Ostiense: the Gazometro and the street art

Street · Ostiense (Porto Fluviale)Rome,Italy

The quarter where Rome put the work it wanted out of sight, its empty 89-metre gasholder frame standing over warehouses now painted with murals.

Ostiense is the quarter where Rome put the work it wanted out of sight: the river port, the general markets, the slaughterhouse road, the power station and the gasworks. The Gazometro is what is left of the gasworks — a cylindrical steel cage eighty-nine metres high, built in 1935 and in use from 1937, when it was the largest gasholder in Europe. It held two hundred thousand cubic metres of town gas in a tank that rose and fell inside the frame as the city used it. Natural gas made it useless from the 1960s. It was never demolished, so the empty frame still stands over the quarter. The warehouses around it were reused instead of cleared. Some became clubs, galleries and university buildings. From around 2010 the city and private sponsors paid artists to paint the blank walls, which made a stretch of Via del Porto Fluviale the place Romans send you to see murals. The best known covered an eight-storey building, with the windows painted as the pupils of enormous faces; it was covered over in 2025 when the squatted block was rebuilt as public housing. The quarter is still painting new ones.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Do this walk in daylight — the streets between the murals are working industrial ones with few people on them, and after dark the quarter empties out rather than turning lively.
Frame the gasholder against something ordinary — a bus, a balcony, a supermarket sign — because on its own the steel frame loses all sense of how big it is.
Expect walls to be missing — commissioned murals here are painted over, weathered off or lost to building works, and the quarter's most photographed one came down in 2025.
Start at Via del Porto Fluviale and work south — the concentration of painted walls is around that corner, and the gasholder stands beyond it toward the river.

Things to do

1
Walk around the painted block on Via del Porto Fluviale
Start where Via del Porto Fluviale meets Via delle Conce and walk slowly around the block. Painted façades rise several storeys on both sides, and they are so large that you can only take them in from across the street. Look at the ground floors too: loading bays, roller shutters, and buildings still in use for storage.
2
See the gasholder from the river bank
Follow the streets toward the Tiber until the Gazometro stands clear of the buildings. From there the frame is a single black outline against the sky, with the smaller holders beside it. The fence keeps you a few hundred metres off, which is the right distance to take it in.
3
Look at what the warehouses became
Between the murals, look at the doorways: a market hall now holds university rooms, a garage is a gallery, a depot is a club with the crane rails still overhead. Almost every building here is used for something other than what it was built for, and almost none of them were knocked down.