Of all Italy's historic cities, it's
perhaps
Rome which exerts the
most compelling fascination. There's
more to see here than in any other
city in the world, with the relics
of over two thousand years of
inhabitation packed into its
sprawling urban area. You could
spend a month here and still only
scratch the surface. As a historic
place, it is special enough; as a
contemporary European capital, it is
utterly unique.
Placed between Italy's North and
South, and heartily despised by
both, Rome is perhaps the perfect capital
for a country like Italy. Once the
seat of a great empire, and later
the home of the papacy, which ruled
its dominions from here with a
distant and autocratic hand, it's
still seen as a place somewhat apart
from the rest of Italy, spending
money made elsewhere on the corrupt
and bloated government machine that
runs the country. Romans, the
thinking seems to go, are a lazy
lot, not to be trusted and living
very nicely off the fat of the rest
of the land. Even Romans find it
hard to disagree with this analysis:
in a city of around four million,
there are around 600,000
office-workers, compared to an
industrial workforce of one sixth of
that.
For the traveller, all of this is
much less evident than the sheer
weight of history that the
city supports. There are of course
the city's classical features, most
visibly the Colosseum, and the Forum
and Palatine Hill; but from here
there's an almost uninterrupted
sequence of monuments - from early
Christian basilicas, Romanesque
churches, Renaissance palaces, right
up to the fountains and churches of
the Baroque period, which perhaps
more than any other era has
determined the look of the city
today. There is the modern epoch
too, from the ponderous Neoclassical
architecture of the post-Unification
period to the self-publicizing
edifices of the Mussolini years. All
these various eras crowd in on one
other to an almost overwhelming
degree: there are medieval churches
atop ancient basilicas above Roman
palaces; houses and apartment blocks
incorporate fragments of eroded
Roman columns, carvings and
inscriptions; roads and piazzas
follow the lines of ancient
amphitheatres and stadiums.
All of which is not to say that
Rome is an easy place to absorb on
one visit; you need to approach
things slowly, even if you only have
a few days here. You can't see
everything on your first visit to
Rome, and there's no point in even
trying. Most of the city's sights
can be approached from a variety of
directions, and it's part of the
city's allure to stumble across
things by accident, gradually
piecing together the whole, rather
than marching around to a timetable
on a predetermined route. In any
case, it's hard to get anywhere very
fast. Despite regular pledges to ban
motor vehicles from the city centre,
the congestion can be awful. On
foot, it's easy to lose a sense of
direction winding about in the
twisting old streets. In any case,
you're so likely to come upon
something interesting it hardly
makes any difference.
Rome doesn't have the nightlife
of, say, Paris or London, or even of
its Italian counterparts to the
north - culturally it's rather
provincial - and its food ,
while delicious, is earthy rather
than haute cuisine. But its
atmosphere is like no other city - a
monumental, busy capital and yet an
appealingly relaxed place, with a
centre that has yet to be taken over
by chainstores and big multinational
hotels. Above all, there has perhaps
never been a better time to visit
the city, whose notoriously
crumbling infrastructure is looking
and functioning better than it has
done for some time - the result of
the feverish activity that took
place in the last months of 1999 to
have the city centre looking its
best for the Church's jubilee. On
the surface the city still looks
much as it has done for years. But
there are museums, churches and
other buildings that have been
"in restoration" as long
as anyone can remember that have
reopened, and some of the city's
historic collections have been
rehoused, making it all the more
easy to get the most out of Rome.
