Under the Estway
To understand how Rome is changing today, one only needs to look at the single kilometre between the neighborhoods of San Lorenzo and Pigneto, where the 1960s Tangenziale Est elevated highway cuts across residential blocks at third-floor level. Built during the post-war era of unregulated urban expansion just steps from the historic center, this infrastructural corridor has become a unique crossroads: a compressed territory where all the souls of the contemporary city coexist and overlap. On one hand, its proximity to the center and the university has fueled a strong wave of gentrification and real estate speculation. Beneath the pillars, new models of urban rent are rapidly advancing: former industrial plots turned into gated student hotels with private gardens, upscale venues, shared e-scooters, older flats renovated for the short-term rental market just two metres from the highway guardrail, and walls plastered with flyers from cash home buyers. On the other hand, the intrusive presence of the overpass has turned this area over the years into a sort of urban free zone—a more accessible housing and job market that has welcomed longtime residents, workers, students, marginalised families, and a deeply rooted Bangladeshi community that rents homes, works, and runs much of the local small trade here. The result is a plural, informal street ecology where, just steps from the new developments, pavements and closed highway on-ramps are used daily as domestic courtyards, open-air workshops, and makeshift places of worship—caught between what is hastily labeled as "decay" and a soulless idea of "regeneration." This contested kilometre embodies the great paradox of the Italian capital, suspended between age-old structural problems and the ambition to become a modern European capital. The question becomes inevitable: what does Europe’s oldest metropolis want to be when it grows up?
