The Tuscolano - off the tourist track.

I'm sitting at my computer in this run down old  building. The facade has been renovated so some of the crumbling plaster has vanished.  Exams are over and a lot of the work is drying up as the Summer break looms ever closer. 

This is an unusual neighbourhood, or as they say here in Rome 'quartiere'. The Tuscolano, it extends from outside the ancient city gates beyond  the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John the Lateran) to the foothills of the Colli Albani. It is crossed by one of the cities principal arteries: the Via Tuscolana, from which the area derives its name.

 From where my place of work is situated, on one side, there is  the famed Park of the Acqueducts (setting of many a Spaghetti Western, when they weren't filming in Spain) a prosperous residential area with well-tended buildings some with large wrap-around deck-like balconies adorned with orange or lemon trees and lavish barbecues. Outside these buildings stand the custodian shelters known as 'Guardiola', though some are empty. Their custodians have retired and not been replaced. 

Some of the buildings have palm-lined or shrub-lined alleys leading up to their doorways. There's a calm feeling of opulence to these roads that border the park. The people who live here are not feeling the pinch of the recession.

The large park with its imposing arches dominates the area. Swarms of parrots can be heard squawking up in the umbrella pines. In this season, birds chirp and sing from the various bushes while crows perch ominously close to nests with an eye out to the opportunity of an easy meal.

On the other side, past the metro station, over  the Via Tuscolana is one of the most built up and populated areas -14,371 inhabitants per square kilometre -  in Europe. It's a grid of streets where dull grey tower blocks face other dull brown tower blocks, all packed together and intersected by traffic-choked streets and alleyways. The wealth that was so evident a bare 500 metres away, on the other side of the artery that splits the area, has disappeared.  

The balconies are adorned with clothes driers, heavily loaded with the daily washing. Some of the canopies, used to protect balconies from the sun, have cracked with age, or become  jaundiced from the sun. There are fewer flowers to be seen. The balcony here is a practical space: to dry the clothes and hold household utensils, usually in a plastic utilitarian cupboard. 

 As space inside flats is limited, families of four or five crammed into 65 square metres, a few of the balconies sport washing machines, at least two of them running at about any time of the day. 

Not many people would use their balconies for a meal on a Spring night or for sunbathing in the Summer, should the sun even reach their floor.  In the Summer shutters are down and the sun is shunned, in the city. On the beach it's another thing altogether.

There are few parks or green areas on this side of the Tuscolana, though many streets are tree-lined, their roots growing out of the pavements or pushing up the tarmac, just adding to a general sense of disorder. Rubbish overflows from the dumpsters and what can be, has been pulled apart and shredded by pigeons, crows and gulls.

 It's loud and hectic as daily, drivers honk their horns, people shout at an imagined (or real slight) and street hawkers especially along the busy Via Tuscolana try to sell their wares.

 A walk along the Via Tuscolana, is a walk alongside a steady, at times, not-so-steady stream of traffic. From Porta Furba, just past the ancient city walls to where the road leaves the city and heads towards the Alban hills, all you get are cars, lorries, buses and the Roman staple of motorbikes, jostling for space and trying to out do each other before they have to grind to a holt at the next traffic light or pedestrian crossing.
And sometimes they don't. The sound of metal crashing into metal, or worse, the dull thud of a pedestrian being knocked over, are all too frequent occurences.

The Tuscolano area is far from the postcard perfect prettiness of the Fori Imperiali and the Colosseum, far from where the tourists would venture. If they did, they'd probably not want to return.