La Città dell'Utopia was founded to promote territorial activation of local development and, at the same time, to always keep a window open to the world. Concretely, it is a laboratory-home open to all associations, movements, informal groups, in short, all entities from the neighborhood, the city, and beyond, who wish to share an experience of dialogue and concrete, collective work on the construction of social and cultural alternatives.
The activities carried out within the project therefore have the characteristic of being the sum of everyone's contributions and having a strong international dimension as added value. The main tools for this process are:
the opportunity creation, which is the construction of containers, proposals, and spaces that enable participation
The laboratory, or an open, flexible, dynamic space that can value and transform individual and group proposals and contributions into action.
La Città dell'Utopia, also known as Casale Volpi or Casale Garibaldi, has a long and interesting history. Its construction dates back to the second half of the 18th century. The building was a trattoria, founded by Augusto Volpi, an anarchist and anti-fascist, as a place for social gathering. Later, during World War II, the farmhouse was a refuge for resistance fighters. Legend has it that one night, the hero of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, slept within the walls of this farmhouse, which was located in the rural area, outside the walls of Rome.
Now, in the last 20 years, it has been renovated and adapted to become a space for the municipality of Rome where various social activities can be carried out to network people from the San Paolo-Ostiense neighborhood and migrants at risk of social exclusion.
Learn a little more about the roots of La Città dell’Utopia with “Sogni di carta,” the newsletter—the “fuel of the neighborhood’s cultural life”—which aimed to collect its “dreams, desires, experiences, requests, and complaints.” The cartoonist is Miguel, one of the first volunteers at the community center, who wanted to satirically depict the process of building La Città dell’Utopia. You can read more by clicking here!
