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Where we are: RIONE MONTI

The Colosseum may be one of Rome’s main tourist attractions, but wander up the slight incline away from the famous amphitheatre and you will find endless gems of architecture, craft, fashion, and restaurants tucked away in narrow streets and quiet corners. Formerly the city’s seedy underbelly – where prostitutes and outlaws took refuge until as recently as the 1940’s – Monti is now an enclave for the city’s young, creative flock, and has the new upstarts to prove it.

Strolling the cobblestone streets, you are likely to hear the hum of a designer’s sewing machine or the thud of a hammer in a jeweler’s shop. Aside from the above, it is obvious that the district of Monti has a long and troubled history.

The district is located on a hill area and during the ancient age it could be divided into a upper rich area and a lower dodgy one (called Suburra). In the later centuries, the district became an almost uninhabited area of the city: Rome city center moved to Campo Marzio and on the other side of the river and so Monti turned in an area full of little gardens and woods. From the XIX century and after the works of the fascist age, the district has lived a reborn.

Signs of this history are present and visible also in the district planning: there are larger streets on the upper area (between Viminale and Santa Maria Maggiore) and a maze of small streets and alleys in the lower area, which was uninhabited many decades ago and looks like a village-in-the-city nowadays.