Trastevere is the Roman neighbourhood that has changed least. The medieval street plan is intact. The 12th-century churches are intact. Many of the trattorias have been on the same block for 80-100 years. The dialect Trasteverini - Romanesco - is still audibly different from the Italian spoken across the river. The neighbourhood has been the "other side" of Rome since the city was founded - culturally Roman but geographically separate, the Etruscan and then the Jewish and then the working-class quarter, never quite respectable, never quite central, always loved. That status is what has preserved it. The aristocracy never lived here (Mayfair-style); the imperial monuments are elsewhere; the medieval lanes were never widened for boulevards. Walk Trastevere and you walk a working medieval city.
The Etruscan side
Before Rome was Rome, the west bank of the Tiber was Etruscan territory - the powerful pre-Roman civilisation that ruled central Italy from the 8th century BC. The Romans crossed the river to control the Etruscans; the early bridges (the Pons Sublicius, the wooden bridge defended by Horatius in 509 BC) were the link. The neighbourhood that grew up on the west bank was practical - dock workers, salt merchants, fishermen, immigrants. It was never part of the original Servian Walls of Rome (the 4th-century BC fortification); it joined the city formally only under the Aurelian Walls (3rd century AD).
From the 1st century AD Trastevere was Rome's "foreign" quarter - the Jewish settlement (about 40,000 Jews by the time of Augustus), the Syrian and Phoenician sailors, the Egyptian traders. The community at Santa Cecilia was Christian by the 220s. The neighbourhood was working-class throughout the Roman Empire and stayed working-class through the medieval period. The Jewish community moved across the river to the Ghetto in 1555 (when Pope Paul IV's bull required them to be enclosed); the Trastevere Jewish quarter dispersed but the synagogue building on Vicolo dell'Atleta survived.
Santa Maria in Trastevere
The basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere has the oldest documented Christian site on the west bank - a titulus (early Christian house-church) on this approximate spot from around 220 AD, when Pope Callixtus I (190-222) is said to have established it. The current building dates from 1140-1143 (under Innocent II), with major 13th-century additions. The basilica's main draw is its mosaics: the apse mosaic of Christ enthroned with Mary (1140s), and the six lower-apse panels of the Life of the Virgin by Pietro Cavallini (1291) - one of the earliest Italian-Renaissance-foreshadowing painted-mosaic works in Europe.
The piazza in front of the basilica is the social heart of Trastevere. The octagonal fountain in the centre (1593 by Carlo Maderno, restored 1873) is the oldest fountain in Rome. The piazza fills every evening with a mix of locals, students from the nearby John Cabot University and Trinity College Rome, tourists, the buskers and the regular street musicians. It is one of the city's most-loved evening spaces.
The Renaissance villa: Raphael at the Farnesina
Trastevere's Renaissance moment came when the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi - the richest man in Rome in the 1500s - bought a tract of land on Via della Lungara and commissioned a pleasure-villa in 1506. The architect was Baldassare Peruzzi; the building was finished by 1510. Chigi then hired Raphael to decorate the loggias. The "Triumph of Galatea" (1512) - a fresco depicting the sea-nymph Galatea on a chariot drawn by dolphins - is one of Raphael's finest secular works. The Loggia of Psyche (1517-1518) - depicting the Cupid and Psyche myth across the loggia ceiling - was painted by Raphael with his workshop (Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine, Raffaellino del Colle). Sodoma painted the Sala delle Nozze upstairs. Sebastiano del Piombo did the Polyphemus (1512) next to the Galatea.
The villa passed through the Farnese family (hence "Farnesina") and is now owned by the Italian state, administered by the Accademia dei Lincei. Entry is €10; opening hours are restricted (Monday-Saturday 09:00-14:00, with extended hours on second Sunday of the month). It is one of the under-visited Raphael sites - free of the Vatican Museum queues, beautifully presented, and a half-hour walk from the rest of Trastevere.
The Risorgimento siege
In April 1849, during the brief Roman Republic that followed the 1848 revolutions, Giuseppe Garibaldi defended the Gianicolo Hill against the French army that had been sent (by President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte) to restore Pope Pius IX. The siege lasted from April to July 1849; Garibaldi's volunteers held the Gianicolo and the Trastevere walls against numerically superior French forces before finally retreating in early July. The defence became the founding myth of the Italian Risorgimento - Garibaldi as the modern Italian hero, the Roman Republic as the seed of unified Italy.
The Piazzale Garibaldi at the top of the Gianicolo - with the 1895 equestrian monument by Emilio Gallori - is dedicated to the siege. The Anita Garibaldi monument nearby (his wife, who died during the retreat) is from 1932. The Manfredi Lighthouse (1911) and the noon cannon (since 1846) round out the Gianicolo's nationalist-monument cluster. The 360-degree view of Rome from the Piazzale is the best free panorama in the city - the Vatican dome, the Forum, the Vittoriano, the Pantheon, the Colosseum all visible on a clear day.
20th-century Trastevere
Through the 19th and 20th centuries Trastevere remained a working-class, slightly rough neighbourhood - the Trasteverini took pride in their distinctness from the rest of Rome. The Romanesco dialect was strongest here. The trattorias served working people; the morning markets were for locals; the streets were dirtier and louder than in the centro storico. From the 1960s the John Cabot University and a number of American academic institutions opened campuses here, drawn by the affordable rents and the atmospheric location. The American students became part of the neighbourhood's mix; many never left.
From the 2000s gentrification accelerated. Property prices in Trastevere are now among the highest in Rome - houses with the canonical small-medieval-courtyard layout regularly sell for €1m+. The trattorias have been joined by cocktail bars (Freni e Frizioni at Via del Politeama is the prototype, since 2005). Tourist density on Piazza Santa Maria in summer can be uncomfortable. But the neighbourhood has resisted full gentrification better than most: the residential population is still strong, many of the original trattorias still working, the dialect still audible. Trastevere is touristy and Trastevere is still Trastevere - which is unusual.
