Roma Vietata: The Lost Geography of a Lived City

How Rome Closed Itself to Its Own People: A Photographic Inquiry Into Lost Urban AccessibilityThere is a photograph you have probably never seen: Piazza del Campidoglio in the 1970s (below), heart of Rome's civic identity, with cars parked directly in front of the city's most iconic monuments. Not as violation or aberration, but as simple fact of daily life. Today such an image seems transgressive. The idea that you could drive to the centre, park wherever you found space, and walk directly to the ancient stones of the Capitoline appears to belong to a different civilization. This is the Rome that Stefano Ciavatta and Luca Galofaro explore in Roma Vietata: Viaggio nella città raggiungibile (Forbidden Rome: Journey into the Accessible City), published by Humboldt Books. The authors insist this is not nostalgic exercise, yet the book carries an undeniable sense of loss. Not for the cars themselves or the absence of parking restrictions, but for what they represented: a city that still belonged to the people living in it. The Accessible CityThe argument is deceptively simple. The Rome of the 1970s, documented in photographs by Enrico Blasi and supplemented with archival materials, newspaper clippings, maps and historical records, was a city of maximum accessibility. You could reach the historic centre from any point in the urban fabric. Parking existed. The great piazzas functioned not merely as tourist backdrops but as spaces of daily life. You arrived, parked, moved through, departed. It was a right, a necessity, a natural family matter; never a transgression. What strikes most is not the casual presence of automobiles in sacred spaces, but what they enabled: fundamental democratic access to the historical centre. The city was raggiungibile; reachable, accessible, available. This was not experienced as absence of restrictions but as extension of everyday life into the monumental core. The Progressive ClosingCiavatta and Galofaro do not argue for returning to the 1970s model. Instead, they examine the mechanism by which the city has progressively restricted access in the name of preservation, tourism management, and cultural protection. The ZTL (Zona a Traffico Limitato), parking meters, smart city planning, 30 km/h zones, carefully managed tourist circuits: each represents a rational response to a historic city overwhelmed by contemporary urban pressures. The cumulative effect, however, has transformed Rome from a city you inhabit into one you visit. Pedestrians now move through pre-determined paths, obligated to move where the city decides. The spontaneity that once made accidental navigation itself an act of discovery has been replaced by sterilized corridors with perfect but unreal scenography of predetermined routes. A ParadoxHere emerges a central paradox: Rome today is simultaneously more congested and more inaccessible than in the 1970s. Cars still dominate everywhere, clogging perimeter roads and filling parking structures. Yet they no longer provide access to the centre. The city has become equally congested and hidden by tourism pedestrians, with both residents and occasional visitors confined to paths the city permits. The book is neither argument for unrestricted automobile access to historic centres nor lament for the era's lack of environmental consciousness. Rather, it examines what happens when a city prioritizes protecting its historic fabric over enabling the lived experience of its inhabitants. What the Photographs RevealThe book's visual power lies in documenting a Rome where boundary between monumental and everyday had not calcified. The Eternal City remained a working city, where you moved through history without genuflecting to it, where great monuments provided background to ordinary life rather than foreground for orchestrated experience. Archival materials (maps, newspaper clippings, tables, graphic records) situate this accessibility within Rome's longer relationship to its citizens. From ancient through medieval periods, Renaissance to Baroque, eighteenth century through modernity: the city had always been, to varying degrees, a place you could move through and inhabit. Modern urban management did not invent inaccessibility; it systematized and institutionalized it in unprecedented ways. The Path ForwardThe book's final question asks what can be preserved of this mobile Rome as the city develops as a metropolitan area. You cannot restore unrestricted automobile access without accepting congestion, pollution, and damage to fragile monuments. Yet the current alternative, a sterile tourism-managed city experienced as managed spectacles, represents a different kind of loss. Ciavatta and Galofaro suggest a third possibility: a Rome that remains lived rather than consumed, where access is possible but not unlimited, where the boundary between inhabitant and visitor is less absolute, where spaces for casual encounter and unexpected discovery still exist. They propose finding this future by looking backward analytically rather than nostalgically. What made the accessible Rome of the 1970s still alive? What elements, adapted for contemporary environmental and conservation realities, might restore the density of lived experience that current management has flattened? These questions linger long after the final page.