Trastevere, Rome

Trastevere is Rome’s thirteenth rione, occupying the Tiber’s west bank in the ground between the river’s bend and Janiculum Hill. As you follow its cobbled lanes past timeworn house fronts, you move through a district whose name comes from the Latin for “beyond the Tiber.” Before Roman expansion, this bank belonged to the Etruscans; Rome took it to command access to the river, yet initially built little here.

Sailors and fishermen made homes here during the Republic, joined by Jewish and Syrian newcomers, giving the quarter a remarkably mixed population from an early age. Augustus later counted this area within Rome as the Regio Transtiberim. The Jewish community remained a major presence until the late medieval era.

Its former synagogue survives in Vicolo dell’Atleta, where Hebrew lettering remains on the base of a central column; forced relocation to the ghetto ended its religious use in the sixteenth century. Medieval Trastevere became a tangle of tight lanes, and projecting additions along façades once prevented carts from passing. Those projections disappeared in the late fifteenth century, while brick paving gave way to the small stone blocks beneath you. That separation across the river helped foster a distinct local identity that still shapes Trastevere’s atmosphere.