Low stucco blocks from the 1920s built around shared courtyards, and the school on Piazza Damiano Sauli that Bianca used as a police station.
What Garbatella looks like
The lotti between and are low blocks in stucco and whitewash, built between 1920 and 1929 around shared courtyards. Curving streets follow the hillside rather than a grid, with garden plots and pine trees set between the blocks.
At two matching blocks stand across the street from each other, joined overhead by an arch, their terraces lined with potted plants. Round arched passages elsewhere in the lotti open onto tiled courtyards, with clotheslines strung between the windows.
combines a rounded cinema theatre with six floors of housing above it, built in 1926 and 1927. On , the Albergo Rosso is a longer red block with a clock tower at one corner, built as a workers' hostel between 1927 and 1929.
The climbs in a straight run of stone steps from Piazza Ricoldo da Montecroce, past low garden walls. At its foot the Fontana della Carlotta channels water from a carved vase in cement, a face worked into its front, into a stone basin below.
, on Via delle Sette Chiese, is a squat single storey church behind iron gates and a palm tree. An orange tree stands by its portico, and a bench sits against the low wall in front.
Shot in Garbatella
Bianca used the former Cesare Battisti school on Piazza Damiano Sauli for its closing scene, playing a police station. The school is a monumental Fascist era building, built between 1931 and 1937 with two wings meeting at a central tower.
Bianca, 1984
Played a police station
The school stands in for a police commissariat in the film's closing scene. Two C shaped wings, each four floors over a basement, meet at a central tower behind a double height hall. Street View
What Garbatella can double for
Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York
Brick rowhouses and low apartment blocks built 1924 to 1928 around shared inner courtyards and communal green space, following the same garden city principles Garbatella's planners used. Both put the shared garden inside the block rather than in private yards. Sunnyside's flat brick facades and straight grid streets read differently from Garbatella's curving stuccoed blocks, so wider shots need care to keep the American street grid out of frame. Try searching brick rowhouses around shared courtyards now.
Can Peguera in Barcelona, Spain
Single storey terraced cottages built 1929 to 1932 for Barcelona's Municipal Housing Board share Garbatella's low working class scale, with pitched tile roofs and small front gardens on curving streets rather than a grid. Can Peguera's houses are single storey and more detached feeling than Garbatella's two to three storey attached blocks, so it reads better in tight cottage scale frames than in a wide street shot. Try searching single storey terraced cottages now.
