camminando | Walking as Healing: Beach Walks in Ostia and Garbatella

My healing walks in Rome continue, as strategy to cope with stress, which has now arrived to extremely high levels. One of my stressors du jour are dealing with a delayed and not well done renovation of my late parents apartment in Rome, which will become my home: I am currently sleeping on the bedroom floor surrounded by boxes and covered by dust. The other stressor is the recurrent problem of progress with my doctoral research, dealing with egos and dysfunctionality: the latest is the  exceptional rejection of approving funding for my presentation at the Symmetry conference in Vienna.
I keep repeating in a mantra-like fashion Nietzsche's popular statement "That which does not kill us makes us stronger". My steps take to the A metro and then to the train to Ostia Stella Polare.

Returning to the city, I got off at San Paolo fuori le mura (IV century AD) the basilica erected in the burial place of San Paolo. The sun starts setting behind the pines at north-west side of the basilica.

My following wanderings encounter Garbatella, the former working class neighborhood which presents harmonious urban planning, inspired by the garden city movement. Wikipedia says:

Garbatella is a quarter belonging to the Municipio XI of the commune of Rome, in the Ostiense district. Its population counts nearly 45,000.It was founded in the late 1920s on an estate bearing the same name lying on a hill adjacent to the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The older section of the area is divided into project units (Italian: lotto), each of them made of several buildings grouped together around a common yards: this design was borrowed from the Garden city movement. This kind of architectural agglomeration in Rococo style, consists of a common garden area which serves as an informal meeting point for all the families that live in the lotto.

My walk ends by the Garbatella metro station, with views of the Roman industrial archeology: the Gasometro framing the setting sun.

 

The sun is setting framed by the Gasometro