San Lorenzo and Trastevere

We decided to have the kick of meeting in a two significant places for our team and for the modern history of Rome. They are two historic neighborhoods on which also begins our professional training, first as students, at the Faculty of Psychology in San Lorenzo and then as specialists at the School of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Trastevere. Furthermore they are two places of great interest for us because closely related to some issues that we are going to treat on this meeting as marginality, solitude and exclusion. These neighborhoods, on the past, was recognized and used as a places to confine the diversity because their relative position to Rome: outside of the city's limits. For this reason their inhabitants organized their own cultural identity and sense of belonging on being "outside" from the rest of the city. In this sense the exclusion and the marginalization that different social groups - poors, sick, disabled and minorities - experienced in the Rome's history talk us about the ways on which the culture constructs, emotionally and structurally, the diversity. In fact, the close relationship, historically determined, between culture and city's structure defines who is “inside” and who is “outside” on the city boundary and contest of cohabitants.

For all of this, on Saturday and Sunday, we will be hosted by San Lorenzo "outside the walls", the Aurelian Walls, and by Trastevere, sorted "trans", beyond, of the Tiber river, the ancient limit of the Romans civil life.

Something about San Lorenzo

Figure 1 A student walking in San Lorenzo near Sapienza University

San Lorenzo is home to the first university of Rome, "La Sapienza" and is one of the most bombed neighborhood during the Second World War.

San Lorenzo sort at the end of 1800 in a time of reorganization of Rome. Italy has just become a unitary state (1861) and the new capital must accommodate administrative offices, industries and implement ways of communication with the rest of the country. The city center is intended to offices and rich people. The poor are displaced in the new neighborhoods outside the city walls which in this period know a fast developing.

San Lorenzo is one of the first neighborhoods to be born "outside the walls". It becomes an industrial area very populated by migrant from central and south of Italy: the new workers for industries and railways, poor and strangers.

Figure 2 Aurelian Walls of San Lorenzo

San Lorenzo "builds" on this experienced of strangeness and diversity its own cultural identity and the sense of belonging of its inhabitants. It became a welcoming and supportive neighborhood for poverty e diversity. Also It housed the beginning services for the poor and marginalized people: The Salvation Army, the first Children's House Montessori and the Neuropsychiatry Child Heal Service.

Today San Lorenzo on one hand continues to host "foreign" as university students from all over Italy and the world, and on the other hand to accommodate "who is on the edge" through social agencies as Caritas and the Salvation Army.

The place where we will have the meeting, “La Casa della Partecipazione” is a public space used by the San Lorenzo’s citizens to carry out cultural activities and participation. It’s near the Faculty of Psychology where we studied few years ago.

Figure 3 Piazza dell'Immacolata, a place between the Faculty of Psychology and "Casa della Partecipazione"

Something about Trastevere

Figure 4 Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere

Trastevere is beyond the Tiber river in an area that, at the time of the Romans (512-730), is hostile because inhabited by the Etruscans and that will be occupied by the Romans that host the foreign legions coming from the different regions of the empire. For a lot of times remained a place isolated from the rest of the city, populated by fishermen and farmers, by the prisoners and by who sought refuge outside the city. Since the Medieval period Rome is divided into districts and old "Rioni", an Italian term used since 14th century to name a district of a town. Trastevere is one of the “Rioni” with a stronger sense of identity in the city. The people living in Trastevere, the “Trasteverini” are also called the "Noantri".

Figure 5 Coat of arms of Rione Trastevere

“Noantri” culturally means that the Trasteverini feel to be different from the others, the rest of the city. In a similar way to San Lorenzo, the identity of the neighborhood in the past has been based on being “out of town”, “beyond the Tiber”. But, contrary to San Lorenzo, here “to be on the edge” organized a cultural feeling of defense against the foreigners, who did not belong to the Rione.

To be different and stranger in Trastevere meant to be an enemy, an enemy to whom oppose. On the other hand, the diversity and marginality is a characteristic of this Rione, in the past and still today, in fact, before housed the Asylum of Rome and, even today, hosts the prison of Rome, Regina Coeli.

Figure 6 "Regina Coeli" Prison in Trastevere

In 1700 Trastevere hosted the “Santa Maria della Pietà”, the Asylum of Rome, at Via della Lungara (near where we will have the kick of meeting), which will then be closed and moved even further out of the city, in a suburban area that is now called Primavalle. The transfer to the Via della Lungara marks the beginning of a process that progressively send out of Rome the poor, disable and crazy people.

It seemed interesting to host our meeting in two neighborhoods "outside" who have accepted in several ways people pushed to the margins of society. Neighborhoods that have also made the "being out" as a central dimension in their sense of identity. Moreover, the meeting of Trastevere, will be to the International House of Women, a place that houses the school of specialization in which we study and where there are services addressed to "women victims of violence".

Figure 7 International House of Women in Trastevere