Geopodcast Walkabout Explores Rome's Unusual Neighborhoods

From September 19 to December 21, 2025, the project 'Paesaggi Umani di Roma Plurale' will traverse and narrate unusual areas of Rome—Tor Tre Teste, Monte Mario, Acilia, Portuense—through performing media storytelling for regenerative memory. Conceived by critic, author, and radio host Carlo Infante, the initiative builds on his two-decade-old Walkabout format developed by Urban Experience, which originated after the 2006 Turin Olympics with an interactive map that predated Google Earth. The project uses georeferenced podcasts (geopodcasts) to engage 'sentient' spectators as active protagonists, interrogating territory and recovering memory traces for intergenerational exchange between elderly and youth. Students will listen to recorded memory fragments, including a focus on the 1943 bombings of Rome, drawing parallels to contemporary bombings in Kyiv and Gaza. The project involves theater artists Marco Baliani, Consuelo Ciatti, Cuocolo/Bosetti, and Mariella Fabbris, whose interventions are contextualized within the Walkabouts. Baliani will lead a walkabout on the 'picaresque' in Acilia, based on his autobiographical novel set in the 1960s. Cuocolo/Bosetti will perform itinerant theater in Portuense, and Ciatti will evoke poet Alda Merini on a train to the former mental hospital of Monte Mario.