a band rehearsing in a friend's basement and looking for a real audience. This has a practical consequence that spares you a bad evening: before heading out for a specific event it's always best to check the venue's channels, because the October evening of last year may not repeat this year, and vice versa.

Via Macerata, a side street that explains the map

The name of the street deserves a moment of attention, because it is part of a system. In this sector of Rome there is a substantial group of streets named after cities and places in the Marche, and it is not by chance: the Marche presence in this quadrant is old and documented, it begins with the sharecroppers called to farm the plots along the Casilina at the end of the 1800s and continues with the families who settle here when the countryside becomes a neighborhood. Walking among these side streets reading the signs means reading a map of the Marche transplanted six kilometers from Porta Maggiore.

In terms of urban form, Via Macerata belongs to the category of narrow residential streets, with reduced sidewalks, buildings of varying height and a road section that was never designed for the traffic that crosses it today. It is the direct consequence of the subdivision into tiny lots that generated the neighborhood: where land is sold in pieces of a few dozen square meters, the streets serve to reach the pieces, not to organize traffic. The result, a century later, is a fabric that is awkward for cars and surprisingly pleasant for those on foot, as long as they accept walking on sidewalks that in places narrow until they disappear.

This geometry has a consequence on the life of the venues. A bar on a side street like this does not have the outdoor space of wide streets, cannot build large outdoor seating areas, and so life takes place inside or on a very limited portion of sidewalk. It is one of the reasons why places like this keep an intimate dimension even when they are full: there is materially no room to become something else. Anyone coming from the logic of venues with 100 seats outdoors has to recalibrate expectations, and generally comes out ahead.

A curiosity about Kif Kif

The real curiosity concerns neither the menu nor the furnishings: it concerns the name, and the road that name traveled to end up on a Roman sign. “Kif kif” is not an advertising invention and not a word made up to sound vaguely oriental. It is a doubling of a real Arabic word, and the path is documented in the dictionaries.

At the base is the Arabic كيف, transliterated as kif and meaning, simply, “how.” It is a particle of comparison, one of the most elementary tools of any language: it serves to say that one thing resembles another. In the spoken usage of the Maghreb the word is doubled, and the doubling produces an effect that Italian renders poorly with a single word: kif kif means “like and like,” that is, “equal,” “identical,” “the same thing,” “even-steven.” It is exactly the construction that the sign of the place translates into its statement: north or south? Kif kif. White or black? Kif kif.

The next step is the most interesting and the least cited. The expression did not remain confined to Maghrebi Arabic: it entered colloquial French through the soldiers who served in the armies of North Africa, and French dictionaries date its first attestation to the second half of the 1800s, around 1867. From there “kif-kif” became an invariable adjective of French slang, used to say that two things are equivalent, and from there it also passed into literature. Anyone in France today who says “c'est kif-kif” is using, without knowing it, an Arabic particle of comparison doubled more than 150 years ago by people who heard those two languages ring together every day.

This is why the name of the place works better than it seems at first sight. It is not a decorative quotation: it is a word that has already made, on its own, the journey the surrounding neighborhood makes every day. Born in one language, adopted by another, understandable again to anyone the moment it is explained. A sign on Via Macerata that says “equal” in Maghrebi Arabic, in a block where people speak Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Romanian and Roman, is the most compact definition of what it means to run a neighborhood venue here.

Why the doubling is not an affectation

Lexical doubling, that is, the repetition of a word to modify or intensify its meaning, is a mechanism that exists in very many languages and that in Italian we use more than we think: “piano piano,” “pieno pieno,” “corri corri,” “a poco a poco.” In spoken Arabic the phenomenon is productive and serves to create fixed expressions that speech consolidates and writing collects afterward. When one of these expressions migrates into another language, it usually migrates as a block, as a unit: someone in France who says kif-kif is not using two words, but a single compound one. In Italian too, anyone reading the sign on Via Macerata reads it as a single block, without asking where the first kif ends and the second begins.

There is a difference to point out for honesty, because it touches a frequent misunderstanding. In French there is also the word “kif” on its own, with a completely different meaning, tied to pleasure and to a plant substance, and it entered youth slang with derived verbs. The two paths have distinct origins and must not be confused: the kif of the doubling is the particle of comparison, not the other thing. When someone at the next table explains the name of the place with the wrong etymology, now you know what to answer.

Something nobody tells you about Kif Kif

What nobody tells you is that a place like this is not judged by the glass, it is judged by the hour at which you walk in. It is an observation that holds for a whole category of Roman places, and that holds here in a particularly sharp way because the functions overlap.

If you go in early, when there is still light outside and the traffic of the Casilina makes that continuous noise that in Torpignattara is the real soundtrack, you find a neighborhood bar: people stopping on the way home, someone reading, conversations at normal volume, the real possibility of talking to the people working behind the counter and having them tell you what's happening that week. It is the moment when a place tells you the truth about itself, because it has no one to impress.

If you go in late, when the evening has taken its shape, you find something else: more bodies, more volume, less room for slow conversation and more room for what happens on the stage or from the sound system. It's not worse, it's different, and getting the hour wrong relative to what you are looking for is the easiest way to leave disappointed from a place that was not at fault. Anyone arriving at 11 at night expecting the silence of a wine shop got the hour wrong, not the venue. Anyone arriving at seven expecting the concert, same.

The second thing nobody tells you concerns the relationship between the venue and the street. In neighborhoods where nightlife grew fast, as happened in the Pigneto between the late 1990s and the 2010s, the relationship between those who drink and those who sleep upstairs is a serious, daily, often conflictual matter. The places that last are those that manage that relationship: the volume is kept under a certain threshold after a certain hour, the sidewalk is kept from turning into a noisy waiting room, they talk with the residents instead of waiting for the complaint. When you walk into a neighborhood venue on a dense residential street like Via Macerata, the way the staff handles the door and the sidewalk tells you much more about the quality of the place than any review.

The third, and perhaps the most useful: in an area like this, the venue is never the point of arrival, it's the point of departure. Within a 10-minute walk there are other bars, other kitchens, bakeries, halal butchers, Bangladeshi grocery shops open late, Chinese bakeries, a commercial fabric that changes continuously and that is the real attraction of the block. Anyone who arrives, sits down, drinks and leaves without walking for 10 minutes in the surrounding streets has seen a tenth of what there was to see.

The neighborhood around: Pigneto, Torpignattara and the Prenestino-Casilino quadrant

To understand Via Macerata you have to widen your gaze by a few kilometers, and widen it in time more than in space. The quadrant that opens outside Porta Maggiore, following Via Casilina and Via Prenestina, has a layering that few other sectors of Rome can claim: from the imperial age to the early 1900s to the present, with very few stretches of continuity and very many breaks.

The imperial villa and the two laurels

The area on which Torpignattara and the surrounding streets now stand lay, in the imperial age, on a suburban region that archaeologists have called by different names and that included a vast property known as the villa Ad Duas Lauros, “at the two laurels.” The place name appears in Tertullian, a Christian author who lived between the second and third centuries, who in one passage addresses the pagans with a question that has remained famous: “Inter duas lauros obsident Caesarem?”, that is, “do they lie in ambush for the emperor near the two laurels?” The most widespread hypothesis is that the name derived from two laurel trees at the entrance of the property, or from a double-laurel decoration.

That estate held more than an imperial residence. There were castra, that is, military camps, training grounds and burial areas. Here were quartered the equites singulares, the imperial mounted guard that came right after the Praetorians in the hierarchy. The equites singulares made a mistake that was paid for dearly: they stayed loyal to Maxentius. Constantine, after defeating him, had the area dismantled and chose precisely this sector to build a Christian basilica and a mausoleum for himself and his mother Helena.

The mausoleum, the pots and the name of the neighborhood

The name of the neighborhood comes from that mausoleum, and it is one of those etymologies that once known are never forgotten. The concrete drum of the Mausoleum of Helena was built by lightening the mass of the masonry with terracotta amphorae embedded in the conglomerate, a Roman building technique meant to reduce the weight of vaulted structures. Over the centuries the structure decayed and those amphorae remained visible in the conglomerate, like terracotta bubbles inside the artificial stone.

The amphorae, in Roman speech, were “pignatte.” The ruin that showed them thus became the tower of the pignatte, and from there Tor Pignattara, then Torpignattara all in one word. The name of an entire neighborhood of tens of thousands of inhabitants derives, literally, from a detail of late-antique building technique observed by people passing by centuries later who had no idea what that building was. The pignattari, that is, those who made and sold the pots, are the second leg of the same popular etymology. It is material worth keeping in mind while you walk toward Via Macerata: under the asphalt and the apartment blocks there is an imperial cemetery, a Constantinian basilica and the catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter.

The sarcophagus of Helena, which stood in that mausoleum, is no longer here: it is in the Vatican Museums, in red porphyry, one of the most imposing pieces of the collection. Those who visit that sarcophagus in the Vatican rarely know it comes from Torpignattara, and those who walk in Torpignattara rarely know the sarcophagus exists. It is one of the many fractures between center and periphery that this city produces without meaning to.

From farming estates to apartment blocks

The leap to the neighborhood you see today happens between the end of the 1800s and the 1930s, and it is a story of agriculture before it is one of building. In the 1880s a widow, Anna Maria Caracciolo, owned a vast farm along Via Casilina, from the area of today's Piazza della Marranella to the Alexandrine Aqueduct. To farm it she called a family from the Marche, and the choice was not by chance: in the Marche the sharecropping system had been established for decades. The result was such that in 1884, when the Ministry of Agriculture carried out a survey, that estate was classified as the best-run farm in Rome.

Next to it was another property, passed from the Apolloni family to an Englishman who married Countess Ojetti: Villa Certosa, whose name derived from the Carthusian monks who had originally cultivated it. That estate was known for a grape variety called “la Favorita,” so much so that the old name of the villa was Villa la Favorita. And here comes the detail that changes the perception of one of the busiest streets in Rome: Via Casilina has been called that only since the 1920s. Before, it was called Via delle Vigne, because it crossed the Favorita estate.

Around 1928 Countess Ojetti's administrator had the idea that generated the neighborhood: dividing the estate into tiny lots, of a few dozen square meters, and selling them. The houses lived in by hundreds of families still correspond to those lots today. The zone born in this way took the name Borghetto degli Angeli, from the place name of Via degli Angeli and from a shrine with a Madonna on which angels were painted. Another tradition, with no certain evidence, links the name instead to the abandoned children who were left in that place, called “esposti” and also known as “angels.”

The 1900s: water, trams, schools, cinemas

The Marranella ditch ran through this area until it formed a wide pond in the present-day square of the same name, and at the beginning of the 1900s the presence of a fountain for watering horses there signaled an old post station. The covering of the ditch, which happened in the mid-1920s, is the act that made the massive building of the zone possible: once the water was covered, you could build. In 1926 the old Strada di Porta Furba, which linked the two consular roads, was named Via di Tor Pignattara.

The arrival of services followed a few years later. In 1916 a single-track tram line linked Termini station to Tor Pignattara along the Casilina, entering the neighborhood and reaching the so-called Giro dell'Anello. In 1917 the Due Allori cinema opened, with a name that recovered, perhaps without fully knowing it, the imperial villa Ad Duas Lauros. In 1928 the Condotta Sanitaria Casilina went into operation on Via della Marranella. In 1929 the Alfredo Oriani elementary school opened, the building that today houses the Immanuel Kant classical high school. In 1938 the Luigi Michelazzi elementary school, today the Carlo Pisacane school, and the Impero cinema on Via dell'Acqua Bullicante, designed by Mario Messina, opened.

By 1930 the neighborhood already had 30,000 residents. The growth was sustained by a phenomenon that recent historiography has reassessed: self-promoted building. Not big firms or cooperatives, but private individuals gathered in small companies or acting alone, building houses of one or two floors with a flat terrace roof, designed so that a floor could be added in later years when finances allowed. The historian Stefania Ficacci has underlined how in the post-war period this dynamic was repeatedly confused with Roman illegal building, producing a historically false judgment that condemned Tor Pignattara to be described now as a borgata, now as an unauthorized neighborhood. Those unfinished terraces you still see today walking the side streets of the Casilina are not neglect: they are a project left half done for lack of money, repeated thousands of times.

The Pigneto, the master plan and Torlonia

The Pigneto has a parallel and slightly earlier genesis. With the master plan of 1909, launched by what was the first secular administration in the history of Rome, the administration begins to look at what lay outside Porta Maggiore: an industrial village grown right around the gate, which in the following years would become the Pigneto. The area was originally an estate of Alessandro Torlonia, and following the Casilina from there you reach Tor Pignattara. The two zones are therefore two successive stages of the same expansion along the same consular road, separated by a few minutes on foot and by a difference of a few decades.

This explains why today a venue on Via Macerata receives a public from both. The Pigneto has become, from the 2000s onward, a recognizable brand of the Roman night, with its pedestrian stretch, its bars and its reputation swinging between creative neighborhood and problem neighborhood. Torpignattara followed a different trajectory, more residential and more marked by immigration, with high housing density and a commercial fabric in continuous transformation. The hinge between the two is precisely the band of side streets in which Via Macerata sits.

My advice for visiting Kif Kif

The advice is simple to state and takes a bit of discipline to apply: get there on foot and get there from far away. Don't get out of the taxi in front of the door, don't park 20 meters away. Pick a starting point 10 or 15 minutes' walk away and make the trip looking at the shop windows, the signs, the balconies, the doorways. It's the only way to understand where you are, and without understanding where you are the venue stays just any venue.

Two routes work well. The first starts from Porta Maggiore and follows the Casilina outward: you cross the point where the ancient city and the 20th-century city touch brutally, with the aqueducts, the tracks, the traffic, and then you enter the fine fabric of the side streets. It is a route that lines up exactly the historical sequence told above: the industrial village outside the gate, the Pigneto, the side streets, Torpignattara. The second starts from the pedestrian stretch of Via del Pigneto, which in the market hours has a vitality that is worth the walk on its own, and continues southeast to the area of Via Macerata.

What to look at while you walk

Look at the heights of the buildings: where they are two floors with a flat roof and iron columns sticking out, you have in front of you the self-promoted building I was telling you about, the project of someone who counted on adding a floor when they could. Look at the signs: the commercial layering of this quadrant can be read with the naked eye, with historic Roman shops next to stores opened in the last 20 years by families arrived from Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Romania, Peru. Look at the doorways and courtyards: many of these houses have interior spaces you can't imagine from the street.

And look at the walls. The quadrant has one of the highest densities of mural works in Rome, the result of different projects succeeding one another over the years, some institutional and others spontaneous. You don't need a printed itinerary: walk and look up. Some of these works have years behind them and bear the marks of time and rain, others are recent. The interesting thing is not the single piece, it's the cumulative effect on such a fine building fabric.

The practical part, without beating around the bush

If your goal is a quiet evening with conversation, aim for the early hour. If your goal is music or an event, check first on the venue's channels that there really is something that evening: the program, by the explicit definition of those who describe the place, is occasional. If you come in a large group, give notice: in venues of this size the difference between a prepared table for six and an improvised table for six is the whole evening.

On the way back: this is a quadrant well served by surface public transport and by the subway, but in the late hours frequencies thin out and it's best to have a plan before going out, especially if you have to return to a distant zone. Night lines exist and cover the Casilina, but waiting times are not those of the afternoon. Anyone arriving by bicycle probably has the best solution: distances here are short and the terrain is flat.

One last recommendation that concerns not the venue but the neighborhood: if you stop to eat at one of the businesses in the area, go in and order the way you order anywhere, without treating it as an anthropological experience. It's a neighborhood where people live, work, take their kids to school and go to bed early because the next morning they get up at six. The most concrete respect you can bring is to behave normally.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely mentioned

The well-known fact is that Torpignattara is “the most multicultural neighborhood in Rome.” The guides say it, the description of the venue itself says it, the newspapers say it when they talk about the zone. What is cited much less often is the part that makes that fact interesting: it is not a recent novelty, it is the repetition of a mechanism that this quadrant has already lived through at least twice.

The first time is at the end of the 1800s, when the Caracciolo estate is farmed by a family called from the Marche expressly to bring an agricultural system that was not widespread in Rome. The second is that of the 1920s and 1930s, when the lots of the Borghetto degli Angeli and the side streets of the Casilina fill up with families arrived from elsewhere: urban proletariat employed in services and trade, a petty bourgeoisie excluded from the cooperative movement, and then the great internal migration flow from the rest of Lazio, from Abruzzo, from the Marche, from the South. Torpignattara was born as a neighborhood of people who came from elsewhere, and has gone on being one without interruption for more than a century.

The third wave, that of the last 30 years, is therefore not an anomaly: it is the same story with other countries of departure. Anyone who tells it as an upheaval of the neighborhood's original nature has simply chosen as point zero the moment their own family arrived. If you move point zero back to 1884, the only constant is movement.

There are concrete consequences you can see by walking. The schools of the quadrant, starting with the historic ones born between 1929 and 1938, have classes with a composition not found in other parts of Rome, and have developed over time teaching practices designed for that composition. The neighborhood trade has a density and opening hours that the center can only dream of: grocery stores open late in the evening, bakeries, butchers, specialized shops that serve specific communities but sell to anyone who walks in. The neighborhood associations, the cultural centers, the public libraries have programs that reflect the real public instead of an imagined one.

There is also a less idyllic part, and omitting it would be dishonest. The high housing density, the historic shortage of equipped green space in some bands, the pressure on rents generated by the growing appeal of the Pigneto, the strain on public services: they are real problems that the residents know better than anyone writing in passing. A venue like Kif Kif lives inside this context, not above it. The fact that it chooses for its sign a word meaning “equal” is a stand within a discussion that in the neighborhood is daily.

The right photo to take of Kif Kif

The right photo is not the sign. Everyone takes the sign, it always comes out the same, and it tells nothing the name doesn't already say. The right photo is the one that puts in the same frame the venue and the street that contains it, because that relationship is the story.

Technically: stand on the opposite sidewalk, step back as far as you can, and look for a frame that takes the venue in three-quarter view together with the row of facades along the street. Via Macerata is a narrow street, like all the side streets of this fabric, and the narrowness is information: it says that here they built on tiny lots, that the street front is fragmented, that each building has its own building history. A moderately wide-angle lens renders that sense of compression better than a telephoto, which would squash everything into one plane.

The right hour

The best hour is dusk, and not for generic aesthetic reasons. In that half hour when natural light goes down and artificial lights come up, the brightness values of the interior of the venue and the exterior come close enough to be recorded together without blowing out the lights or closing the shadows. It's the moment when you can see inside and outside in the same image: the people sitting inside, the street living outside, the signs of the neighboring shops lighting up. If you wait for full dark, the interior becomes a luminous blot and the street disappears.

If you want a second photo worth the trip, change subject and go find the Mausoleum of Helena. Photographing the concrete drum with the amphorae visible embedded in the masonry means photographing the etymology of the neighborhood itself: those are the pignatte from which the name Torpignattara comes. It's an image you don't have many chances to take in Rome, and one that explains 1,000 years of place names in a single frame. The raking light of early morning or late afternoon is what best brings out the relief of the amphorae from the conglomerate.

What not to photograph

Two warnings that hold everywhere but here more than elsewhere. The first concerns people: a neighborhood is not a set. Photographing recognizable faces without asking, and in particular photographing people to underline their origin, produces images that use people as a scenic backdrop. If you want to portray someone, ask. The answer is very often yes, and the photo that comes out of it is better.

The second concerns the interior of the venue. In a small place the flash is an aggression, and photographing other people's tables is rude. If you want to document the interior, do it early, when there are few people, and ask the staff if it's a problem. Once again the answer is almost always no, and you have spared yourself an embarrassing scene.

Some important events that happened here in history

It must be said clearly: the documented history of this address is the history of the area, not of the single business, and mixing the two would be incorrect. But the history of the area, within a radius of a few hundred meters from Via Macerata, is the kind that few Roman neighborhoods can line up.

The 4th century: Constantine, Helena and the end of the equites singulares

The most consequential event happens in the 4th century. After the victory over Maxentius, Constantine dismantles the corps of the equites singulares, who had stayed loyal to Maxentius, and materially erases their traces in the suburban area where they were quartered, within the Ad Duas Lauros property. On the same ground he has a Christian basilica and a dynastic mausoleum built. It is a political gesture as well as a building one: the new legitimacy is built on top of the physical ruins of the old.

The mausoleum receives Helena, the emperor's mother, a central figure in the Christianization of the empire and the object in the following centuries of a very wide cult. Her porphyry sarcophagus, today in the Vatican Museums, is one of the most imposing artifacts to have come down from antiquity. The cemetery tradition of the place survives the death of Constantine and Helena, and is witnessed by the catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, which develop precisely in this area.

1884: the best farm in Rome

The second event is of a wholly different order of magnitude, but it is the one that produced the neighborhood. In 1884 a survey by the Ministry of Agriculture classifies Anna Maria Caracciolo's estate, along the Casilina, as the best-run farm in Rome. The owner had discovered the existence of a law that financed land improvement and had organized the management by calling sharecroppers from the Marche. From that farm, and from the neighboring estate of Countess Ojetti, comes by successive subdivision the residential fabric you still walk on today.

The 1920s: covered water, vineyards turned into a road

The third decisive step is hydraulic and toponymic at once. In the mid-1920s the Marranella ditch, which formed a pond in the present-day square of the same name, is covered: from that moment the building of the area can proceed without obstacles. In the same years Via delle Vigne changes its name and becomes Via Casilina, and in 1926 the old Strada di Porta Furba is named Via di Tor Pignattara. Around 1928 the subdivision of the Ojetti estate produces the Borghetto degli Angeli. In less than 10 years, an agricultural landscape becomes an urban one.

There is a detail of the place naming of those years worth knowing because it makes the map readable: the cross streets were named according to two distinct criteria depending on the side. On one side the names recall designers and builders of fortifications and military works. On the other, heroic pilots of Italian aviation. When you walk the side streets and read the signs, what looks like a random list is actually a system planned at a desk in the 1920s.

The 1930s: 30 thousand inhabitants and half-finished houses

In 1930 the resident population reaches 30,000. The demographic push produces the neighborhood's characteristic building form: houses of one or two floors built by self-promotion, with the terrace roof designed as a base for a future floor. It is the moment when Torpignattara takes on the look that still distinguishes it today from the Roman peripheries built from above, by large blocks and large firms. The historiographic reading that values this phenomenon, instead of dismissing it as illegal building, is relatively recent and is tied to the work of Stefania Ficacci.

The post-war period and cinema

The quadrant outside Porta Maggiore has had a role in Italian cinema that goes beyond the anecdote. In the Pigneto were shot scenes of films that defined neorealism and the season that followed, and the borgata landscape of this band of the city entered the national imagination through the screen even before through the news. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who knew this periphery street by street, uses it as a setting and as narrative material: in a passage of his Roman novels the characters leave Porta Furba behind and move into a landscape of little vegetable gardens, wire fences, hovels, open lots, building sites, big apartment blocks and marane, arriving at the Borgata degli Angeli, which lies, he writes, between Tor Pignattara and the Quadraro. It is the same Borgata degli Angeli of the Ojetti subdivision, seen 30 years later through the eyes of a writer.

The last 30 years

The most recent event is a slow process that cannot be dated to a precise day: the demographic transformation of the quadrant, with the stable arrival of communities from Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Romania, the Philippines, Peru and other countries, and the simultaneous establishment of the Pigneto as a hub of the Roman night. The two dynamics have interacted in complex ways, sometimes virtuous and sometimes conflictual, and have produced the neighborhood in which a bar called “equal” in Maghrebi Arabic makes perfect sense.

Who has passed through Kif Kif

A clear distinction is needed here, and I make it right away so as not to fool you. There is no public, verifiable list of famous people who have passed through this specific venue, and inventing one would be the quickest way to make everything you've read so far useless. What can be said precisely concerns two things: who frequents a place like this, and who has left documented traces in the surrounding streets.

The real public

A venue filed at once as bar, wine shop, brewery, social space and music club, on a side street between the Pigneto and Torpignattara, gathers a public that few other Roman formulas manage to put in the same room. There are the residents of the street and the nearby streets, of all origins, who come in because it's the bar downstairs from home. There are the students and workers who arrived in the quadrant for rents lower than elsewhere. There are the regulars of the Pigneto night who move two blocks over looking for something less crowded. There are the people who gravitate around the cultural associations of the neighborhood, which in these parts are many and active. And on program nights there are the musicians, the authors and those who follow them.

It is a public that doesn't pose. If you are looking for the venue where you can spot someone, this is not the place. If you are looking for the venue where you hear three different languages at three neighboring tables, you have arrived.

Who has passed through the neighborhood, and this is documented

On the area, instead, the names are there and they are solid. Pier Paolo Pasolini crossed, described and filmed this band of the Roman periphery for years, and his novels and films fixed the image of the borgata between Tor Pignattara and the Quadraro at a precise historical moment. The Pigneto hosted shoots that belong to the history of post-war Italian cinema, and it is still today one of the most recognizable Roman places for anyone who has seen those films.

Further back in time, the names are imperial. Constantine and his mother Helena tied their names to this suburban sector definitively, with a mausoleum and a basilica. Tertullian left the first written mention of the two laurels. And in the 1800s there are the less celebrated but most decisive names for the daily life of those who live here: Anna Maria Caracciolo, the family from the Marche called to farm, Countess Ojetti, the anonymous administrator who had the idea of subdividing into small lots and who, without knowing it, drew the plan of the neighborhood.

Between these two extremes, the emperor and the side-street bar, lies all the distance that makes this part of Rome interesting. Helena's sarcophagus is in the Vatican Museums, behind a rope. The conglomerate with the pignatte from which the neighborhood takes its name is here, in the open air, a few minutes from a glass.

A note on the names that don't appear

It is worth explaining why in everything you have read you don't find the name of whoever runs the venue, the exact opening date, the dishes on the menu or the price of a glass. It is not reticence: it is that this information, for an independent neighborhood business, changes with a frequency no written text can chase. A menu is rewritten every season, a management can change hands, an opening time shifts by an hour when the light changes. Writing a specific dish here would mean handing you information destined to age before you get to Via Macerata.

What does not change, instead, and is therefore worth putting in writing, is everything else: why that name, the language it comes from, the neighborhood around it, the history that neighborhood has under its feet, the right way to get there and the right way to look at it. They are the pieces of information that hold up over time and that make an evening different from a drink. You read the menu on the spot in 30 seconds. The fact that the drum of the mausoleum a few minutes from there contains the amphorae from which the neighborhood takes its name, that you don't read anywhere while you order.

There is also a more practical reason. The venues of this Roman band, those outside the tourist circuits and inside the lived-in fabric, live on narrow margins and direct relationships. The best way to support them is not to cite their signature dish in a list: it's to walk in, sit down, ask what's on that night and trust the answer. It is also, quite simply, the way you drink and eat best.

Where to go before and after

An evening on Via Macerata works better if it has a before or an after. The quadrant and the neighboring zones offer enough to build a whole day without moving around much.

In the afternoon, the nearest and most interesting green space to see is the ex Snia lake, the body of water born by chance inside the area of the former Snia Viscosa factory on the Prenestina, one of the most talked-about cases of nature and urban conflict in Rome. The ex Snia area as a whole is worth a walk even just to understand what industry was in this sector of the city. A little further on, toward the Casilino, the Casa della Cultura di Villa De Sanctis and the park around it are the public cultural hub of reference for the quadrant.

For those who want to push toward archaeology, the underground basilica of Porta Maggiore is a few minutes from the point where the Casilina leaves the walls, and it is one of the most enigmatic rooms of ancient Rome. The Aqueducts Park, further south, closes the sequence of the landscape that Pasolini filmed. Those who prefer to stay on the markets-and-food side can go back up toward the Esquilino and the new Esquilino market, the most international market in the city, and the Cittadini del Mondo intercultural library, which works on the same cultural ground on which, in its own way, a bar called Kif Kif works.

For the evening, staying inside the quadrant, Fanfulla 5/a is the other historic address of the Pigneto's cultural life and a reference for those looking for music and screenings outside the major circuits. If instead you want to move a little toward the Mandrione, Snodo Mandrione works on a railway and aqueduct landscape that is the other face of the same periphery.

Frequently asked questions about Kif Kif

Where is Kif Kif?

Kif Kif is on Via Macerata, in Torpignattara, in the Prenestino Casilino quadrant of Rome, just outside Porta Maggiore along the line of Via Casilina. It is an address that changes identity several times over the course of the evening.

What does the name Kif Kif mean?

Kif Kif takes its name from a doubling of a real Arabic word, documented in the dictionaries: at the base is the Arabic kif, which simply means how, in the same way. It is not an advertising invention made up to sound vaguely oriental.

What kind of place is Kif Kif?

Kif Kif is filed by the city guides under more than one label: bar, disco bar, wine shop and wine bar, brewery and pub, social space, club, music club. This multiplicity reflects a place that changes function depending on the hour and the day of the week.

In which neighborhood is Kif Kif and why is it special?

Kif Kif is in Torpignattara, an area often called the most multicultural neighborhood in Rome. The phenomenon is not recent: the quadrant, between the imperial age, the early 1900s and the present, has already lived through phases of strong layering and mixing of different populations several times.

How is it best to get to Kif Kif?

The advice for getting to Kif Kif is to get off a few stops earlier and do the last stretch on foot, starting from a point 10 or 15 minutes' walk away, looking at shop windows, signs and doorways along the street to better understand the neighborhood you are crossing.

Why is it best to check the official channels before going to Kif Kif?

Kif Kif is a neighborhood venue, and neighborhood venues live on cycles that don't go through press releases: the kitchen changes, the music program comes and goes, the hours adapt to the season. Before crossing the city it's always best to check the venue's direct channels.

Before you leave the house

Kif Kif is a neighborhood venue, and neighborhood venues live on cycles that don't go through press releases. The kitchen changes, the music program comes and goes, the hours adapt to the season. Before crossing half the city for a specific evening it's always best to check the venue's direct channels, exactly as you would for any other independent Roman address. It is the simplest way to avoid the disappointment of a closed door and, above all, to discover the event that was on no public calendar.

If you are building a broader itinerary on Rome and Lazio, and want to put together the periphery well told with the center you already know, you will find useful material on ItalyPlanner, which works precisely on planning trips in Italy day by day. If instead you are a professional in tour guiding and need tools to build and manage groups, the reference is TourLeaderPro. They are the two places where this same care for detail becomes a working tool instead of a read.

The street does the rest. Via Macerata 54, a Maghrebi Arabic word on the sign meaning “the same,” and a neighborhood that has practiced that word for 140 years without ever having written it on a wall. Source