Calle de Roma
The street owes its name to Rome, capital of Italy. It forms part of the Colonia Madrid Moderno, a development of terraced villas raised from 1890 on land in La Guindalera by the businessman Mariano Santos Pinela and the architect Julián Marín, with a European-flavored naming scheme fixed by the developers themselves.
Between 1890 and 1906, on land in Madrid’s eastern outskirts near Las Ventas, the Colonia Madrid Moderno grew in three phases: rows of two-story terraced villas that, against what was normal on the fringe, were born with running water, sewers and lighting. The first phase came from the architect Julián Marín, who raised Neo-Mudéjar houses on this calle de Roma. The third, directed by Valentín Roca Carbonell, added houses with a Modernist air, with floral panels, spires and ironwork.
The name did not come from the City Council. The developers named the streets on their own, hence that collection of European place names meant to dress an outlying development in cosmopolitan clothes. No name is known before 1890.
Of the nearly hundred original houses, barely a dozen survived the demolitions of the 1970s. Some still stand on calle de Roma, still with their ceramics, their two-tone brick and their wooden balconies.