Via Margutta is a small street in the center of Rome, in the old quarter of Campo Marzio, also known as "the foreigner's quarter", located near to the slopes of Mount Pincio. It is a place with many art galleries and fashionable restaurants, where before the Renaissance there were only modest craftsmen workshops and stables.

In the 1950s, after the film Roman Holiday it became an exclusive road, and a residence of many famous people, like film director Federico Fellini.

The name probably originates from the word "Marisgutia", meaning "Sea Drop", a gentle euphemism for a dirty stream that came down from the hill of the villa of the Pincii, used like a natural Roman Cloaca. Via Margutta was behind the palaces of Via del Babuino (Baboon road), where warehouses and stables were found.

To the base of Pincio hill, there were houses of masons, marble cutters, coachmen and in the small road the activity of laborers had a large space. In the Middle Ages an unknown artist opened the first workhouse where the finest craftsmen of Rome made portraits, cut marble for fountains and forged metal plates, giving birth to a flourishing industry that attracted the migration of foreign artists (including Flemish and German), as well as other Italians. They slowly replaced the shacks and stables with houses, workshops and gardens.

A Belgian monsignor, Saverio de Merode, in the years of Pope Pius IX, understood the change: he bought the territories of the slopes, built drains and transformed the alley into a street in the public city plan.

Now it is a charming, calm road,  scents from flowers is present, and since its beginning, whilst being in the full center of Rome it seems an "outside door road", perfumed by trees and vineyards, and this has made it a perfect choice for artists, painters, sculptors, antiquarians, even if today many of these studies have become private flats.