Garbatella celebrates 100 years. On February 18, 1920, as evidenced by the plaque commemorating that day in Piazza Brin, King Vittorio Emanuele III laid the foundation stone of the historic Roman popular district. An anniversary that is celebrated, in these days, with many initiatives, exhibitions and guided visits in historical lots. Among others the initiative of the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre which involved 100 students in the recovery of the historical and social memory of the 'garden village'.
Founded with the aim of responding quickly to the pressing demand for housing, the neighborhood was built on the hills of San Paolo and was conceived as an innovative architectural and social experimentation project. A group of young architects close to Gustavo Giovannoni (including Innocenzo Sabbatini, Plinio Marconi, Camillo Palmerini, Giovan Battista Trotta and Giuseppe Nicolosi), led by Innocenzo Costantini, then general director and president of the Technical Service of the Institute for public housing, built in a few years a neighborhood that still today is an expression of an extraordinary architectural and urban quality. The building fabric, inspired by the English theories of garden cities, was integrated with the natural orography of the land, the courtyards of the lots were conceived as spaces for social gathering and the solutions adopted for housing were declined in multiple compositional variations. The design of the elevations was conceived as a combination of decorative apparatuses of the most varied stylistic derivation which led to the creation of a style, later defined by critics as "baroque".
The neighborhood is at the center of initiatives these days. Among others an exhibition created starting from the work of 100 students of the Architecture Department of the Roma Tre University with the collaboration of the artist Pietro Ruffo entitled 'Garbatella 20/20 - The city and the memory'. The exhibition, which opens on February 21, curated by Francesca Romana Stabile, Elisabetta Pallottino and Paola Porretta at the Moby Dick space, tells the story of the project documented also in a video by Emiliano Martina and collected in the Quaderni di Garbatella 20/20, two maps generals and an urban carpet, conceived as a graphic synthesis of the plan of the 44 lots and an abstract reading of the plant elements of the courtyards. The young people made 44 interviews with the inhabitants of the neighborhood and an itinerary was imagined with the most significant stages of the urban and architectural history of the neighborhood that will be the center of guided visits over the weekend.