Lucia’s quinceañera
Lucia, a Peruvian girl born in Italy, lives with her mother and two sisters in Metropoliz, a former meat processing plant on Via Prenestina, Rome’s eastern outskirts. The factory, abandoned in the 1990s and occupied since 2011 by seventy families of mixed origins, has been converted into makeshift apartments, always under threat of eviction.
The Peruvian community, first to settle in Metropoliz, remains numerous and supportive.
For Lucia’s fifteenth birthday, they organized a Quinceañera, the Latin American rite of passage that marks the transition from girlhood to womanhood.
Over the course of a week, the residents decorated the factory halls, sewed gala dresses, and cooked in every home. A limousine, a gift from Lucia’s father in Peru, carried her and her classmates on a tour of the city center.
The celebration brought together relatives, neighbors, and school friends. Music, dance, and food filled the night. Lucia, in a white gown, stepped into adulthood as tradition demands.
A Quinceañera is more than a birthday: it is a cultural and religious ritual, common in Latin America and among migrant communities abroad. Unlike Italian rites, such as confirmation or the eighteenth birthday, it fuses faith, heritage, and social belonging in a single event.
At Metropoliz, it also reaffirmed the ties of a community that survives on the margins of the city, keeping alive traditions from afar.