Roma Borgata Festival - Primavalle Stage (Murder at the Market)

Theater enters the Primavalle market

With the Primavalle stage, the Roma Borgata Festival reaffirms its vision of decentralized theater: bringing live performance into the everyday spaces of Rome's suburbs, without asking the audience to step inside a traditional theater hall. The heart of this stop is "Murder at the Market," a site-specific play that will be performed on June 5th and 6th, 2026, at 9 PM, among the stalls of the Mercato Primavalle II, in Rome's 14th Municipality, in the Lazio region.

A performance born from its setting

Directed by Emiliano Morana, "Murder at the Market" treats the local market not as a backdrop, but as a true character. The market itself dictates the rhythm of the narrative, the distance between actors and spectators, and the very perception of the scene: the dramaturgy uses the neighborhood's ordinary architecture to generate attention and suspicion, like a mystery unfolding between the stalls. The everyday space becomes a stage, and the borgata (suburb) ceases to be a simple frame to become part of the story.

Primavalle, a historic Roman suburb

Primavalle is one of the official suburbs established in Rome in the 1930s, now a populous neighborhood in the capital's northwest outskirts, along the Via Aurelia and near the Grande Raccordo Anulare. Bringing a high-quality cultural event here means restoring centrality to an area often on the fringes of the entertainment circuit: the market, a place of social interaction par excellence for the district, thus becomes a place of shared culture.

A stop within a widespread festival

The Primavalle evening is part of the broader program of the Roma Borgata Festival, which between May 9th and September 13th, 2026, enlivens eight suburban districts of Rome with over 80 events - including Centocelle, Alessandrino, Torpignattara, Trullo, Magliana, Tor Marancia, Montespaccato, and Primavalle - alternating theater, dance, music, contemporary circus, and workshops. During the same window (June 3rd to 7th), the festival reaches Primavalle and nearby Montespaccato with other events, such as the play "Petern Norman - The Forgotten Hero" by Matteo Cirillo.

A community project

The Roma Borgata Festival is conceived and produced by the A.S.A.P.Q. association, with artistic direction by Alessandra Muschella, and stems from the experience of the La Città Ideale festival. The festival enjoys the support of the Ministry of Culture and the Lazio Region, and the patronage of Rome's 5th, 8th, 11th, and 14th Municipalities and ATER Roma. The choice of a symbolic ticket of 1 or 2 euros reaffirms the project's popular and inclusive vocation: theater as a good accessible to the entire neighborhood.