Quartiere Coppedè

Neighborhood · Quartiere Trieste (Piazza Mincio / Via Dora)Rome,Italy

Forty invented buildings on a few Rome streets, mixing medieval towers, Assyrian lions and Art Nouveau iron into the same façades, all private flats.

Quartiere Coppedè is about forty buildings on a few streets north of the centre, and its architecture was invented from scratch. Gino Coppedè started work in 1913 and put medieval towers, Baroque swags, Art Nouveau ironwork, Assyrian lions and Renaissance loggias into the same façades, sometimes into the same window. He was a Florentine trained as a woodcarver, and he treated whole apartment blocks as objects to be carved. He died in 1927 with the quarter unfinished, and his son-in-law completed it to his drawings. You come in under an arch joining two buildings across Via Dora, with an enormous wrought-iron chandelier hanging from it. Beyond, the streets open into Piazza Mincio, where a fountain of stone frogs sits in the middle and no two buildings around it are alike. One block has a spider spread across the entrance; another is covered in painted fairy-tale scenes and has a bee and a wasp over the door. The quarter is still lived in: these are private flats with ordinary residents, who put their bins out under the towers, and none of the buildings can be entered.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come after dark as well as by day — the arch and its iron chandelier are lit at night, and the quarter looks stranger still when the modern streets around it disappear into the dark.
Keep your voice down and stay off the doorsteps — every building is somebody's home, residents are tired of photo shoots, and none of the buildings can be entered.
Look above the doors rather than at them — the strangest carvings sit in the lintels, brackets and window heads: a spider, a bee, a lion, a saint, all on buildings a century old.
Enter under the arch on Via Dora — the quarter was designed to be entered from there, and coming in from any other street loses the effect.

Things to do

1
Walk in under the chandelier
Find the arch spanning Via Dora between two buildings and stop directly beneath it. An iron chandelier the size of a small car hangs from the vault, with figures worked into the arch above. Then keep walking: the street narrows, opens, and drops you into the square without warning.
2
Stand in the middle of the square and turn a full circle
Stand at the frog fountain and go round slowly, taking one building at a time. A tower, a loggia, a painted façade, an arcade, a corner covered in animals. Each building borrows from a different style, so working out where every detail comes from takes far longer than crossing the whole quarter, which needs only a few minutes.
3
Hunt for the creatures
Give yourself ten minutes and find five animals. There is a spider over one entrance, a bee and a wasp over another, lions, frogs and birds in the ironwork. The animals are part of the structure itself, carved into doorways, brackets and railings rather than added afterwards, and once you start looking you keep finding more.