Quadraro

Quadraro is a borgata that grew outside the walls between Via Casilina and Via Tuscolana, in the southeast quadrant of Rome, a quarter of an hour by metro from the center and a few minutes on foot from the Cinecittà studios. It's not a monumental neighborhood and it has no tourist center. It has narrow streets named after Roman families, low apartment buildings from the 1920s and 1930s, courtyards, workshops, and a political identity that comes from one precise event, the Nazi roundup of April 17, 1944. For 15 years its walls have also hosted an open-air urban art museum. This page lays out what you actually see walking around, what the sources say about the roundup and where the sources disagree with each other, how the museum of the walls works, and what to expect from an area that lives off itself and not off tourism.

Where Quadraro is and how to get there

Administratively, Quadraro corresponds to urban zone 6C of Municipio V of Roma Capitale, and spills over into the Tuscolano neighborhood and Municipio VII. The practical boundaries are easier to read than the codes: Via Casilina to the north, Via del Mandrione to the west, Via Tuscolana cutting through it at Porta Furba, and then the streets that climb toward Monte del Grano. Around it are Torpignattara, Casilino, Centocelle, Don Bosco, Appio Claudio and southern Tuscolano.

The distinction you'll hear locally is between Old Quadraro and New Quadraro. The first is the historic core closest to Via Casilina and the Mandrione, where the painted walls are thickest. The second is the part that grew later toward Via Tuscolana and Via dei Quintili. If you're coming for the first time and looking for the murals, aim for Old Quadraro, otherwise you'll wander a long time without finding anything.

By metro

The right stop is Porta Furba Quadraro, on metro line A, between Arco di Travertino and Numidio Quadrato. From the exit you're already inside: just cross Via Tuscolana and take the streets that go down toward the north. On the same line, two stops further on, you get off at Cinecittà. If you want to combine the two in one day, it's the simplest connection Rome offers in the suburbs, with no transfers and no buses.

On foot from Cinecittà and the aqueducts

Walking is the best option. From the Cinecittà stop to Old Quadraro takes about 25 minutes on continuous sidewalks, and the same distance separates the neighborhood from the north entrance of Aqueducts Park. If you come from the park, you enter Quadraro from the upper part and cross it downhill, which is the right direction: the main streets of the old core run down toward Via Casilina.

By car, by bike, in the evening

Parking in Old Quadraro is a struggle and it's better to say so up front. The streets are narrow, the parking is almost all for residents, and the through traffic between Via Casilina and Via Tuscolana goes right through there. On a bike life is easier, with the limit of the climbs toward Monte del Grano. The map of the bike lanes that really work is collected on the page about Rome by bike. In the evening the neighborhood is alive but not lit like the center: at night, the painted walls can't be seen.

What you actually see walking around, and how long it takes

Quadraro has no monument to put on the cover, and anyone who arrives expecting one is disappointed in the first 10 minutes. What it has is a fabric: short streets named after Roman gentes, Via dei Lentuli, Via dei Pisoni, Via dei Corneli, Via Decio Mure, two- and three-story buildings with iron balconies, neighborhood shops, a local market, and a quantity of painted walls that changes from year to year. You walk looking up and to the sides, not down the end of the perspective.

The walk around the walls of the old core takes between an hour and a half and two hours, walking slowly and going back over the same streets twice, because some works are on side facades that can only be seen from a certain angle. Adding Parco XVII aprile 1944 and Monte del Grano brings it to three hours. If you want to finish the day with Parco degli Acquedotti, count on a full half day, with the right shoes.

What you don't see

There's no visitor center, no ticket office, no information point. The museum of the walls is literally in the street and nobody will give you a map when you arrive. The Monte del Grano mausoleum, the most notable ancient thing in the area, stays closed almost all year and opens only on special occasions. If you imagine a route marked with panels and arrows, you instead find a lived-in neighborhood where you have to find your own way.

Unwritten rules of behavior

The painted houses are houses. Many works are on private facades, on garage doors, on courtyard walls, and someone lives behind those walls. Photographing from the street is fine, going into the courtyards is not, and ringing doorbells to get the best shot is the thing that annoys residents most. Respect here is not a formality: the neighborhood accepted the open-air museum precisely because it was built with the residents and not against them.

How Quadraro came to be: an unplanned borgata

The place name is old and predates the neighborhood by centuries. It comes from an agricultural estate tied to the Roman abbey of Sant'Alessio, granted in emphyteusis and recorded in documents in forms such as Guadralis or Guatralis, from which the Italian Quadraro. Throughout the Middle Ages and the modern age this was countryside: vineyards, farmhouses, the Felice aqueduct crossing it, and the consular roads bounding it.

The built-up area was born between the 1910s and the 1920s as a subdivision of villas, and changed nature almost immediately. In the 1930s the neighborhood filled with families evicted by the demolitions in the historic center, with immigrants from the south, with construction workers and laborers looking for work on the building sites of the expanding city. Growth happened largely outside any plan: you build where you can, you add floors when needed, the streets take shape after the houses.

This origin explains many things about Quadraro today. The narrow, irregular streets, the sudden changes in level, the blind walls that face the side streets and that a hundred years later became the surface to paint on, the absence of monumental squares. Rome has dozens of neighborhoods born like this between the wars and after the war: Quadraro is one of the few where that spontaneous design can still be read as you walk.

Why here and not elsewhere

The location matters. Quadraro sits between two major roads out of the city, Via Casilina and Via Tuscolana, and was already served by the Roma Fiuggi railway that ran along Via Casilina. Nearby were the Centocelle airport, the building sites of the southeast quadrant, and, from 1937, the Cinecittà studios. A borgata of laborers is born where there is work to reach on foot or by tram, and this part of the city offered plenty.

The relationship with the Mandrione

The western boundary of Quadraro is Via del Mandrione, the road that runs narrow between the arches of the Felice aqueduct and the bundle of railway tracks. For decades those arches housed shacks leaning against the piers, in conditions that the documentaries and photographs of the 1950s and 1960s made known. Today the street has changed and also hosts cultural spaces like Snodo Mandrione, but the route and the arches are the same.

April 17, 1944: Operation Whale

At dawn on April 17, 1944, German units surrounded Quadraro and rounded up the men house by house. The operation had a code name, Unternehmen Walfisch, Operation Whale, and was directed on the spot by Herbert Kappler, the same SS officer responsible for the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, which had taken place 23 days earlier. The sources agree on the date, on the code name and on Kappler's direction.

The neighborhood had been under watch for weeks. On April 10, 1944, a partisan action had killed some German soldiers in the area, and an early curfew was already in force in the quadrant. Quadraro and the surrounding borgate, Quarticciolo, Torpignattara, Centocelle, were considered by the German command an area out of control, where Roman Resistance groups operated and where draft evaders of the Italian Social Republic found places to hide.

The sequence of events

The men taken from their homes were brought first to the Quadraro cinema, on Via Tuscolana, and registered there. From there they were transferred to the Cinecittà studios, turned into a collection camp, where a selection took place. The later transfers, reconstructed from testimonies, pass through the Murate prison in Florence and through Terni, and arrive at the Fossoli transit camp, near Carpi. From Fossoli the deportees were sent toward Germany and Austria, and in part toward Poland.

The destination was not extermination but forced labor. The men of Quadraro were employed in German chemical and steel industry, often after signing work contracts presented as voluntary and obtained under coercion. This detail, apparently technical, weighed for decades: on their return, that signature was used to deny them the status of deportees and the protections that came with it.

The numbers, and why the sources differ

On the number of men taken the sources don't agree, and whoever writes a flat figure without saying so is simplifying a real historiographical problem. The most recurrent estimates line up like this: the list compiled by the parish priest don Gioacchino Rey, considered by many scholars the most reliable document because it was drawn up at the time, counts 683 names. Silverio Corvisieri gives about 740. Marisa Musu and Ennio Polito, 744. Robert Katz, about 750. Enzo Piscitelli, at least 800. And the figure of 947, today the most cited in commemorations, corresponds according to several reconstructions to the people selected at Cinecittà after the roundup.

On the total of the men stopped in the morning, before the selections, the reconstructions speak of about 2,000 people between 16 and 65 years old, out of a neighborhood population that at the time numbered between five and 6,000 inhabitants. The gap between the figures depends on what is counted: those stopped, those held after the selection, those who left with the convoys, those registered in the parish lists. Whoever wants a single figure has to choose which question they are asking.

How many came back

On the return the sources agree more and are more sober: about half of the deportees came back to Quadraro. Several of those who returned died in the following years from the effects of working in the German chemical factories. Not all the names are known, and in 2024, for the eightieth anniversary, a public appeal was relaunched to complete the list of the deportees, a sign that the reconstruction of the records is still open.

Institutional recognition came late. For decades the affair remained a matter of local memory, kept alive by families, by the chapters of ANPI and the neighborhood associations, while national historiography paid it little attention. The overall picture of occupied Rome is better reconstructed at the Museo Storico della Liberazione on Via Tasso and at the Ardeatine Caves Mausoleum.

The wasps' nest: how well documented is that label

The phrase that always accompanies Quadraro is nido di vespe, wasps' nest, and it's worth knowing where it comes from. The most cited source is Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen, German consul in Rome during the occupation, who in his postwar memoirs describes the neighborhood as a wasps' nest populated by hostile elements, informers, partisans and communists, and defines the roundup of April 17 as the fiercest operation of its kind conducted by the Germans in Rome.

Part of the literature instead attributes the phrase directly to Kappler, in a more theatrical form along the lines of "let's go and smoke out that wasps' nest." This version circulates widely but rests on a chain of citations less solid than Möllhausen's, and should be taken for what it is: a storytelling formula, not a document. Anyone visiting the neighborhood would do well to know that the expression exists in the German sources, but that the precise attribution is disputed.

On the substance, however, the documents hold up. The area hosted cells of several Roman Resistance formations, from the bands tied to the Partito d'Azione to the Gruppi di Azione Patriottica, as well as draft evaders, stragglers from the army and wanted men. The roundup was not a reprisal for a single episode but a preventive clearing operation of an entire urban area, and this is what distinguishes it from the other Roman events of that April.

The gold medal and the places of memory

In April 2004, on the sixtieth anniversary of the roundup, the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi awarded Quadraro a gold medal, handed to the municipal administration that at the time had jurisdiction over the area. On this the sources agree: year, occasion and the authority that awarded it.

On the exact name of the honor, however, the sources diverge and the divergence has to be reported. Local publications, the neighborhood press and municipal records mostly speak of the gold medal for civil merit. Other sources, including national news agencies and encyclopedia entries, write gold medal for civil valor. One journalistic reconstruction even speaks of military valor. The three are distinct honors, with distinct procedures. Anyone citing the medal in a public text would do well to check the wording on the official act instead of trusting the most widespread formula.

The citation, in the form in which it is reported, recognizes the neighborhood for having been one of the most active and organized centers of Roman anti-fascism and for the resistance it put up against the occupier, with the price paid by the male population. It is the recognition of a community, not of individuals: a rare thing, and the only one of this kind awarded to a neighborhood of Rome.

Parco XVII aprile 1944 and the monument to the deportees

The main green space of the neighborhood carries the date of the roundup. Parco XVII aprile 1944 is located between Piazza dei Tribuni and Via Asconio Pediano, was redone in the late 1990s and named in 2001. Inside there is a sculptural group on a pedestal showing a man embracing his family and a soldier separating him from them. It's a sober monument, without rhetoric, and over the years it has been defaced several times with Nazi symbols and cleaned up by the residents.

The commemorative march of April 17 starts every year from the neighborhood and involves schools, associations and ANPI chapters, with temporary changes to traffic on the affected streets. If you happen to be in Quadraro on that date, you find a neighborhood out in the street and a chance to listen that no guided tour reproduces. The rest of the year the park is a neighborhood garden like many others, used by the people who live there.

Monte del Grano

Inside the same park rises an artificial hillock about a dozen meters high: it's the mound of a great Roman mausoleum, the Monte del Grano, the third tumulus tomb in Rome by size after those of Augustus and Hadrian. The brick stamps date it to the second century AD, while tradition assigns it to the emperor Alexander Severus, who lived in the third: the attribution is disputed and studies have not closed the question. The popular name comes from the shape, which recalls an upturned bushel of grain.

Inside, a corridor about 20 meters long leads to a circular chamber covered by a dome. In the sixteenth century an Attic sarcophagus with the stories of Achilles on Skyros was found there, now kept at the Capitoline Museums. The monument is normally closed and can be visited only on special openings promoted by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina or by associations. If you go hoping to get in without checking the calendar, you find a gate.

A curiosity about Quadraro

The streets of Old Quadraro almost all carry the names of Republican Roman gentes: Lentuli, Pisoni, Corneli, Quintili, Decio Mure, Calpurnio Fiamma, Asconio Pediano. It's a learned street naming, decided at a desk in the years of the subdivision, applied to a borgata that had nothing learned about it and that filled up with evicted families and day laborers. The contrast between the names of the streets and the life that went on there is one of the things that struck the writers who frequented the area in the 1950s.

That choice had a curious practical effect. In Quadraro it's very easy to get lost, because the names all resemble each other and none of them tells you where you're going: Via dei Pisoni and Via dei Lentuli are 50 meters from each other and intersect with other streets of the same layout. If you look for a painted wall without the exact address, you go around in circles. It's best to note down the street names before leaving.

One thing nobody tells you about Quadraro

The men deported in April 1944 were not recognized as deportees. On their return they found themselves classified as workers who had signed a contract, because in Germany that signature had been extorted under threat but was on the record. For decades this excluded them from the benefits provided for survivors of the camps and for the categories of victims recognized by Italian law.

The consequence is that the story of Quadraro stayed outside the national narrative of the Resistance much longer than others. There was no trial, there was no state plaque in the early years, there was no film. Memory was kept standing by the families and the neighborhood associations, and public recognition came 60 years after the events. Anyone arriving today and seeing the murals and the plaques should know that this visibility is very recent.

There's also a more unpleasant reason for this delay. Quadraro was a poor borgata with a political lean to the left, in a periphery the city looked at with suspicion, and its story did not fit comfortably into any of the official narratives of the postwar period. Only since the mid-1980s has local historical research begun to reconstruct the facts with method, and everything you read today descends from there.

My advice for visiting Quadraro

Go in the morning, on a weekday, and plan to walk aimlessly for an hour before looking for anything specific. Quadraro is understood by watching how it lives: the neighborhood market, the bars where you have breakfast standing up, the workshops with the shutter up, the outside stairs of the apartment buildings. Whoever arrives with the list of murals in hand and ticks them off one by one takes home 10 photographs and no idea where they've been.

The second thing is to study the geography of the two cores beforehand. Get off at Porta Furba Quadraro, cross Via Tuscolana and head for Via dei Lentuli and the streets around it: that's where most of the works of the open-air museum are concentrated. Parco XVII aprile 1944 and Monte del Grano are on the other side, toward Piazza dei Tribuni, and require a conscious detour.

The third is to set aside half a day and not two hours, pairing the neighborhood with something that completes it. The two combinations that work are Quadraro plus Aqueducts Park, which you do entirely on foot, and Quadraro plus Cinecittà Studios, which you do with two metro stops. The first is free and worth it for the landscape, the second costs a ticket and is worth it for the history of Italian cinema.

When to avoid it

In August in the middle of the day Quadraro is an oven, with no shade and no shelter, and half the shops are closed. Sunday afternoon it's half empty and loses its best feature, which is the street life. In the rain there's nothing to do indoors: there are no museums, no open churches to visit, no galleries. In those cases it's better to move to an indoor destination and put it off.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

The Quadraro roundup was directed by the same officer who 23 days earlier had organized the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, and this fact appears in all the reconstructions. What is cited less is the difference in logic between the two operations. The Ardeatine was a reprisal with a numerical ratio set from above after the attack on Via Rasella. Quadraro was instead a preventive clearing of a territory, with no triggering event to punish and no number to reach.

The distinction is not academic and has legal consequences. A reprisal leaves documentary traces, orders, lists, communiqués. A roundup of labor leaves work registers and contracts, and gets confused with the forced recruitment practiced all over Europe. This is also why the men of Quadraro had so much difficulty getting recognized, while for the Ardeatine there were trials and sentences.

A second fact rarely cited concerns the women. The roundup hit the male population between 16 and 65 years old, and so left a neighborhood of women, children and old people to hold itself together for months, in an occupied and starving city two months before the liberation. The reconstruction of those months, which is documented by testimonies collected in the neighborhood, remains the least explored chapter of the whole story.

The right photo to take in Quadraro

The photograph that tells Quadraro is not the close-up of a well-lit mural. It's the wide shot where the painted wall sits together with the lived-in building: the laundry hung out, the antennas, the scooter below, the shutter of the workshop, and above all this a work by an artist who exhibits in museums. That contrast is the reason the open-air museum works, and it should be photographed whole, not cropped.

Technically the best time is the morning between nine and 11, when the sun comes in low on the east-facing facades and the colors hold without burning out. In the early afternoon the narrow streets of Old Quadraro end up in shade and the walls go flat. You need a wide-angle lens or the willingness to step back a long way, because the streets are only a few meters wide and some works take up three floors of facade.

The two alternative shots

The first is from Parco XVII aprile 1944 toward the mound of Monte del Grano, with the 1970s apartment buildings around it: an imperial tomb surrounded by public housing, and no caption needed. The second is from Via del Mandrione, with the arches of the Felice aqueduct in a row and the tracks beside them, which is the most direct way to understand where the neighborhood ends.

If you have time and want the best-known photograph of the area, though, you have to leave Quadraro and go up to Aqueducts Park at sunset, where the arches of the Claudian Aqueduct and the Felice aqueduct run parallel in the meadow. It's the landscape that has crossed half a century of Italian cinema, and it's 25 minutes on foot from the painted streets.

Some important events that happened here in history

The second century AD leaves here the great tumulus tomb of Monte del Grano, a sign that the area was already occupied by high-ranking suburban properties along the Tuscolana route. In 1585 Sixtus V starts the construction of the Felice aqueduct, which cuts through the area and draws the western boundary of the future neighborhood. In 1733 Clement XII has the fountain of Porta Furba restored and enlarged, at the crossing between the aqueduct and Via Tuscolana.

Between the 1910s and the 1920s the subdivision is born, which in the 1930s turns into a borgata through the effect of evictions from the historic center and internal immigration. In 1937 the Cinecittà studios come into operation a few hundred meters away, and the neighborhood becomes the pool of extras and craftspeople for Italian cinema.

On April 17, 1944 the roundup takes place. In the postwar period the Cinecittà studios host for years a collection center for refugees and displaced people, a story documented by research and by a documentary and for a long time removed from the history of the city. Between the 1950s and the 1970s the quadrant is the setting of cinema and literature about the Roman borgate.

In 1999 the green area around Monte del Grano is redone, named in 2001 for April 17, 1944. In April 2004, for the sixtieth anniversary, the gold medal arrives. In 2010 the urban art museum is born that today brings many visitors to the streets of the old core. In 2024, for the eightieth, the public appeal to complete the list of the names of the deportees is relaunched.

Who passed through Quadraro

Herbert Kappler passed through on April 17, 1944 to direct the operation, and he is the name the neighborhood remembers first, with the precision owed to the facts. Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen, German consul in Rome, put in writing in his memoirs the judgment on the neighborhood from which the wasps' nest formula comes. They are the two German names that recur in every documented reconstruction.

Pier Paolo Pasolini frequented this quadrant in the 1950s and 1960s, in the phase of research on places and faces that would lead to his cinema. In an article written in the period of preparation for Accattone he tells of an evening walk toward Quadraro and of meeting a boy on a bicycle, outlined against the Roman horizon. The relationship between Pasolini and this area is documented: what must be kept separate is where he actually shot, and we come back to that further on.

Don Roberto Sardelli, priest of the parish of San Policarpo, went to live in 1968 among the shacks leaning against the Felice aqueduct, in the area that is today inside Parco degli Acquedotti, just beyond the southern boundary of Quadraro. There he founded the Scuola 725, from the number of the shack, and in 1969 had his pupils write a letter to the mayor of Rome about the conditions of the shack dwellers. The shacks were demolished in 1973. Sardelli died in 2019.

Since 2010 international urban artists have also passed through here, invited to paint on the walls of the neighborhood through the open-air museum: among the names recurring in the project's documentation are Ron English, Gary Baseman, Jim Avignon, Beau Stanton, together with the Italians Lucamaleonte, Mr Thoms, Gio Pistone, Omino 71 and Alessandro Sardella. If you follow urban art in Rome, you'll find the general picture on the page about street art in Rome.

The MURo, Rome's urban art museum

The MURo, Museo di Urban Art di Roma, was born in 2010 in Quadraro on the initiative of the artist David Vecchiato, known as Diavù. It's an open-air museum: it has no building, no ticket office, no opening hours, and its collection is the walls of the streets. The works are outdoors and visible for free at any time, with the obvious limit of the light.

The mechanism declared by the project is what sets it apart from urban decor operations dropped in from above. The interventions are proposed and discussed with residents through public assemblies and online channels, and the subjects are chosen in relation to the history and identity of the place: the roundup, the Resistance, the figures of the neighborhood. The wall is granted by whoever owns the house. This procedure is the reason why in Quadraro the works are generally respected and not covered.

From Quadraro the project then extended to Torpignattara and other areas of Rome, with later strands dedicated to the overpasses of the Grande Raccordo Anulare and to urban staircases. The overall collection counts several dozen interventions, spread over several neighborhoods. Those of the original core in Quadraro are concentrated in a few streets and can all be visited on foot.

The works, and the warning about the works

Walls change, and a list of murals is the thing that ages faster than a guidebook. Works painted outdoors fade, get covered by graffiti, undergo repainting of facades, and in some cases disappear when the owner redoes the plaster. In Quadraro the available documentation already notes works damaged by time and at least one intervention covered over the years.

That said, some works have become stable reference points of the neighborhood and are cited consistently in the sources. The best known is the Nido di Vespe by Lucamaleonte, from 2014, which turns into an image the German definition of the neighborhood and reverses its meaning. Alongside it recur L'arte feconda il Quadraro by Diavù, the works of Ron English, Gary Baseman, Jim Avignon and Beau Stanton in the streets of the gentes, La Fenice by Alessandro Sardella and the intervention in the tunnel by Gio Pistone.

The serious way to organize the visit is to check first the updated map published by the project itself and by the museum's channels, instead of trusting lists copied from blog to blog. If you want one more check, you can lean on the pages of 999Contemporary, the Roman organization that produced many of the city's large mural works, and on the museum's institutional page on the tourist portal of Roma Capitale.

Why it worked here

Quadraro offered three conditions that are hard to find together: many blind walls left by spontaneous building, a community with a strong collective identity and a story to tell, and a distance from the center sufficient not to trigger the restrictions and controversies that accompany every intervention in the historic fabric. None of the three, alone, would have been enough.

Quadraro and Cinecittà: a working relationship

The Cinecittà studios opened in 1937 on Via Tuscolana, a few minutes from Quadraro. For decades they were the main employer of the quadrant: extras, bit players, craftspeople, carpenters, tailors, electricians, haulers. The surrounding borgate supplied the hundreds of extras that costume productions required, and Quadraro was the closest.

Historical research has highlighted the social flip side of this relationship. For a population that had been expelled from the historic center by the demolitions, working as an extra inside the set reconstructions of ancient Rome meant going back into those spaces, even if in papier-mâché and for pay. It's one of the sharpest observations produced about the beginnings of Cinecittà, and it directly concerns this neighborhood.

The relationship also had a dramatic side. In April 1944 the studios were used as a place to gather and select the men rounded up in Quadraro, and in the postwar period they hosted for years a center for refugees and displaced people. Anyone visiting Cinecittà Studios today with the museum route finds mostly the history of cinema. This part, which is the history of the city, has to be reconstructed elsewhere.

What to see and at what price

The Studios can be visited with a ticket and a guided route, with hours that change by season and by the productions underway, and it's always best to check first. If instead you're looking for cinema as museum material, you can aim for the MIAC, the Italian museum of the audiovisual and cinema, set up inside the same complex. The theme park Cinecittà World is something else, is located far away, on Via Pontina, and should not be confused with the historic studios.

Pasolini, cinema and the borgate: what was actually shot here

The link between Pasolini and the southeast quadrant of Rome is documented, but it has to be taken apart with precision, because the tourist vulgate puts everything together and gets the neighborhood wrong with ease. Accattone, shot in 1961, has its main locations in Pigneto, the borgata Gordiani and Torpignattara, with forays into Centocelle, the Monti district, Trastevere and Testaccio: Quadraro, in the reconstructions of the locations, does not appear among the film's sets.

With Mamma Roma, from 1962, the story changes. The film is shot in large part right in this quadrant, between the arches of the Felice aqueduct, the streets of Quadraro and the Cecafumo area toward southern Tuscolano: in the reconstructions appear Via Lemonia, Via Lucio Sestio, Via Calpurnio Fiamma, and the shacks leaning against the aqueducts that in the film are still seen standing. Whoever walks today in Aqueducts Park is standing inside those shots.

What Pasolini did in Quadraro, according to his own pages, was above all to look. In a piece written in the preparation phase of Accattone he tells of an evening walk toward the neighborhood, the shacks, the bars of the periphery, and the boy on the bicycle outlined against the horizon. It is scouting and writing material, not shooting material, and confusing it with a set is the most common mistake you read around.

The rest of the area's cinema

The quadrant between Casilina, Tuscolana and the aqueducts has been used by very many Italian productions, and continues to be, precisely because it offers within a few kilometers countryside, ancient ruins, public housing and sound stages. The arches of the aqueducts have appeared in famous films shot in Rome in the postwar period and in dozens of minor titles. If you want to see outdoor cinema in this part of the city, every summer you find free arenas in the area, from the screenings at Aqueducts Park to those at Casilino Sky Park, besides the general picture of the summer arenas of Rome.

Parco degli Acquedotti, Porta Furba and the edge of the neighborhood

Porta Furba is the point where the Felice aqueduct crosses over Via Tuscolana forming a monumental arch, with beside it the fountain commissioned by Clement XII in 1733, restored and enlarged on an existing structure from the Sixtine era and touched up again at the end of the nineteenth century. The etymology of the name is uncertain: some trace it to the Latin fur, thief, for the brigands who extorted travelers, and some to a distortion of formae, the medieval term for aqueducts.

The Felice aqueduct takes its name from the baptismal name of Sixtus V, Felice Peretti, who started its construction in 1585 to bring water to the upper districts of the city. Its arches cross this whole quadrant and form the southern and western edge of Quadraro, first along Via del Mandrione and then inside the park. For the Roman water system as a whole we refer you to the page on the Acqua Vergine.

Aqueducts Park is the natural destination of a walk starting from Quadraro: open meadow, the arches of the Claudian Aqueduct and the Felice in a row, and no fence. It's free, it's always accessible, and the right time is late afternoon. It's part of the Appian Way Park system, which from here continues toward the Caffarella and toward the Villa of the Quintilii.

Toward the north: Via Casilina

On the other side, toward the north, Quadraro leans on Via Casilina and the Torpignattara and Centocelle quadrant, which has a comparable density of urban art and a parallel social history. Continuing along Via Casilina toward the center you reach Porta Maggiore, where 11 ancient aqueducts converged on the walls, and the underground basilica that opens below street level. The urban stretch of the Aurelian walls begins there.

Other nearby things

Within two or three metro stops are the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano and Holy Cross in Jerusalem, which close the quadrant toward the center. Closer, in the fabric of the borgate, remains the church of San Felice da Cantalice in Centocelle, and the Mausoleum of Sant'Elena with the catacombs of Santi Marcellino e Pietro on Via Casilina. On the Appia, a little further south, are the catacombs of San Sebastiano.

Neighborhood life today

Quadraro is a neighborhood lived in by people who work there or were born there, with a young component that arrived in the last 15 years for the lower rents and the convenient metro. It has social centers, neighborhood associations, active ANPI chapters, clubs, a local market, and a fabric of neighborhood commerce that has disappeared in many parts of Rome. This is the real reason the walk is worth it.

The flip side is that the neighborhood is also fragile. The houses from the 1920s and 1930s are often without elevators and without maintenance, the through traffic is heavy, green spaces are few and the main park has repeatedly had problems of neglect. Whoever arrives as a visitor and describes Quadraro only as the neighborhood of the murals skips half the issue.

In the local calendar there are events worth the detour, from the initiatives of the Casilino Urban Fest to the cultural series of the quadrant such as those at Villa Lais, a little further west. The nearest equipped green space, for those traveling with kids, is Parco Appio. Other practical tips are collected on the page about Rome with kids.

Eating in the area: here the signals work in reverse

Quadraro is one of the Roman cases where the restaurant chapter has to be written in reverse. It's not an area worked by mass tourism, it has no monument in front of which to put tables, and the places that are there live off neighborhood clientele: families, workers, people on their way home. This means that the warning signs you use in the center serve a different purpose here, namely to tell when you've left the real Quadraro and entered the band that intercepts visitors.

The signs, and how to read them here

The menu with photographs of the dishes remains the first clue everywhere, because photographing food serves someone who can't read the language, and in a neighborhood place it serves no one. The same goes for the lady rolling fresh pasta in the window or on the sidewalk: it's a staged lure built for passersby, not a clue about the cooking behind it. The person at the door inviting you to sit works the flow, not the returning customer.

Add the all-day hours. A place open from morning to night with no kitchen break doesn't have a crew working defined services: it's serving whoever turns up, at any hour, with whatever it can manage. And finally the spots placed in front of attractions, where the price adjusts to the customer in front of them, with items not priced on the menu and different price lists inside and outside.

In Quadraro these signs become a different yardstick. Inside the old core, among the streets of the gentes, you rarely find them. As you move toward the big arteries, toward the busy Tuscolana or toward the hubs that bring visitors, they reappear one after another. When you start to see two or three together, you have crossed the boundary of the area you're visiting.

Chains with repeated signs

In the center of Rome, in recent years, a type of dining with repeated signs has grown, with the same menu in several points of the city, identical decor and the queue with the number ticket at the door. It works very well as a tourist attraction, and Romans don't go. There's no snobbery in this: that model sells a standardized and predictable product, which is exactly the opposite of what you look for near home. In Quadraro those signs don't arrive, and it's one of the reasons the neighborhood holds up.

The criterion, just one

Look at who is sitting and in what language they order. If at the tables there are people who speak Roman and order without opening the menu, the place stands on its own. If there are only backpacks and maps, you keep walking. This criterion works everywhere and requires knowing nothing about cooking. In Quadraro, quite simply, it almost always gives a positive result, and it's one of the few areas of Rome where you can walk in almost at random.

If you want a reference that's already filtered, you can consult Daniele Dezi's personal list on Google Maps, a curated and unsponsored collection. The full reasoning on how to choose in Rome is on the page about where to eat in Rome, while for places with a long history behind them there's the page on historic cafés and shops. For a comparison with another Roman neighborhood where local dining has held up, you can read the page on Testaccio.

When to go, what's closed, how much it costs

Walking around Quadraro costs nothing. The urban art works are outdoors and free, Parco XVII aprile 1944 is a public garden, Parco degli Acquedotti and Via del Mandrione have no ticket. The only possible expenses are the metro ticket and, if you add the visit to the studios, the Cinecittà ticket.

The right seasons are spring and autumn, for the light and the temperature. The Roman summer makes a walk without shade tiring and empties the neighborhood in August. Winter works on clear days, with the limit of short days: after five the painted walls can't be read anymore.

Two dates deserve separate mention. On April 17 the neighborhood is taken over by the commemorations, with a march and changes to traffic: whoever wants a quiet stroll picks the wrong day, whoever wants to understand Quadraro picks the right one. April 25 has the same character. For the rest, Monte del Grano opens only on special dates announced by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina or by the associations that run its visits, and on the opening days of municipal sites such as those listed on the page about free museums in Rome.

Frequently asked questions about Quadraro

How many men were deported from Quadraro on April 17, 1944?

The sources diverge and no figure is definitive. The list compiled by the parish priest don Gioacchino Rey, considered the most reliable because it was drawn up at the time, reports 683 names. Other reconstructions indicate about 740, 744, 750 or at least 800. The figure of 947, today the most cited, corresponds according to several reconstructions to those selected at Cinecittà. The men stopped in the morning were reportedly about 2,000, and of those then deported roughly half returned to the Quadraro.

What medal does the Quadraro have and in what year?

The gold medal was awarded in April 2004 by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, for the 60th anniversary of the roundup, and it is the only recognition of this kind given to a neighborhood of Rome. On the name, sources diverge: most speak of civil merit, others of civil valor, one journalistic reconstruction of military valor. Anyone who has to cite it in an official text should check the wording on the act.

Why did the Germans call the Quadraro a wasps' nest?

The most solid source is Eitel Friedrich Möllhausen, German consul in Rome during the occupation, who in his memoirs describes the neighborhood as a wasps' nest inhabited by hostile elements, partisans and communists. The version that attributes the phrase directly to Kappler circulates widely but rests on a chain of citations that is less verifiable. The substance, that is the presence of cells of several Resistance formations, is instead documented.

How do you get to the Quadraro by public transport?

The stop is Porta Furba Quadraro, on line A of the metro, between Arco di Travertino and Numidio Quadrato. From the exit you cross Via Tuscolana and you are already in the neighborhood. Two stops further on, still on line A, is the Cinecittà station, which serves the studios. The Parco degli Acquedotti can be reached on foot in about 25 minutes.

What is the MURo and how much does it cost to visit?

The MURo, Museo di Urban Art di Roma, is a dispersed museum founded in 2010 by the artist David Vecchiato, known as Diavù. It has no site, ticket office or hours: the works are on the walls of the streets and can be seen free of charge at any time of daylight. The interventions are agreed upon with residents and with the owners of the walls, and they concern the history and identity of the neighborhood.

Are all the Quadraro murals still there?

No, and the lists you find online age quickly. Outdoor works fade, get covered by graffiti or disappear when a facade is redone: at the Quadraro the documentation already reports deteriorated works and at least one covered. It is better to check the updated map published by the museum before you go, instead of following lists copied between sites.

Did Pasolini shoot his films at the Quadraro?

Accattone was shot mostly in Pigneto, the Borgata Gordiani and Torpignattara, and the Quadraro does not appear among its locations. Mamma Roma, on the other hand, was shot in good part in this quadrant, among the arches of the Felice aqueduct, the Quadraro and the Cecafumo area toward southern Tuscolano. At the Quadraro Pasolini mostly did location scouting and observation, as he himself recounts in an article from the preparation period of Accattone.

How much time do you need to visit the Quadraro?

For the tour of the walls of the old core you need between an hour and a half and two hours walking at an easy pace. Adding the Parco XVII aprile 1944 and Monte del Grano brings it to about three hours. Anyone who wants to finish with the Parco degli Acquedotti or the Cinecittà studios should allow a full half day.

Is the Quadraro safe?

The Quadraro is a lived-in and frequented neighborhood, and by day you get around without problems as in any Roman residential area. The precautions are the usual ones of outskirts with through traffic: watch out for narrow streets without sidewalks, be careful with a camera in your hand during empty hours, and in the evening prefer the main streets, where there is lighting. The painted walls, in any case, can't be seen at night.

Who wrote this page

This page is edited by the team at Tour Leader Pro, the Roman project office that designs and coordinates visits, itineraries and cultural events in Rome and Lazio. The dates, figures and divergences between sources reported here were checked against the sources available at the date of publication: where scholars don't agree, we wrote that instead of picking the most convenient number. If you find an outdated fact, let us know.

Anyone putting together a Roman route outside the center, having to make work neighborhoods without ticket offices, monuments that open only on extraordinary dates, mural works that may have disappeared since the last printed guide and walking distances that the map makes look shorter than they are, for themselves or for a group, will find planning tools at Tour Leader Pro, where we collect materials for those who guide visits and for those who organize on their own.

For the overall picture on trains, rentals, airports and destinations in Lazio beyond the ring road, from the Castelli to the lakes to the coast, a useful resource is Italy Planner.