Città-Giardino Aniene

The City Garden Aniene, today forming part of the Montesacro district, is located in the north-east of Rome, on a hill along the Via Nomentana, near the confluence of the River Aniene and the Tiber.

The hill, located 50 metres above sea level, is characterised by sedimentary rocks, mainly of alluvial type, due to fluvial deposits.

In 1919, the "Cooperativa Città Giardino Aniene" was established, a merger of the Unione Edilizia Nazionale and the Istituto Case Popolari, with the task of defining the framework for a district for the middle-class employees of the Ministries and the State Railways.

In 1924, after management of the project had passed into the hands of the Istituto per la Case Popolari in 1923, the Città-Giardino Aniene was created, whose urban plan was defined by Gustavo Giovannoni, a Roman engineer, architect and town planner.

The project is undoubtedly influenced by Ebenezer Howard's reflections on garden cities, and is structured around two main elements:
- the first, a system of services for citizens (initially planned on the Ponte Tazio - Corso Sempione - Piazza Sempione axis) such as a school, church, cinema-theatre, post office, shops and a 'sports district' (not realised);
- the second, the large public park typical of garden cities across the Channel (now incorporated into the Aniene Nature Reserve).

The settlement fabric is characterised by low density and the building type of small villas with their own gardens. While respecting the morphology of the area, the ground plan of the street layout is characterised by mainly curvilinear, irregular paths, almost never perpendicular to each other.

As in the Garbatella district, the prevailing architectural style is the 'barocchetto', which consists of a reworking of elements of minor Roman architecture between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Gustavo Giovannoni was directly involved in the design of the Ponte Tazio and the Church of the Santi Angeli Custodi in Piazza Sempione; the arrangement of the square, with the porticoes surrounding it up to the church and the entrance building, is the work of Innocenzo Sabbatini.

In its original form, the Garden City survived for about thirty years. Around the 1950s, with the great building boom and the construction of the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the image of a small garden city "was replaced by that of a denser and more compact district made up mainly of blocks of flats".