Trastevere

So as far as neighborhoods are concerned, here's just a few.

So Trastevere is great for an evening atmosphere and restaurants.

Then you've got Monti.

which puts you close to the Coliseum with a younger neighborhood feel.

Okay, let's go back to community life.

There was a catastrophic fire in 1084, which devastated the Trastevere area and therefore isolates the main shul and destroys half the city.

And the Jews now move further.

from these ancient areas where they had lived for centuries to the left bank of the Tiber, near the Theatre of Marcellus, which is the area that Pope Paul IV would make into a walled ghetto centuries later, and is the area that is sort of visited by tourists today as Jewish Rome, although Jewish Rome hadn't been there for a thousand years.

He became Benedictus.

He marries into a Roman elite family and becomes nobility.

His son, Leo, capitalises on this status, and he becomes a loyal ally of Pope Leo IX, and he builds a palace within the Trastevere quarter, and his son, Petrus Leonis, expands the family holdings by capturing the island on the Tiber and building next to the theatre of Marcellus.

And the family serves as diplomats, but it's culminated in what you might call an explosive ecclesiastical crisis, because when the Pope died in 1130, a minority faction of cardinals selected Innocent II in secret to be the Pope.

But that is not the whole story.

Santa Maria in Trastevere is the people's church.

They say that oil miraculously sprang from the ground here, even before the birth of Christ, and that from that moment on the neighborhood became convinced that heaven owed it something.

Look at the windows facing onto the square.

A group of women debating politics as if it were the very air they breathe.

Street boys hurling stones at guards who had come from across the Tiber.

Outsiders on Trastevere soil.

Here, power did not give orders.

Did you go

anywhere in Trastevere? No.

Into where?

Trastevere, I think is how you say it.

That neighborhood is, I mean, that neighborhood was hot 20 years ago.

So I can only imagine what it's like now.

Lots of whistling.

Yes, yes.

Everything, you're like, wow, this is amazing.

Did you stay in the city centre? We stayed in Trastevere, which is just across the bridge.

It is in the city centre.

But I would prefer to stay there than right in the heart.

The institution was conceived at the expressed wish of the pope himself, and as Cardinal Dziwisz emphasized, one of its greatest achievements has been helping hundreds of people develop their talents and build their futures.

The mass took place at the Church of Santa Maria del Carmelo in Trastevere in Rome, very close to St. Peter's Square, and marked the beginning of the celebrations for the Vatican Foundation.

In his homily, Cardinal Dziwisz remembered how in 2001, during events marking the foundation's 20th anniversary, Pope John Paul II spoke about a special monument that is quietly built in people's hearts and minds.

"There is no greater and more enduring monument for our times than one built with the bronze of science and culture," the cardinal said.

Simon came to Rome with that message.

They speculate he lived in what's now called the Trastevere neighborhood in Rome.

Now it's full of restaurants and kind of night spots and trendy places, and, uh, it's a touristy part of Rome.

In those days, it was where the Jews lived.

And so likely, Shime-Shimeon Bar-Yona came there.

Well, the Romans found his message so off-putting, so disturbing, that around the year sixty-four, probably in the wake of Nero's, uh, fire when he was casting about for scapegoats, they rounded him up, and they transported him, again, probably from, from Trastevere, up to the Circus of Nero.

Now, that's not the Circus Maximus, the giant circus.

Smaller one, and this one was actually outside the, the main, uh, city.

Mm-hmm.

So most of that in Trastevere?

So there, it's actually on the opposite side of the river, um, in what we call the Jewish Ghetto, right?

Okay.

Yeah, I really hate sleeping.

[laughs]

Um, so the cooking school is in Trastevere in the quiet part of the neighborhood.

It still feels like a little neighborhood.