ochres of Garbatella (left) and grey of Corviale (right)

…was the story of the day as we made long anticipated pilgrimages to both planned communities just outside of the Roman center, starting with the 11-story 1 kilometer-long crazy Corviale housing block of 1200 apartments and 6000 people in this endless concrete Le Corbusier Unités-d’Habitation-gone-wild folly designed by a team of Italian architects headed by Mario Fiorentino – and a 1 km long building in the middle of the Roman countryside might sound like a neat idea, and it might look amazing from a distance, but of course the closer you get, the sadder it is, and the best that one might be able to say about it now is that the otherwise penned-in tenants enjoy either views of Rome out one side or else they get to look at rolling fields and cows out the other…and from the grey it was on to the ochre baroque rococo fascist Garden City (Borgata Giardino) inspired delights of Garbatella, the working class fantasy land designed and built through the 20’s and 30’s by many hands to suggest the intimate small town rural living environment which many of the original residents where moving from, which you can still feel as you catch glimpses down certain streets when the sun is low, the sense of being in a small Lazian farming village, but in a sophisticated Roman baroquey sort of way – but the treasures are the variety of garden courtyards that each of the blocks face in to, originally meant to be vegetable gardens, they are now untended (I just want to get my hands on one of those big empty round ones) – but I suppose that just adds to it’s rough romantic patinaed lived-in state which, wow, really feels charged and magic. (some Corviale videos here and here)