La Rome del Pigneto. Etnografia in movimento su un quartiere romano

Abstract

The essay is based on a subjective narrative on crossing a Roman neighborhood, the Pigneto, where I lived after fifteen years in Brazil. In my wandering, I apply the astonishing methodology through which I dialogue with people, buildings, writings, murals, trams that I meet and that surprise me. My polyphonic writing incorporates the sense of estrangement that ‒ as an anthropologist born in Rome ‒ I experience in feeling a stranger in a neighborhood that has profoundly changed in recent years. A fundamental location from neorealism, Pigneto is becoming a metropolitan country that locally intertwines the flows of three great global changes: the popular Roman one or from southern Italy; emigration of people from China, Africa, Bangladesh; creatives who develop digital technologies in the areas of architecture, design, co-working, craftsmanship, catering, etc. The result calls into question the classic urban categories of periphery and center: Pigneto is the central periphery from which change arises