Borgo is an ancient neighbourhood of Rome located between the Prati neighbourhood and the Tiber on one side, and between the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo on the other. It consists of a series of parallel streets that are not called “vie” (streets) but “borghi” (hamlets), and cross streets that connect them. This network includes 15th-century noble palaces, plebeian houses, the monumental complex of S. Spirito in Sassia, the fortified passageway connecting the Vatican with Castel Sant’Angelo, and, although strictly speaking not part of it because it is already Vatican City, the adjacent St. Peter’s Square with Bernini’s colonnade. Unfortunately, it also includes Via della Conciliazione, an urban eyesore dating back to the 1930s, which, by gutting the Spina di Borgo, destroyed the miraculous Baroque balance between the majesty of the esplanade and colonnade of St. Peter’s Square and the narrow streets leading to it, eliminating the surprise effect and replacing it with a disastrous ‘bowling alley effect’ in which Michelangelo’s dome represents the central pin.
The centre of the district is the pedestrian street called Borgo Pio, now crowded with restaurants, bars, ice cream parlours, various food shops and souvenir and trinket shops serving tourists and pilgrims, which have now completely replaced the old shops that crowded the neighbourhood in past centuries (but it must be said that gastronomic and other thefts from pilgrims have been a well-established tradition in the district since the Middle Ages).
Incidentally, it is also the street where I live, which allows me, indulging my innate laziness, to find ideas, faces, objects and other things to photograph without having to do much more than take a few walks around the neighbourhood streets: especially at the end of July during the jubilee, there was no shortage of vaguely surreal aspects or the slightly dazed attitudes of people from all over the world who flocked to this area, which I photographed with profit and enjoyment.
The shots I present here are the result of these walks.
