by RACHEL DONADIO
On a sunny recent Sunday in a playing field on the outskirts of the city, the sounds of cheering could be heard. “Come on, come on, come on!” someone shouted in Italian from the sidelines to a player scrambling on the slightly overgrown field. “Wake up!” another cried.
But this wasn’t the usual weekend soccer league. Instead, the players, almost all from South Asia, were dressed in white pants and V-neck sweaters, or black jerseys — and they were playing cricket. Piazza Vittorio, a scrappy young team named after an ethnically diverse neighborhood in Rome, was facing off against Green Bangla, the presiding champions of an amateur cricket tournament now in its third year in the Rome area.
The match was held in the grassy center of a former dog track that had been transformed into a cultural association. Its stadium walls were covered in colorful graffiti. Broken beer bottles were scattered across the parking lot; nearby, families stood under a hot midday sun picking through mounds of used clothing piled near a garbage bin.
In these edgier patches of the city, whose schemers and dreamers were immortalized in the early 1960s by the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, a new Rome is taking shape. It is filled with Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis, Indians and other immigrants who are quietly transforming the texture of one of Europe’s most homogeneous cities, blending their own traditions with a Roman accent.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)