In 1951, Pier Paolo Pasolini was still a nobody. He was 29 years old, had little money, and—at least at first—no job.
He lives with his mother, Susanna, in an apartment in Rebibbia, at Via Giovanni Tagliere 3, just a short walk from the prison.
Today, Pasolini’s house in Rome is open to everyone, and admission is free.
It’s called Casa Pasolini and is a state-run museum. You can visit it on Thursdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., and on Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., by booking a free ticket on the Musei Italiani app.
Now is the perfect time: on November 26, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s house-museum celebrates its first anniversary, and throughout November there will be tours and events (see below for details).
What’s inside the house in Rebibbia: 70 square meters, original wallpaper, and a pillow in place of a chair
It’s about 70 square meters: two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, on the first floor of a low-rise building with exposed brick. Pasolini remembered it as a bare house, on the very outskirts of the city.
In the summer there was dust; in the winter, the marsh.
The restoration preserved the original wallpaper and the kitchen tiles. The space is so small that at events, instead of a chair, they give you a cushion.
From Rebibbia to Ciampino by bus and train: the commuter Pasolini who wrote *Ragazzi di vita*
To make ends meet, Pasolini worked as a substitute teacher at a private middle school in Ciampino. Every day he took the bus to Portonaccio, transferred to Termini, and then boarded the train.
If you’ve ever commuted in Rome, you know how exhausting it is.
And yet it was precisely within these walls that he began writing *Ragazzi di vita*, the novel about the kids from the suburbs published in 1955.
It was here that some of the poems that would eventually appear in *The Ashes of Gramsci* took shape.
Years later, far from Rebibbia, he would look back on those days with nostalgia: they had been freer than they had seemed at the time.
From the 2022 auction to the museum: how the house on Via Tagliere was saved
For years, the fate of these 70 square meters remained uncertain. In 2013, the city government wanted to turn it into an International House of Poetry, but the funding never materialized.
In 2022, the apartment was put up for auction—amid protests from many—and was purchased by producer Pietro Valsecchi, who donated it to the state in 2024.
The Ministry of Culture restored it and opened it on November 26, 2025, fifty years after the poet’s death.
Casa Pasolini Today: How to Visit for Free (and November Events)
- Hours: Thursday and Friday 9 a.m.–2 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m.–6 p.m. Last admission is half an hour before closing.
- Closed: Monday through Wednesday, December 25, and January 1.
- Admission: free, with reservations required via the app or the website museiitaliani.it. Groups are limited to a maximum of 15 people.
- How to get there: Take Metro Line B to the Rebibbia terminus, then walk.
Here are the events you won’t want to miss in November:
- Saturday, November 14, at 4 p.m.: dramatized tour “The House, the Street, Life.”
- Sunday, November 15: a reading group on *The Ashes of Gramsci*.
- Sunday, November 22, at 10 a.m. and 12 p.m.: a guided tour of the neighborhood, which also passes through the areas featuring Zerocalcare’s mammoth.
More than seventy years after Pasolini, Rebibbia has found another storyteller. If you’re making a list of famous houses in Rome to see at least once, put this one at the top: no other place tells the story of where this city comes from quite as well.
