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.