Europe > Italy > Lazio > Rome > Articles > Rome: A General Introduction

Just across the grass from John Keats, whose name lies writ in water in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, is a pyramid. A pretty large one too - built in 12AD as a funerary monument for a wealthy praetor with exotic tastes who just loved Julius Caesar’s version of Cleopatra - the Movie.

On the other side of the pyramid, where a large resident feline community is kept purring by a surprisingly well-organised cat-lady cooperative, stands the Porta San Paolo. Once part of the Emperor Aurelian’s ambitious 3rd century defences, this city gate is now at the centre of one of Rome’s most alarming junctions. Trams, silent but deadly, lend their weight to the mad choreography of Vespas, cars, and lorries on their way to or from the wholesale fruit and vegetable markets down the Via Ostiense.

I was once towing a friend’s Fiat Cinquecento around here when - in one of those unlucky conjunctions that seal our fate - I put my foot on the accelerator as he put his on the brake. One might have expected the rope to snap in two, but it was made of stronger stuff. Instead, the whole front panel of the Cinquecento came off.

At moments like this, as the popi popi (to use the correct Italian term) of the car horns starts its doleful chorus, the fact that people have been standing here with their hands on their hips for 2000 years, examining the damage to biga, ox-cart or phaeton and trying to restrain the urge to laugh, is probably no big reassurance - not at the time, anyway. But in the long run, I’d like to believe it counts for something. It has to be good for the soul to live in a city that sweats history.

Romans themselves, it must be said, are sublimely indifferent to what somebody once called the “anxiety of influence”. Washing is strung up between the arches of an aqueduct, and a surviving part of the horrea - a huge warehouse near the Tiber, the largest single building of classical times - was until recently used as a soft drinks deposit. The “bunch of old rocks” approach, though, is actually a form of self-defence, and a reaction to Mussolini’s glorification of the Roman Empire, which did not chime with the fatalistic, sardonic, ahistorical character of modern romani. Deep down, they are proud of the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain - but on the surface they like to ignore them, ostentatiously.

In places where history encroaches less on everyday life, statues are generally silent, and stored in museums. In Rome, they talk. The most famous of the city’s talking statues is Pasquino, who presides over a small square near Piazza Navona. This marble torso is supposed to represent Menalaeus with the body of Patroclus, but it is so ravaged and mutilated that it looks more like the centrepiece of a Francis Bacon triptych.

As soon as it was set up in a niche on the square in 1501, the statue became a magnet for anonymous poetic satires, fixed overnight to the plinth, and invariably directed against the powers that be. One of the most famous of these “pasquinades” neatly demonstrates how much Romans care about their heritage, for all their apparent nonchalance. When Urban VIII, the Barberini pope, removed the bronze from the beams of the Pantheon’s portico for use in St Peter’s, the following epigram appeared: “Quod non fecerunt barberi, fecerunt Barberini” (What the barbarians didn’t do, the Barberini did). But Pasquino still speaks out; just recently, he composed a scatological ditty about Silvio Berlusconi.

Georgina Masson, doyenne of Anglo-Roman travel writers, never tired of repeating that “Rome is a palimpsest” - a manuscript used over and over so many times that it becomes a sort of historical layer cake. Nowhere is this more obvious than in certain churches, such as San Clemente, whose essentially 12th century upper church, with its glorious apse mosaics, is only the top strata of a warren of superimposed buildings in which people have worshipped their tutelary gods ever since the 1st century. But evidence of use and reuse is everywhere. In the Jewish ghetto stands a 15th century house, adorned with a fragment of classical frieze and a stone lion, borrowed from some ruin that had no further use for it. On the ground floor - back in the present tense - a Jewish bakery serves a mouthwatering ricotta and sour cherry tart.

In one sense, then, our bi-millennial walking tour is an artificial exercise. We take the Castel Sant’Angelo to represent the 10th century, because at this time it was the headquarters of senatrix (and dominatrix) Marozia, one of the most powerful and influential women Rome has ever known. But just about any other century between the 1st and the 19th could have been chosen to illustrate the history of this mausoleum-turned-Papal-fortress.

This is the joy of Rome: emperors, visigoths, Medieval builders, Renaissance artists and Baroque town-planners have all left their mark, and while that mark may have looked like a catastrophe at the time, or a scandalous novelty, time and wear have mellowed the result into an effortless blend an interior designer would kill for.

Of all the city’s major buildings, perhaps only those two white monoliths, St Peter’s and the Vittorio Emanuele monument, have succeeded, through sheer force of scale and singleness of purpose, in stopping time in its tracks. When he began work on St Peter’s in 1506, Bramante took the almost unprecedented step of demolishing the old church, rather than incorporating it into the new edifice. Similarly, the northern slope of the Capitoline hill, with its classical ruins and Renaissance villas, was entirely transformed by the huge, bombastic monument to Italy’s first king, inaugurated in 1911. Romans don’t like such swaggering intrusions; they prefer intimate architectural jumbles like Piazza del Pantheon. The Pantheon itself was once a proud white boast - but it has had the edge (and the marble) taken off its swagger by greed, changing fortunes and the fish market which once occupied the square.

This is Rome all over: resilient but sceptical, or rather, resilient because sceptical. A local proverb goes: Quando muore er papa, ne fanno ‘nartro - “when the Pope dies, they just make another one”. The same attitude dominated Romans’ view of the 2000 Holy Year, which brought millions of pilgrims to the city. There was plenty of grumbling about preparatory roadworks, but millennial panic was, in the end, noticeably absent. This is because the Eternal City has seen it all before. In Fellini’s anarchic homage to his adopted city, Roma, the American writer Gore Vidal tells the camera why he has chosen to live in Rome: “There is no better place than this city - which has died so many times, and been reborn so many times - to wait for the end of the world”.

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