Scalea del Tamburino

There's a spot in Trastevere where the city suddenly changes elevation, and it does so without warning. On one side you have the low district, the one of the avenue, the traffic, the travertine doorways and the shops. On the other, a handful of meters higher, the hanging gardens begin, the villas, the boundary walls, the green climbing toward the Janiculum. In between is a ramp of brick and travertine steps that no tourist guide has ever put on its cover and that, for anyone born around here, is an address in the most literal sense of the word. It's called the Scalea del Tamburino, it links Viale Glorioso to Via Dandolo, and it has 126 steps.

In Rome the most interesting places in the city almost never coincide with the most photographed ones. This staircase is the textbook case. It has no Baroque facade, no masterpiece inside, it doesn't appear in any three-day itinerary. Yet it holds together, in 126 steps, at least four completely different Roman stories: a 16-year-old boy who died in 1849 defending the Roman Republic, a director who spent his childhood here and as an adult reinvented the American western, a piece of working-class Trastevere that holds out inside a district now almost entirely transformed, and a generation of Roman musicians born in the 1990s that took its name from this number, 126.

This staircase usually provokes two reactions. People of a certain age light up at the word Janiculum and start talking about Garibaldi. People who are 20 light up at the number and start talking about records. The beauty is that both are right, and that the point where the two things touch is exactly this, an iron handrail and a ramp of steps in the middle of Trastevere.

What exactly it connects

It's best to settle the geography right away, because it's the first thing that confuses people arriving. Trastevere is not a flat district. The part everyone knows, that of Piazza Santa Maria and the osterias, is the plain on the bend of the Tiber, a few dozen centimeters above the river level. But Rione R. XIII also includes the Janiculum hill, and so has an internal difference in height far more dramatic than the postcard lets you imagine. The boundary between the two Trasteveres is not a street, it's a series of climbs, ramps and staircases that over the centuries were carved out wherever the slope allowed.

The Scalea del Tamburino is one of these hinges. At the bottom it starts from Via Dandolo, the street that runs parallel to Viale Trastevere on the hill side, behind the big building of the Ministry of Public Education (the building is bounded precisely by Viale Trastevere, Via Emilio Morosini, Via Dandolo and Viale Glorioso, and this gives an idea of how compact the block is). At the top it arrives at Viale Glorioso, which is already another world: a wide, tree-lined street, with the villas and small apartment buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, an air more of Monteverde than of Trastevere.

The jump in elevation is not huge in absolute terms, but the perception is. At the bottom you hear the noise of the avenue, the horns, the trams. Halfway up the staircase the noise fades. At the top you hardly hear anything anymore, and what you sense is the green: the private gardens spilling over the walls, the pines, the wind that comes down from the Janiculum toward the river. 12 minutes on foot and it feels like you've changed cities.

To get your bearings: if you come down from the Janiculum toward Trastevere along Via Garibaldi, you're on the north side of the hill, the one of the Fontanone and San Pietro in Montorio. The Scalea del Tamburino is on the opposite side, the south one, which looks toward Viale Trastevere and toward Monteverde. This is why so many visitors spend a whole day in Trastevere without ever getting near these steps: they're simply not on the path everyone takes.

A word on the name, because that too says something. Scalea is not an approximate Roman dialect word for scalinata: it's a precise architectural term, indicating a monumental flight of steps or in any case a ramp of steps of a certain breadth set in an urban context. Rome has several, and the fact that the street-naming office chose this word instead of scalinata or salita tells the intention with which it was christened in 1891: not a service shortcut, but a place with a dignity of its own. Anyone who arrives today and finds a modest ramp, with marked walls and a few scribbles, understands immediately that between the intention of 1891 and the reality of 2026 a century and a half of daily use has passed. Which is, after all, the way a city stays alive.

One last note on elevation. The Janiculum is not one of the seven hills of Rome, even though practically everyone believes it is. The seven hills of ancient Rome are on the left bank of the Tiber: Palatine, Capitoline, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Viminal, Quirinal. The Janiculum is on the right bank, it is higher than all of them, and for exactly that reason it was for centuries the militarily decisive point of the city: whoever controls it dominates Rome. In 1849 the French knew this very well, and it's the reason the whole siege was played out on that ridge instead of at the eastern gates. The Scalea del Tamburino is one of the routes by which the low city reached that decisive height.

A curiosity about Scalea del Tamburino

Let's start with the fact that in the last 10 years has made this staircase famous with an audience that had never heard of the Roman Republic: the 126 steps gave their name to one of the most influential music collectives of Italian rap of the 2010s.

The crew is called Lovegang, and is also known simply as 126, stylized in Roman numerals as CXXVI. The name comes from the 126 steps that make up the Scalea del Tamburino, the area between Trastevere and Monteverde where the group's members hung out daily as teenagers. It's not a legend built after the fact by a press office: it's a fact that appears in the biographies of the individual artists and that they themselves have told many times.

The names, for those who don't follow that world, are these. Franco126, stage name of Federico Bertollini, born in Rome on July 4, 1992. Ketama126, stage name of Piero Baldini, born in Latina on March 30, 1992 and raised in Rome, rapper and producer. Pretty Solero, who at first called himself Sean126 and then SeanyDelRey. And then Drone126, Asp126, Gordo, Ugo Borghetti, with the widened orbit that includes Nino Brown and Carl Brave. Anyone who has listened to Italian music in recent years knows at least one track that came out of this circle, even without knowing they know it.

The thing I find beautiful, and that I usually tell while stopping halfway up the ramp, is the chain of meanings that number carries with it. 126 is the number of steps of a staircase. The staircase is named after a drummer boy who died at 16 in 1849. A century and a half later, a group of kids who spent their afternoons on those same steps take the number as a brand, without the original meaning having anything to do with it, and from there build a music scene. It's exactly the way memory really works in an old city: not by preservation, but by reuse. The name stays, the meaning changes, and the place keeps being used.

I'll add a detail I find very entertaining. The number CXXVI in Roman numerals, printed on a sweatshirt or a record cover, looks like an aesthetic choice by a graphic designer. In reality it's the transcription of a count done on foot, going up, by someone who had walked those steps enough times to feel like counting them. And anyone who tries to count them today gets to the same number, which is a rather honest way of checking an urban legend.

Who the drummer boy really was

The drummer boy of the Scalea has a first name, a last name, a date of birth and a date of death. He is not a symbolic figure, not a Risorgimento allegory put there for atmosphere. His name was Domenico Subiaco.

He was born in Ripi, in Ciociaria, in the province of Frosinone, on December 4, 1832, to a family of farmers: his father Giovanni, his mother Angela Maria Paparelli. He had just turned 16 when he decided to leave his town and go to Rome to join the Garibaldian brigades defending the Roman Republic from the French attack.

Here comes the detail that explains everything else. Because of his short stature, and above all his age, he was not considered fit for combat. They didn't give him a rifle. They appointed him drummer boy of the I Infantry Regiment, that is, they entrusted him with the task of sounding the charge before every assault and of urging the men on during movements. In the wars of the nineteenth century the drummer was a real and important role: commands were transmitted by sound, not by voice, and a boy with a drum slung over his shoulder in the middle of the infantry was an instrument of tactical communication before being a folkloric figure. He was also, it must be said without rhetoric, a target.

On June 3, 1849, the day the French army commanded by General Oudinot launched the decisive attack on the Janiculum, Domenico Subiaco does the thing for which he is remembered. After sounding the charge, he throws away the drum, picks up an abandoned rifle from the ground, shouts Viva l’Italia! Viva Roma, takes aim and starts shooting at the French soldiers. Shortly after he is hit by an enemy ball and dies. He was 16 years and six months old.

There is an eyewitness account of this scene. It is told by Camillo Ravioli, who fought alongside him. His writing says that the boy, from the top of Porta San Pancrazio, fired with bare chest after throwing off his uniform. It says that Ravioli saw him with his own eyes on the morning of that June 3, that he fired 10 to 12 shots against the French assaulting the eighth bastion, having the already loaded weapon handed to him by the comrades who were lower down, and that in the end an enemy ball struck him on the left parietal bone and threw him backward, dying, down from the position.

It's a dry testimony, the kind that doesn't embellish. That detail of the weapon passed up already loaded by the comrades beneath him says more than 10 pages of rhetoric: it means that around that boy a small chain of grown men had organized themselves, who had decided to indulge him. It means nobody stopped him. It also means that the reloaded rifle arrived faster than he could fire, and that he therefore kept going as long as it was physically possible.

In Frosinone, in the center of Piazza della Libertà, there is a monument that represents him, the work of the sculptor Ernesto Biondi. In Rome there is this staircase.

Someone at this point wonders why a 16-year-old boy from Ciociaria was in Rome in June 1849, 200 kilometers from home, in an army that wasn't his. The answer is that the Roman Republic was, for a few months, a magnet. Volunteers arrived from all over the peninsula and from outside too: Lombards who had fought the year before in Milan, men from Romagna, Tuscans, the Polish Legion, the Roman University Battalion made up of students, and a quantity of very young people who set out from towns of the Papal State where until a few months earlier nobody would have imagined such a thing. Ripi was one of those towns. The fact that a farmers' son decided at 16 to set off on foot toward Rome to defend a republic proclaimed only a few weeks earlier says how deeply that idea had taken root, and in how little time.

One thing nobody tells you about Scalea del Tamburino

And here we are at the point that is rarely clarified, and that is the key to truly understanding the place: Domenico Subiaco did not die on these steps.

The formulation that circulates most often, even in serious sources, is that the staircase was named after him because it's the place where he fell. Ravioli's testimony says something else, and says it very precisely: the boy was from the top of Porta San Pancrazio, on the eighth bastion of the Janiculum walls. Porta San Pancrazio is at the top of the Janiculum, on the other side of the hill, at a considerable distance from Via Dandolo. That was the front line: the point where the city walls faced the French batteries camped outside, toward Villa Pamphili. The Scalea del Tamburino, instead, is inside the city, on the slope that descends toward the district.

Why then name this particular ramp for him? For the most obvious and most beautiful reason: because it's on the route. Anyone who in June 1849 had to climb from Trastevere to the positions on the Janiculum passed through here or through ramps like it. The wounded came down by the same way. Ammunition, bread, water, reinforcements, messages went up on this side. It's not the place of Domenico Subiaco's death: it's the place of his journey, and of the journey of all the others. It's a difference that seems to me far more interesting than the simplified version, because it shifts attention from a single heroic instant to a daily logistics made of legs, breath and steps.

The second little-known element is the date of the naming. The staircase takes the Drummer Boy's name in 1891. 42 years after the events. It's not an irrelevant detail. In 1891 Rome had been the capital of the Kingdom of Italy for 20 years, the veterans of the Roman Republic were by now elderly gentlemen with medals, and the city was actively building its Risorgimento street-naming. In those same years the Janiculum was filling up with the busts of the Garibaldians that still accompany the walk today. Naming a Trastevere staircase after a 16-year-old drummer boy from Ripi was, in that context, a precise political choice: not celebrating a general, but the smallest and lowest-ranking of all.

Third element, and here we enter the territory of things you only learn by walking there: the staircase is not a monument, it's a living piece of infrastructure. It isn't fenced, it has no hours, no ticket office and nobody watching over it. Residents pass with their groceries, kids coming back from school, couriers, dogs. Early in the morning you meet people running up and down it to train. Which means that anyone who arrives expecting a solemn place of memory is left disoriented, and anyone who arrives knowing it's a street finds it exactly for what it is.

The advice I give you for visiting Scalea del Tamburino

The most important advice is also the most banal and has to be said first: do it going up, not down.

It may seem the opposite of what anyone who cares about your calves would advise, but there's a logic. Going down, from Viale Glorioso toward Via Dandolo, the staircase is a convenience: you reach the bottom in four minutes, you don't notice anything, and the gesture is so automatic that the place leaves no trace. Going up, everything changes. You have to count your breath, you stop at least once, and in the pause you look around. And the sense of the place, which is the sense of a difference in height overcome on foot, is understood only this way. Then there's a historical reason: anyone who climbed this way in 1849 toward the positions on the Janiculum did so with a rifle on him and the idea of arriving at a point where they were shooting at him. Doing it going up is the most direct and least rhetorical way of getting an idea of what that meant.

On timing. The best light around here is that of late afternoon, when the sun goes down behind the Janiculum and the ramp stays in shade while the houses above are still lit. A very sharp contrast is created between the low and the high that is, in practice, the photograph of the place. Early morning works differently but just as well: the staircase is deserted, you hear the birds of the private gardens, and the noisy city begins only 30 meters lower down. The time to avoid, if you're after atmosphere, is school dismissal, when the ramp becomes a sort of crowded corridor. The time to look for, if instead you want to understand why generations of Roman kids have spent their afternoons here, is exactly that one.

On how much time to give it. Honestly: on its own, this staircase is worth 20 minutes. It's not a stop that justifies a trip made just for it if you're coming from another neighborhood. It is instead an excellent piece of a longer itinerary, and here is the recommended combination.

The itinerary I recommend. You begin at the bottom, in Trastevere, at the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere with its mosaics, and continue toward the Museo di Roma in Trastevere in Piazza Sant’Egidio, which costs little, never has a line and has a photography program better than its scant publicity lets you imagine. From there you cut toward Viale Trastevere, take Via Dandolo and climb the Scalea del Tamburino. At the top, Viale Glorioso leads in a few minutes toward the upper part of the district. At this point you can head for the Janiculum, with the walk of the Garibaldian busts, the Acqua Paola Fountain, which everyone calls the Fontanone, and San Pietro in Montorio with Bramante's Tempietto in the courtyard. Whoever wants to close the historical circle can go as far as Porta San Pancrazio, where today you find the Museum of the Roman Republic and Garibaldian Memory, which is the place where the story of Domenico Subiaco finds its full context. Taking it easy it's a full half day, and it's one of the Roman half days with the best ratio of effort to reward.

On shoes. Steps of stone and brick, worn, slightly irregular, with some uneven stretches. After rain they can be slippery, especially in the shaded spots where the moss never dries. Smooth soles are a terrible idea. The central handrail is there and it's solid, but holding it means walking in single file, which slows a group down quite a bit.

On accessibility. It must be said clearly: it's a staircase, so it can't be used with wheelchairs, strollers or wheeled luggage. Anyone with walking difficulties has to go around it, and the detour is not very short because the slope is steep and the roads for cars make wide loops. If you're accompanying someone with mobility difficulties, it's best to make the climb toward the Janiculum by bus or taxi from Viale Trastevere.

On what to bring. Nothing, except water in summer. This is an area without services: no cafe on the ramp, no restrooms, no drinking fountain right on the steps. The cafes are at the bottom on Via Dandolo and at the top toward Viale Glorioso. In summer in Rome doing 126 steps at noon without a bottle in your bag is a mistake you pay for.

On the season. The staircase is open all year and has no wrong season, but it changes quite a bit. In spring the private gardens spilling over the side walls are the main attraction: wisteria, jasmine, a few fruit trees, and a smell that doesn't reach the bottom, on the avenue. In summer the ramp is a funnel of heat until five in the afternoon, then becomes one of the coolest places in the district because the shadow of the hill covers it early. In autumn the leaves make the steps slippery but the light is the best of the year. In winter, with the short days, it's best to do it early: public lighting exists but isn't generous, and in the dark the irregular steps demand attention.

On how to get there. The simplest reference is Viale Trastevere, which is served by the tram and by several bus lines. From there you take Via Dandolo and look for the start of the ramp on the hill side. Anyone coming down from the Janiculum instead arrives from above, from Viale Glorioso. There are no tourist signs and no signage of any kind: you have to know it exists, and this is precisely what makes it a place to know and not to stumble on by chance.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

Here comes the second story, the one that surprisingly appeals even to those who want nothing to do with the Risorgimento. Sergio Leone grew up here.

The facts are these. Sergio Leone was born in Rome on January 3, 1929, in Via dei Lucchesi, a few meters from the Trevi Fountain, the son of Vincenzo Leone, a silent film director and actor who signed with the stage name Roberto Roberti, and of the actress Edvige Valcarenghi, known as Bice Waleran. In 1931, when he is two, the family moves to Via Filippo Casini, in working-class Trastevere, in the block of houses that faces Viale Glorioso staircase itself. There Leone spends his childhood and youth.

On that house today there is a plaque. It is not one of the usual municipal plaques, with the dates and the bureaucratic formula. It carries a sentence by Leone himself, and that's why those who see it speak of a plaque signed by him. The sentence is: My way of seeing things is sometimes naive, a bit childish, but sincere. Like the children of Viale Glorioso staircase.

It's worth pausing a second on this sentence, because it is much more than an affectionate quotation. Leone uses it to define his own gaze as a director, that is, the gaze that built A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America. Anyone who has seen those films knows what it's about: Leone's western is a western seen through the eyes of a European boy who knows the West from comics and movies, and who, instead of correcting that distance, turns it into the very form of the story. The masks, the stretched-out duels, the music that arrives before the image, the taste for myth more than history: all that grammar is born, by the author's own explicit admission, from games on a Trastevere staircase.

There's a particular that makes it even more literal. In the 1950s, before making his directing debut, Leone wrote the screenplay of a film that was never produced. It was titled Viale Glorioso and told of themes close to those Federico Fellini would put in I vitelloni. When I vitelloni came out, in 1953, Leone temporarily gave up his directing ambitions and went back to working as an assistant director. It means that his first film never shot was named after the street at the top of these steps, and that the director's trade, for him, began with the idea of telling precisely this piece of the city.

And then there's the coincidence that hardly seems true. Leone studied with the Lasallians, by the choice of a family that opposed Fascist public education. At the elementary school desks he met a classmate named Ennio Morricone. Those two children, who in the same years wandered the same area of Trastevere, would later build together the most recognizable partnership between direction and music in the history of Italian cinema, from 1964 until Once Upon a Time in America in 1984. 20 years of collaboration that begin at a school desk a few hundred meters from this ramp.

I'll add for completeness a detail that concerns us as Romans: the young Leone, at 14, decided to join the Resistance and was talked out of it by his mother. 14 years old, in a neighborhood under occupation, with the idea of going off to fight. It's not hard to see the thread that links that boy to the 16-year-old drummer boy after whom the staircase under his house is named. Neither of them, I imagine, had thought of it. But the staircase is the same.

The right photo to take at Scalea del Tamburino

A necessary premise: this is not a spectacular staircase. It's not Trinità dei Monti, it's not the Aracoeli staircase, it has no postcard view at the top. If you come here looking for the shot that makes 5,000 little hearts, you'll go back disappointed. Which is precisely why the right photograph is interesting: you have to earn it.

The main shot. It's taken from below, from the first steps, lens held low, almost resting on the second or third step, pointed upward along the axis of the ramp. What you get is the perspective vanishing of the steps narrowing toward the point of light at the top. It's an elementary shot, everyone knows it, but here it works very well for a specific reason: the ramp is narrow, the side walls compress it, and the result is a sort of urban canyon that forces you to look toward the exit. If you hold the camera or phone as low as possible, the steps in the foreground become enormous and the distortion tells the effort better than any caption.

The shot I really recommend. Climb about two thirds of the way, turn around, and shoot downhill with the low district in the background. That's the point where the image contains both Trastevere: the steps in the foreground, the roofs and antennas of the working-class district farther off, and the physical sense of the difference in height. It's the photograph that explains what this place is, that is, a hinge, and not simply a stair. In a photograph from below the difference in height isn't seen: you only see the climb. From above you see where you started from, which is the most important information.

The light. Late afternoon, I repeat, because the sun setting behind the Janiculum leaves the ramp in shade and lights up the walls and roofs below. You get a dark, almost graphic foreground and a warm background. The contrast is strong, so expose for the highlights and let the shadows close up: the image gains from it. If you're shooting with a phone, tap the bright spot on the screen to focus and then lower the exposure manually. On overcast days the staircase becomes flat and gray, and honestly the photograph isn't worth the trip. In compensation, in those conditions the details of the materials show up very well, the worn brick, the moss, the graffiti on the side walls.

The detail not to forget. Photograph the plaque with the street name. Roman street signs are those slabs of white marble with the inscription cut in and the name of the district above, and the one for the Scalea del Tamburino has the rare advantage of being a title that immediately asks for an explanation. It's the shot that then makes you tell the story to whoever looks at your photographs, and it's much more useful than yet another view.

The bonus detail. If you feel like looking, try framing the plaque with Sergio Leone's sentence on the house in Via Filippo Casini. It's small, it isn't signposted, and it's not even very easy to spot on the first try. But it's one of those photographs that is worth more for what is written on it than for how it's composed, and putting the drummer boy's name and the director's sentence on the same roll is the best summary of this page of the city.

A warning about common sense. This is a residential street, not a set. The windows on either side of the ramp are lived-in homes. Setting up a tripod in the middle of the steps at dinner time, or doing long photo shoots that block the passage, is the kind of behavior that within five years gets places like this closed or fenced off. You shoot, you say thanks, and you move on.

Why Trastevere needs places like this

I'll make a digression that is not a digression. In the last 30 years Trastevere has changed more than it changed in the previous 300. The district's historic population has thinned out, rents have gone up, many ground floors have become restaurants and bars, and the lower part on weekend evenings is a place of consumption before it is a neighborhood. I don't say it with militant nostalgia: it's a description, and anyone who walks there notices.

In this context the staircases of the upper slope have acquired a new function. They've stayed outside the circuit. You don't drink here, you don't eat here, you don't buy souvenirs, groups don't pass through. Residents pass through. Which means that if you want to see how Trastevere works when it's not on stage, places like the Scalea del Tamburino are among the few left where something ordinary still happens. An elderly man climbing slowly with his shopping bag. Two kids sitting halfway up the ramp. Someone carrying a scooter down by hand. It's the same city as 100 meters lower down, but with the volume turned down.

It's also the reason this staircase has become, generation after generation, a hangout. In the traditional description of the place it's said to be always the meeting point of the gioventù de noantri, and the formula is right as long as you understand it properly. Staircases are the natural hangouts of all cities on slopes: they offer a free seat, they're shielded from the eyes of the main streets, they have no owner and nobody tells you to buy something or to leave. Rome is full of kids sitting on steps: in front of churches, on ramps, at the edges of fountains. Here it has been happening for decades, and the best proof is that at a certain point the name of a music scene came out of it.

Speaking of de noantri: the Festa de Noantri is the identity celebration of this district and it's worth knowing what it is, because the name recurs constantly and almost nobody explains it. De noantri in Roman dialect means of us others, in explicit opposition to you others who live in the other neighborhoods. It's already a declaration of belonging before it is even the name of a festival.

The festival is celebrated in honor of the Blessed Virgin of Mount Carmel from July 16 to 30. The origin handed down goes back to 1535: after a storm, some Corsican fishermen found at the mouth of the Tiber a statue of the Virgin carved in cedar wood. For this reason they called her Madonna Fiumarola, that is, Madonna of the river. The statue was donated to the Carmelites of the Basilica of San Crisogono, in Piazza Sonnino, from which the title of Madonna del Carmine derives, and the Virgin became the protector of the Trastevere people.

Today the statue is in the Church of Sant’Agata in Trastevere, halfway along Via della Lungaretta, in Piazza San Giovanni de Matha. From there, on the Saturday after July 16, a polychrome wooden nineteenth-century statue depicting the Madonna del Carmine is carried in procession through the streets of the district to San Crisogono and, after a brief stop, returns to Sant’Agata, where it remains solemnly on display for a week. The following Sunday the procession on the Tiber takes place: the statue, laid on a boat, travels the river as far as Ponte Garibaldi, in memory of the discovery at the river mouth, then goes back upstream to Santa Maria in Trastevere, where it stays until the next morning. There the celebrations end.

A detail that has to be said because it dismantles a widespread misunderstanding: the religious part is ancient, but the popular festival as we know it, with the stalls, the music, the open-air osterias and the fairground, dates to the 1920s and was promoted by the Fascist regime as part of the revival of Italian popular festivals and traditions. It isn't any less real for that, but it's useful to know that the folkloric image of Trastevere singing and dancing in July is less than a century old, while the Madonna found in the river is almost 500 years old.

Some important events that happened here in history

Here is what happened around these steps, because the context is far more dramatic than the quiet of the place lets you imagine.

February 9, 1849. The Roman Republic is proclaimed. The government is entrusted to a triumvirate made up of Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Armellini and Aurelio Saffi. Pope Pius IX has fled to Gaeta. Rome becomes, for a few months, a political laboratory of enormous importance, with a Constitution that will be among the most advanced of its time.

April 30, 1849. First French attack. General Oudinot arrives with about 5,000 men convinced he will enter the city almost without fighting. He is repulsed by the Roman militias and by the charges of Garibaldi's volunteers, who come out of Porta San Pancrazio. The French withdraw with more than 500 dead and 365 prisoners. It is the day that convinces the Romans that defense is possible, and it is also the day that makes Garibaldi a popular myth in the district.

May 15, May 31, 1849. Diplomatic phase. The French plenipotentiary Ferdinand de Lesseps negotiates a truce of 20 days and on May 31 signs a non-interference agreement. But already on May 29 Louis Napoleon had ordered Oudinot to resume the siege and recalled Lesseps to France. The agreement, in practice, is born dead.

June 3, 1849. The date that directly concerns this staircase. Oudinot attacks with 30,000 men and 75 cannons, a day earlier than he had announced. The objective is the Janiculum, the height that dominates Trastevere and from which the city can be bombarded. On the same day Goffredo Mameli, the 21-year-old author of the lyrics of the national anthem, is wounded at Villa Corsini: he will die on July 6. And at Porta San Pancrazio, on the eighth bastion, Domenico Subiaco dies.

June 1849, the weeks of the siege. On June 10 there is the unlucky sortie of General Luigi Mezzacapo. On June 15 fighting takes place on the Monti Parioli with the Polish Legion. On June 20 the French cross the Tiber at Ponte Milvio despite the resistance of the Roman University Battalion. On June 26 a new assault on Villa del Vascello is repulsed by Giacomo Medici. Throughout these weeks Trastevere is the immediate rear of the front: cannon shots fall on the district, the wounded come down from the Janiculum by ramps like this one, and the civilian population lives alongside the artillery.

June 30, 1849. French general assault and final battle on the Janiculum. Garibaldi defends the Vascello. Italian losses between dead and wounded are about 3,000, the French about 2,000. The defense gives way, but the army of the Republic comes out of the day with its military honor intact.

July 2, 1849. Garibaldi gives in Piazza San Pietro the speech that remained famous, the one in which he promises neither pay nor soft idleness but hunger, thirst, forced marches and battles. In the evening, around 20:00, he leaves Rome with about 4,000 armed men, 800 horses and one cannon. The retreat begins that will take him, hunted by the Austrians, as far as San Marino and then in flight toward the Adriatic, where his wife Anita will die.

July 4, 1849. The French occupy Rome. The Constituent Assembly approves a decree of surrender but stays in its seat. Mazzini and the triumvirate never sign a formal capitulation. Martial law is proclaimed. The Roman Republic ends after fewer than five months, and Rome will go back to being the capital of the Papal State until the breach of Porta Pia on September 20, 1870.

1891. The staircase between Viale Glorioso and Via Dandolo is named after Domenico Subiaco, the Drummer Boy. These are the years in which Rome as capital builds its own Risorgimento memory and in which the Janiculum fills up with the busts of the defenders of 1849.

The 1920s. The Festa de Noantri takes on the popular form we know, with stalls and events, within the operation of reviving traditions promoted by the regime.

1931. The Leone family moves to Via Filippo Casini. Sergio is two years old. The Trastevere childhood begins that 30 years later will be seen, transfigured, in his films.

The 2010s. A group of kids who frequent these steps founds the crew Lovegang and takes as its name the number of the steps. From there come records that change the landscape of Italian rap and carry the place name, without almost anyone noticing, to half the world.

Who passed through Scalea del Tamburino

The list is less predictable than it seems, and it's worth reading in full because it's the best way to understand how much city passes through 126 steps.

Domenico Subiaco. The drummer boy from Ripi, 16, I Infantry Regiment, died June 3, 1849. The staircase has carried his name since 1891. He didn't die here, but he passed through here, like all those who climbed from the district toward the positions.

Camillo Ravioli. The comrade in arms who saw the scene and put it in writing. Without his eyewitness account, today we would have only a name on a plaque and no story. It's a reminder that the memory of a city almost always depends on someone who sat down to write.

The Garibaldians of 1849. Volunteers from Lombardy and Romagna, Poles, Roman university students, Trastevere tradesmen, kids who arrived on foot from the provinces. The defense corps of the Roman Republic was an improbable and international aggregate, and its logistics ran through the ramps of the south slope of the Janiculum.

Giuseppe Garibaldi. There is no proof that he set foot on exactly these steps. But in the months of the Republic he crossed Trastevere in every direction, from the Vascello to Porta San Pancrazio to Piazza San Pietro, and the whole hill above this staircase is the theater in which he built his European legend.

Sergio Leone. From 1931 on, as a child and then a boy, in Via Filippo Casini. The plaque on the house carries his sentence about the children of Viale Glorioso staircase. His first screenplay never shot was titled Viale Glorioso.

Ennio Morricone. Leone's desk mate in elementary school with the Lasallians, in the same area, in the same years. From 1964 to 1984 their joint work defined the sound of Italian cinema in the world.

Ketama126, Franco126, Pretty Solero, Drone126, Asp126, Ugo Borghetti, Gordo. The Lovegang, the CXXVI collective. Federico Bertollini, Piero Baldini and the others spent entire afternoons here as teenagers and carried the number of these steps onto record covers and into the lyrics.

The people of Trastevere. Who are the most important category of all and the only one without a plaque. Generations of people who take this ramp twice a day because it's the way home, and who keep doing it while the lower part of the district fills up with people from outside. They are the reason the Scalea del Tamburino is still a living place and not a monument.

What to see within a 10-minute radius

I close with the practical part, because the most frequent question after climbing the staircase is: and now?

Down below, toward the district. From Via Dandolo you reach the heart of Trastevere in a few minutes. The Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere with its apse mosaics and its Cosmatesque floor is the obligatory stop. The Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, on the other side of the avenue, is quieter and for me more moving, with the statue by Maderno and the Last Judgment by Pietro Cavallini on the upper floor. The Museo di Roma in Trastevere in Piazza Sant’Egidio is the civic museum I recommend most often to people coming back to Rome for the second or third time.

A detail almost nobody knows is the Antica Spezieria di Santa Maria alla Scala, the pharmacy of the Discalced Carmelites, which is one of the few eighteenth-century Roman interiors left substantially intact and which can be visited only by reservation. If the genre interests you, it's one of the most particular things in the whole district.

Up above, toward the hill. From the top of the staircase, the Janiculum is within leg range. The walk with the busts of the Garibaldians, the terrace with the view over all of Rome, the noon cannon. A little farther on the Acqua Paola Fountain and San Pietro in Montorio with Bramante's Tempietto. At Porta San Pancrazio the Museum of the Roman Republic and Garibaldian Memory tells exactly the months in which the boy after whom the staircase is named died: it's the stop that gives sense to all the rest, and I recommend doing it afterward, not before, because the names become much more concrete when you've already walked the terrain.

On the river side. Going down toward the Lungara there are Villa Farnesina with the frescoes of Raphael and Peruzzi and the Rome Botanical Garden, which in summer is one of the few serious areas of shade in the center. Farther south, on Sunday morning, there is Porta Portese, and on the river the Tiber Island.

A note on pace. The risk with Trastevere is doing too much of it. The district holds up well to a slow day and holds up very badly to a forced-march visit, because its value is largely atmospheric and atmosphere isn't seen on the run. If I had to choose a single combination with this staircase in it, I'd do it like this: a morning down low in the district between the two basilicas and the civic museum, a long lunch, an afternoon climbing from the Scalea del Tamburino, sunset at the Janiculum, a walk back down in the dark. It's a day that costs almost nothing and that in the end is remembered better than quite a few paid museums.

Why it's worth it, after all

I'm not telling you that you have to take a bus on purpose to climb 126 steps. I'm telling you something else, more useful: that in Rome the stories are almost never where you look for them, and that the difference between seeing a city and understanding it almost always runs through places like this, where there's nothing to see and quite a lot to know.

An ordinary ramp of steps, which serves to overcome a difference in height, carries the name of a 16-year-old farm boy from Ripi who in 1849 threw down his drum to take up a rifle. On a house along the same ramp a plaque carries the sentence of a director who explained his own view of the world by citing the children who played there. The number of its steps became the name of a generation of Roman musicians. And all this happens on a piece of Trastevere that no tourist itinerary includes, where people climb with their shopping in hand and nobody asks for a ticket.

Rome works like this. Memory isn't guarded: it's trodden on daily, and for exactly that reason it survives. A staircase that nobody uses becomes a ruin in 20 years. A staircase that everybody uses stays a staircase for a century and a half, and keeps being called by the name of a boy about whom we would otherwise know nothing.

Frequently asked questions about Scalea del Tamburino

Where is the Scalea del Tamburino?

The Scalea del Tamburino is in Trastevere, in Rome, and connects the lower part of the district, that of Piazza Santa Maria, with the Janiculum hill, overcoming with 126 steps an internal difference in height that the district has but that doesn't show on the map.

Who was the drummer boy the staircase is dedicated to?

The drummer boy to whom the Scalea del Tamburino is dedicated was named Domenico Subiaco, born in Ripi, in Ciociaria, on December 4, 1832, died on June 3, 1849 during the defense of the Roman Republic. The staircase has carried his name since 1891, even though he didn't physically die on these steps.

Is it better to climb or descend the Scalea del Tamburino?

It's better to do it going up, not down. Going down, from Viale Glorioso toward Via Dandolo, the staircase is only a convenience that you cross without noticing, while tackling it going up lets you truly appreciate it.

Why is the Scalea del Tamburino known even outside the historical context?

In the last 10 years the 126 steps of the Scalea del Tamburino have given their name to Lovegang, also known as 126 or CXXVI, one of the most influential music collectives of Italian rap of the 2010s.

What is the connection between the Scalea del Tamburino and Sergio Leone?

Sergio Leone, the director born in Rome on January 3, 1929, grew up in the area of the Scalea del Tamburino, a well-known fact among those who know Trastevere but rarely told at length to those who visit the neighborhood.

What is there to see around the Scalea del Tamburino?

Going down from the Scalea del Tamburino toward the bottom, in a few minutes you reach the heart of Trastevere, with the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere and its apse mosaics, and the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, quieter, on the other side of the avenue.

Is the Scalea del Tamburino a spectacular staircase to photograph?

No, and it has to be said clearly: it's not Trinità dei Monti nor the Aracoeli staircase, and it has no postcard view at the top. Its value is not visual but lies in the history and in the layering of events that it carries with it.

Before closing

If you're organizing a trip to Rome and want to build it around things like this, that is, around neighborhoods to walk, stories that sit inside a street name and civic museums instead of around the list of the 10 obligatory monuments, here are two useful references. On italyplanner.com you'll find itineraries and practical guides to put together your days in Italy with a criterion, including the neighborhood combinations that let you avoid wasting half days on transfers: for a Trastevere and Janiculum day like the one described above, it's exactly the type of tool you need. On tourleaderpro.com there is instead the professional side of the trade, for those who accompany groups and need real timings, working materials and operational tools.

And if you pass through Via Dandolo, even just by chance, look up and find the start of the ramp. Then count them, the steps. There are 126, and once you reach the top you'll have a much more precise idea of what the word elevation difference means, in a city built on seven hills.