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Piazza Vittorio is the popular name of a large square in the centre of Rome. If you ask a Roman more formally, assuming there are any left, where Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II is, he might not be able to answer you. But ‘Piazza Vittorio’, bigger and more lived in on a daily basis than St Peter’s Square, everyone knows it.
At least those of a certain age upwards, especially for the well-known open-air market, which sprung up spontaneously at the end of the 19th century and finally disappeared in the early 1990s with the opening of the Nuovo Mercato Esquilino.
The square is the largest in Rome, measuring 325×184 metres, and the most representative of the squares created by the Umbertine urban planners. It follows the model of the English ‘squares’, i.e. rectangular in shape with a central garden and monumental residential buildings.
The uniqueness of this square in Rome lies in the colonnaded porticoes that surround it. This model is reminiscent of the Piedmontese building style in Turin, the first capital of Italy. Thirteen streets converge on the piazza.
The relocation of the main Roman market (1902) started its decline. The market remained in business until the 1990s, much frequented by Romans because of its cheap prices. But between 2018 and 2020 a major redevelopment of the central garden gave the whole square a new elegant atmosphere.
An early form of magic to be told here was this, with the attractiveness of very low prices, popular characters lingering in the memory and the well-known quote in the film ‘Bicycle Thieves ’ by Vittorio De Sica.
The commercial character has changed profoundly: from the open-air centre of the square to the new closed market and shops under the arcades and in the adjacent streets.
From popular Romanesco to Oriental, Middle Eastern, African and Asian for the overwhelming number of foreign inhabitants of the Esquiline. From zero-kilometre food, as they say nowadays – mainly chicken, bacchi, cod – to food, spices, clothes and objects that tell of different customs and traditions.
The third magical aspect of the Piazza is the historical one, attested in the emblematic monuments that stand at the centre of the well-kept, only a few years ago, public gardens. The Piedmontese-style town planning of the early years of Rome’s capital assigned the roadway of the rectangular square only the perimeter of the central gardens, thus close to the Umbertine palaces that bordered it.
When the new quarter was built, mainly by the prolific architect Gaetano Koch, the remains of a Roman fountain from the 3rd century AD were placed near the so-called ‘Porta Magica “ or ”Porta Alchemica”. This monument was built in the second half of the 17th century in the Villa Palombara that existed before the square and was demolished in favour of it. Latin inscriptions and esoteric symbols have made it an object of attraction for mystery scholars for centuries.
