Rome Tor Bella Monaca

I met De Santis while hanging out in Bar Pasticceria where owner Rocco Sansotta educated me about the life and times of Tor Bella Monaca [LINK] in Part II. My good Australian-Italian friend, Robert Della Vedova, lived here for six months and remembered De Santis as one of the regulars. He remembered he had a good story to tell.

Did he ever. It’s one of poverty and drugs, false hope and fleeting wealth, of painful crashes and shaky rebounds. It’s of violence, of betrayal, of prison.
It’s of Tor Bella Monaca.
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Via dell’Archeologia stretches along five of the most dangerous blocks in Rome. On one side is a series of drab, gray, seven-story apartment houses. On the other are 15-story apartment towers, yellowing like last year’s newspaper. The buildings could be in any lower middle-class neighborhood in the world, except for one element.

You’ll find it in the back of the buildings. Or it’ll be below. It’s away from foot and car traffic, away from eyes that, in this neighborhood called Tor Bella Monaca, are usually averted.

“NOOOOO! I don’t go behind there,” says Rocco Sansotta who owns a bar in Tor Bella Monaca. “It’s like the Bronx. They say, ‘You don’t go there.’ I don’t go there. They say, ‘You don’t go back there. You don’t go underneath the garages.’

“I hear stories.”
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What we’re doing is touring Tor Bella Monaca at night. Travel guides list a few things you don’t do in Rome: Don’t take photos inside art galleries. Don’t order a cappuccino in the afternoon. Don’t drink in excess. It says nothing about touring arguably Rome’s most dangerous neighborhood after sunset, an area simply known as the Black Hole of Rome. When I told my Roman friends my plan, they all said I needed counseling. I knew exactly what I was doing. And it wasn’t thrill seeking. I wanted to write about crime in one of the world’s most glamorous, most beautiful tourist cities in the world. I wanted to dive head first into the dark underbelly of Rome, a part of the Eternal City that outsiders never see nor know about. I also wanted to show how crime in Rome doesn’t compare to crime in American cities.
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