San Lorenzo

Neighborhood · San Lorenzo / Tiburtino (Rione outside Porta Tiburtina)Rome,Italy

Rome's student quarter, built in the 1880s around the rail yard, the part of the city the bombs of July 1943 fell on.

San Lorenzo is Rome's student quarter, and it is the part of the city that was bombed. On 19 July 1943 around five hundred American bombers came over Rome for the first time; the target was the rail yard, and the bombs fell on the quarter built around it. About three thousand people were killed in a few hours, and the front of the basilica of San Lorenzo was torn off. Pius XII drove out of the Vatican that afternoon and stood in the crowd outside the church. Six days later the Fascist Grand Council voted against Mussolini and he was arrested. The quarter was young when it happened: laid out from the 1880s outside the city wall, in plain blocks on a grid, for the men who worked the railway and the huge new cemetery next door. The rebuilt basilica shows its history in the stonework, and from the forecourt you can see where the medieval porch ends and the postwar repair begins. Today San Lorenzo is loud after dark and covered in political posters and murals, and it looks like nowhere else in Rome.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Go inside for the floor and the candlestick — the inlaid marble pavement and the twisted stone holder for the Easter candle both came through the raid, and they are the oldest things in the building.
Day for the history, night for the quarter — the basilica and the cemetery close in the late afternoon, and the streets around Piazza dell'Immacolata only fill up after nine.
Two different places share the name — the basilica and cemetery are at one end, the lived-in quarter is a few hundred metres south-west, and the two feel completely different.
Read the plaques on the walls as you walk — the quarter marks its own dead and its own political history on small stone tablets, and they show what the neighbourhood chose to remember.

Things to do

1
Stand in the forecourt and find the repairs
Take the steps up to the basilica and stop in the open forecourt. The porch in front of you was destroyed in 1943 and rebuilt from what survived. Look along the courses of stone until you find where old work meets new, then look up at the mosaic and the campanile, which both survived the 1943 destruction.
2
Walk into the cemetery next door
The Verano is enormous, laid out as streets of tombs with cypresses and family chapels, and it is a public space Romans use. Go in through the main gate and take one avenue. Sections of it were destroyed in the same raid, and the repairs are as visible here as in the church.
3
Cross to Piazza dell'Immacolata after dark
Ten minutes south-west, the quarter's own square fills with students from the university next door. Bars spill onto the pavement and the walls are covered in posters and painted slogans. Almost everyone here is a local rather than a visitor, which makes this the plainest and most present-day evening in this guide.