On 18 October 2025, in the multicultural heart of Tor Pignattara, hip hop returned to its roots: the street, the community, sharing.
As part of the Hip Hop Cine Festival, the A Sud network and the European partners of the Soundroutes project organised a large public jam entitled “Hip Hop as Intangible Cultural Heritage”, an event dedicated to the recognition of hip hop as intangible cultural heritage.
The festival, which has been a reference point for urban culture in Rome for years, celebrates all disciplines of hip hop — MCing, Breaking, DJing and Writing — bringing together artists, scholars and the public in an intergenerational and intercultural dialogue.
The Soundroutes jam transformed the streets of Tor Pignattara into an open-air workshop, with live graffiti painting, DJ sets and open mic cyphers where young and established artists shared the same stage, the same beat, the same desire to tell their stories.
‘Hip hop is not just aesthetics or entertainment,’ says one participant. ‘It is a collective language that speaks of identity, justice, memory. It is living culture.’
For A Sud, which coordinates the activities of the European Soundroutes project in Italy, the goal is precisely this: to connect creativity, participation and social justice, restoring urban culture to its original meaning — that of a political and community space.
The jam was the perfect synthesis of this journey: a moment of encounter between artists, young people, migrants, educators and activists who build new narratives from the bottom up every day.
The Tor Pignattara neighbourhood, which has always been a crossroads of cultures and resistance, has proven to be fertile ground for experimenting with new forms of citizenship and coexistence through art.
Here, hip hop is recognised as a common good, a shared memory, a living heritage that belongs to those who practise and renew it every day.
The October jam symbolically closes the cycle of Soundroutes’ Italian Local Hubs, which have travelled through Rome, Palermo, Catania and L’Aquila, transforming urban culture into a European network of training, cooperation and creative liberation.
A journey that demonstrates, once again, that hip hop does not just tell the story of reality: it changes it.
