Our analysis is the culmination of the Rome Workshop, a course offered in the spring of 2013 by the City and Regional Planning Department of Cornell University at its Rome campus. While our classrooms and computers are located in the historic center of Rome, our real tools are located in the city’s periphery, where we work to dissect the urban fabric of our respective quartieri (closest translation is ‘neighborhoods’). Our team consists of Bria Francisco, Kenneth Kalynchuk, Tania Marinos and Ariel Velarde. As Cornell students (and one visiting student), familiar with the complexities of American urban issues, we are faced with the challenge of unfamiliarity. Although one member of our team speaks Italian, we are relatively new to understanding the urban issues specific to Rome and to Italy. This is a critical point to note before we begin our analysis. The particularly difficult task of understanding a Roman quaritere has been both illuminating and humbling. Through the course of this project we have learned to think beyond the comforts of the typical classroom setting, and have worked to integrate our studies, interests, and talents into a community we do not belong to. We have learned to think of the periphery not as peripheral, but as a central representation of Rome’s urban issues: our semester’s studies.