I fell for the neighborhood the same way I’d fallen for her. On the piazza, the usual five people would be sitting in the bar and someone always sat outside the tobacco shop. A couple of people in electric wheelchairs would go by on the streets. Some didn’t work because they were rich, some because they were poor. Nearby, in Torpignattara, the social mishmash brought on tensions and the fear of Islamic terrorist infiltration. But here, in this wedge between the consular road and the high-speed trains, it only generated a sleepy charm in a breeze blowing along this backstreet cut with dead-end lanes, like degrees on a thermometer.

I grew up in a Rome thick with large supermarkets and apartment buildings that were taller than the zoning laws allowed; I never expected my home or neighborhood to bring me any peace or pleasure. But here, a hundred meters from the projects along Via Casilina, you’d find courtyards and one- or two-story houses. The only disturbance came from cars driving through to avoid the traffic in Torpignattara.

The vast sky and the area’s haphazard construction—former barracks and the occasional fascist-era building—inspired a calm impossible to describe without getting lost in this hypnotic perfection that somehow let you ignore the lack of parking or the uncollected garbage piled three or four meters high behind the dumpsters.