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 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.
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.
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