Subdued elegance and pastel colors
Hidden away in a corner of northern Rome, precisely in the Flaminio district, there is a charming enclave with an unexpected taste of England. It is a short private old-fashioned cobbled street between Via del Vignola and Via Flaminia made up of low-rise, colorful houses with wooden doors, stairs leading up to the front door and gardens in the back – an Insta-worthy location which now stars in many Italian music videos, television commercials, and even movies. The English architectural style of this street, which is named Via Bernardo Celentano, has earned it the nickname “La Piccola Londra”, or Little London: two iron gates protect this tiny and quiet piece of London from traffic and the surrounding world.
A city on a human scale and for everyone
But the street, which dates back to 1910, is also a time capsule that recounts an ideal urban development policy, an architectural and political project desired by the then city administration and then realized in patches. Only a year earlier, in 1909, the new Piano Regolatore for the expansion of the city outside the Aurelian Walls had come into force. Developed by Italian engineer Edmondo Sanjust di Teulada, the city plan had been commissioned by Ernesto Nathan, the first mayor of Rome who did not belong to the land-owning elite and Roman nobility, and the first Jew to fill that position. The son of an Englishman and of an Italian mother, Nathan was a freemason and a Republican, Mazzini follower animated by a cosmopolitan, secular and anti-clerical spirit. In the seven years he was in charge of Rome (from 1907 to 1913), he tried to shape and regulate the city, bringing it up to the level of other European capitals in many areas, from infrastructure to transport and education, and keeping the collective interest in mind. The city plan, a revolution in a city where 55% of the building areas were in the hands of only eight owners, defined three types of housing to be built all around the ancient city. A distinction was made between apartment complexes up to 24 meters high for densely populated areas (“fabbricati”); two-storey buildings with small gardens (“villini”), and luxury buildings surrounded by parks and gardens.
Aesthetics and functionality
Among those who materially contributed to changing the face of the city, in tune with the progressive ideas of Mayor Nathan, was the engineer and architect Quadrio Ferruccio Pirani, author of some of the most interesting housing complexes built in the early decades of the 20th century for the underprivileged classes and the clerical middle class in Rome. The projects for the units (lotti) and villini in the Rione San Saba and Rione Testaccio, for example, are still today an expression of extraordinary architectural and urban quality, far from the speculative logic that had guided previous interventions. Today’s Flaminio district was an area excluded from the transformations of the late 19th century. Pirani therefore had complete freedom to experiment with different urban models. In addition to designing the Flaminio I complex of the Istituto Case Popolari (now partly demolished), it was he who gave life to the atypical constructions in Via Bernardo Celentano, a utopia of 26 “Anglo-Italian” Art Nouveau low-rise buildings originally intended to house high-ranking civil servants and enriched with friezes, decorations and small balconies. Set among tall bourgeois palaces, the dwellings remain a romantic witness to the ideal design of Rome’s mutation in the early 1900s, a unique experiment that retains its charm.
Great architects, sport, culture and leisure: the attractions and surprises of the Flaminio district
The elegance of Little London is the unusual calling card of one of the most lively and innovative areas of the city, always in transformation. Developed during the 20th century, the Flaminio district has been a place of architectural and urban experimentation since its inception, from the monumental “Palazzo delle Ancore” built in 1912 to house the Ministry of the Navy to the Ponte della Musica, inaugurated in 2011 and designed to be crossed only by public transport, pedestrians and bicycles. The large travertine eagles and the arches punctuated by lampposts of the Ponte Flaminio, begun in 1938 but not completed until 1951, bear the signature of Armando Brasini. The district’s “sporting vocation” dates back to a few years later. For the 1960 Rome Olympics, Pier Luigi Nervi designed the Flaminio Stadium and, with Annibale Vitellozzi, the Palazzetto dello Sport in Viale Tiziano, while the Villaggio Olimpico, the residential complex created to house athletes and workers, saw the participation of Vittorio Cafiero, Adalberto Libera and Luigi Moretti, among others. Finally, dating back to the early 2000s are two symbols of the district: both the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone designed by Renzo Piano and the MAXXI - Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, designed by Zaha Hadid and opened to the public in 2010, are very popular and have a rich cultural and entertainment offer.
Photo Turismo Roma
