Sabine parkrun
Rome, Italy
Sabine park is to the North of Rome, easily reached via a 15minute train ride to Fidene from Roma Tiburtina station, then a walk of just over a mile. The nearest metro is to the South, about 4km away, which is perfectly doable (but not for me, with a tight check-out time and Tuscany calling). Just check the times of trains back if you want the convenience of Fidene, as at the moment they’re only 10:15 or 13:15 (and later).
The train before the one I aimed for was delayed, so I caught that and was even earlier than I’d planned. It was very little hardship to wander to the start under blue skies, and hang around in the sun. And despite my early start, and experience telling me to expect to see no one, I could see the course was largely set out (I’m assuming they were still making their way round as I wandered past the early signs, but it may be they’d actually done everything), and I was greeted by volunteers as I got to the start, at the NE corner of the park.
The course is very well laid out so as to need no marshals, with the event run by a handful of volunteers, as is often the case outside the more parkrun-populated countries. The route heads out from the spot pictured above, again at the NE corner of the park, heads round to the right as can just be seen in the photo, before completing a short loop in the middle of the park. Once that’s complete, you do two large loops of the outside of the park and then finish back at the corner.
The team were assiduous in greeting everyone, and in making sure we knew where we were going. We covered a range of nationalities, and the Australian lady I’d met years before at Pineto was able to translate a couple of tiny warning notes about the course, though I didn’t notice the rough ground they’d mentioned.
The route isn’t totally flat, with a climb past the turn-to-the-short-loop, and a bigger one towards the end of the large loop, though both are fairly gentle. The paths give a good surface, but being gravelly they also probably don’t make for the very fastest course. But it’s a decent route, exposed to the sun in general but with occasional shaded spots. On this Spring day it wasn’t too warm in any case, but I imagine that it’ll be hot in summer. 2025 will be their first summer, with the event having started in November 2024.
There seemed a general sense of happiness in the attendees. That’s easily explained among those of us for whom Rome is itself a novelty, but the field was mostly Italian and they were clearly enjoying the sense of community. The group photo at the beginning is a nice tradition, as at other Italian parkruns - I’ve seen them wrangle a higher number of people, but with 30 or so, we were all in place and ready before the photographer.
I was glad to have got there a little too early, to have a little more time to poke around the park in the sun, and this is a place that warrants a more leisurely approach than I gave it.
Results from Sabine parkrun #29, 17/5/25; 26 finishers