Rome has two rivers. Everyone knows one of them. The river of history, photographs and postcards: the Tiber. The other flows almost unnoticed. The Aniene cuts across the city from east to west, yet most Romans have never seen it. They cross it by car, train or on the ring road without even realizing it.

Here, a landscape survives that seems to belong to another Rome. All it takes is a walk down to the riverbanks to see it. Suddenly, the city changes. But you must walk to see it. Exploring a riverbank means learning to see what normally escapes our gaze. The city trains us to notice built-up spaces, monuments, squares and familiar landmarks. River’s banks tell a different story. They tell the story of what remains on the margins, because places are inhabited in their empty spaces, too. Those stretches that seem useless or abandoned hold stories, gardens, paths, animals, makeshift shelters and lives unfolding beyond the city’s gaze. The river is a natural threshold. It does not separate two banks; it divides into two ways of seeing. From the bridges above, we see the water flowing below. Only when we climb down to the riverbank do we notice what that same water holds together. Along the river, something different is always happening.

Behind a wire fence, small gardens come into view. What remains of the old wartime gardens. Rows of tomatoes. Fig trees, grapevines, hazelnut trees, bamboo, shacks built from salvaged materials, chairs left in the shade. They are visible to everyone. And yet they seem unreachable. There are locked gates, growling dogs and men who stop working to scrutinize anyone who approaches. Whenever I pass by, I feel as though I am being watched, even when I cannot see anyone. Then someone suddenly appears, and the wary question comes naturally, especially when they spot a camera around my neck.

“Are you from City Hall?”

Distrust is a way of inhabiting this landscape. These gardens grew on the fringes of the official city, and their caretakers learned to protect them in the shadows, without attracting attention. Each one holds a story, a piece of land, a family memory. Almost always, it is something to be kept hidden. That is why you cannot simply ask to come in and look around. You have to be invited.

Dino invited me.

Dino opens a small wire gate and waits for me to catch up. The mesh is made from an old bed frame. He closes it behind us without saying a word. A few steps are all it takes, and everything changes. The noise of the city recedes into the distance. Ahead is a narrow path hidden among the foliage. You have to turn sideways to squeeze through, then pass another padlock, and finally the garden comes into view: freshly turned earth, fruit trees, the smell of grass, the river hidden by vegetation.

Dino breaks the silence.

“There’s no railway worker without a garden.”

He smiles. I don't understand. But that is how this story begins. And Dino’s story begins when his father takes him by the hand and brings him to the garden.

“It must have been the late 1950s. I was still a child. For me, it was the beginning of an adventure.”

We followed a road that no longer exists. In its place is a bike path. And as Dino talks, it is easy to picture it.

“The houses of the Fosso di Sant’Agnese neighborhood were built up against the railway embankment. Farther up, there was a nasone — one of Rome’s characteristic public drinking fountains — pouring out ice-cold water. After the nasone, the gardens began. But first, you had to cross the tracks. I was afraid of the gypsy communities that sometimes camped there. But I was even more afraid of the train. My father held my hand tightly.”

His memories contain no major events. Just details. The sound of footsteps on the tracks. The descent toward the river. The shacks along the bank. They are images no one ever photographed and that survive today only in his memory.

After the nasone, the gardens began.

“More or less the same ones we see today.”

Small plots carved out along the Aniene riverbed, one beside another. Almost all of them belonged to railway workers from Via di Villa Chigi. Today, Dino is the only railway worker’s son still farming the plot his father cleared. Around him, the gardens have changed hands. Some were abandoned, others occupied, others passed from one owner to another. He stayed.

“There was no railway worker without a garden. When the railways assigned the apartments in 1938, many of them came down here to clear a piece of land. My father did the same. Back then, gardening wasn’t a hobby. It was a way to put a little more food on the table. At first, his was near the tracks. Then he traded it for this one. The river was closer here. You just lowered a bucket into the Aniene and had water for irrigation.”

The garden is one of the ways this city continues to tell its story. In recent years, urban gardens have become a model to be planned: they are designed, funded and officially opened. These gardens, by contrast, did not emerge from an urban planning vision. They were born out of necessity. A piece of land to cultivate meant supplementing a salary, feeding a family and building a small household economy. Nearly a century later, that very necessity has produced a landscape no one ever planned. Biodiversity was not designed. It emerged as a consequence of continuity.

Dino’s land has remained much as it was nearly a century ago. Everything around it has changed, more than once. And it continues to change.

The people who inhabit these places are changing, too. Rome is a constantly shifting backdrop, a city with many different selves. It all depends on how you look at it. Because landscape is not an objective fact; it is constructed by the gaze. It emerges from the relationship between a place and those who move through it. It consists not only of what we see, but also of what we choose to include and what we leave at the margins of our vision.

The gardens along the Aniene were never far away. They simply remained out of frame.

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