Things to do in Rome
Coming off the auto strada at Fiano Roma¬no or Roma Sud exit, you know by the convergence of heavily trafficked routes that you are entering a grand nexus: All roads lead to Rome. And then the interminable sub¬urbs, the railroad crossings, the inter sections no wonder they call it the Eternal City.
Nearer the center, Rome begins to have the air of a city socially divided. On one side, com¬pact masses of old tenements crowd above mean streets. On the other, soaring yellow washed apartment blocks, five stories high with inner courtyards, are geometrically aligned. Poor or not so poor, your Roman likes living in a crowd, in the thick of things. The residential suburb, out at Monte Sacro or Garbatella, has little appeal for him.
In the urban sprawl a few features that match your expectations of Rome begin to take shape: a bridge with heroic statues along its parapets; a towering cake of frothy marble decorated with allegorical figures in extrava¬gant poses; a piazza and an obelisk under an umbrella of pine trees; a fountain pitted with age, bearing the notice ACQUA NON POTABILE which doesn't prevent street urchins from dashing up to drink at it. Street names touch a chord of school room memories:
Via Appia Nuova, Via Aurelia Antica. The very gratings and manhole covers are stamped SPQR, The Senate and Populace of Rome, an expression that links the citizen with his ancestor of 22 centuries ago and gives the stranger the eerie feeling that the dust he stirs has been stirred by the togas of Cato, Cicero, and Seneca. In Rome, 22 cen¬turies are just a few generations back.
You have arrived. You are in the city's heart. Your automobile is parked in the shadow of a stone she wolf, along with automobiles which have ROMA on their license plates. Italian in¬dex letters are abbreviations of the vehicle licensing towns, MI for Milan, GE for Genoa and so on except in Rome.
The Roman mo¬torist wears ROMA, spelled out in full. Like the SPQR, that was Mussolini's doing. He re¬asserted the grandeur that was ROME. He made Romans understand that they were the children of heroes and demigods. Up north, they tell us that Turin with its industry and Milan with its commerce are the true capital cities of Italy.
Rome is badly planned, badly sited, too far south, too enervating in summer, a town of lawyers, civ¬il servants, and tourists. But the Romans can smile at that. They know they inhabit the fountainhead of the Western world, not solely of Italy. They know that their town, and no other, collected the wisdom of Egypt and Greece, refined and enriched it, and supplied the nations which arose afterward with their laws, systems of government, religions, mili¬tary arts, and the foundations of their language and literature.
Those black-eyed urchins at the wall fountain, that gross wom¬an bawling from her tiny balcony, that grand¬father snoring on a cane chair at street level, that white robed child emerging from the side door of the church, that pallid waiter polishing the restaurant window with yester¬day's newspaper all can say, as their dis¬tant ancestors said, Civis Romanus sumI am a Roman citizen.
If they should travel to other parts of Italy they will note without surprise that most main streets are called Via Roma; that every medieval walled town has its Porta Romana, the gate that faces Rome; and that, on posts beside every main road, the distance to Rome is recorded every tenth of a kilometer.
Rome was not built in a day, though much of superficial Rome was built in less than a century. The old city grew organically, and still grows, and its growth is chronicled in its stones. When you look into this city you see how, like Troy, it exists on several levels. Un¬like the levels of Troy, these have each been a spiritual metropolis for whole societies of human beings, most of whom never set eyes on Rome. Under the swarming traffic lie traces of Etruscan Rome; ancient Veii and Caere, strongholds of Etruscan princes, are virtual¬ly part of modern Rome.
There is a Rome of the Republics and the Em¬perors, outcropping in unexpected places like barbershops, garage forecourts, and railroad sidings. There is an early Christian Rome, tunneling away in the catacombs, and a Dark Age Rome, when the pampered citizenry fled to Carthage and, on arrival, immediately wanted to know what was playing at the the¬ater. Engineers working on sewers or boring for extensions to the metro politana (the sub¬way) run afoul of the relics. A constant war is waged between archaeology departments and the town planners.
There are gaps in history's stratification. In the middle Ages the city was reduced to a ru¬ral slum on the banks of an evil smelling Tiber, and the malarial heirs of imperial grandeur borrowed classical pillars to repair their hovels. There is also Rome of the papa¬cies, and Rome of a period when the popes were hunted in and out like criminals. There is evidence of Byzantine Rome, of the dark little brick and tile churches that incorpo¬rated Rome's name in an architectural style (Romanesque), and of the sumptuous flower¬ing of the later Renaissance styles which are called Roman Baroque.
Rome, however, though rich in florid sculp¬tures, intricate ornamental motifs, and neo Introduction classical effects, cannot show us galleries of famous paintings the way many provincial centers can. For a capital city, it lacks a capi¬tal display of national artists. The Italian heritage is spread over the whole country; all major cities and many small towns and vil-lages have their share of the treasure.
Closer to the present day and to the sur¬face of Rome lies the early 19thcentury city, destination of Grand Tourists. That is the Rome of Gioacchino Belli, dialect poet and satirist, and of Goethe's and Stendhal's travel books. In the English quarter, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, the poet John Keats died and Mrs.
Babington kept her teashop. Students of the Risorgimentothe resur¬gence and reunification of Italy in the 19th century know a Rome of Garibaldi and his insurgents. From a vantage point on the Ja¬niculum, the hero on horseback surveys the terrain in bloody skirmishes and betrayals. Pigeons from St. Peter's Square love to fly up and perch on the saddle of that equestrian statue, so that it often looks as though Gari¬baldi is carrying the birds to market.
Toward the end of the last century, the Eter¬nal City spread its wings. On September 20, 1870 (Via Venti Settembre is one of the most durable of Italian street names), General Cadorna's regiment of bersaglieri breached the Porta Pia, proclaimed Rome capital of It¬aly, and made Pope Pius IX the prisoner of the Vatican.
The gold rush of merchants and contractors from the north, the arrival of hordes of bureaucrats from Florence, briefly the former capital, and of poor immigrants from Naples and Calabria, doubled the popu¬lation of 100,000 in days, and took it to half a million in months. The Via Nazionale and the Via Venti Settembre were christened and the city center slums were cleared for public buildings more in keeping with Rome's dignity. But the new city council rejected Garibaldi's scheme for diverting the Tiber. Without the Tiber, floods and all, Rome would not have been Rome.
Much of modern Rome, therefore, went up in a few years in the 1880s, decade of the gran febbre di Roma (great fever of Rome)a fever that ended with the pa¬tient's total collapse. Through greed and childish dreams, a newspaper said, the bankers have promoted building in a manner devoid of all prudence.... Every stage of construction depended on promissory notes .... When foreign bankers refused to discount notes, the paper tower crumbled.
The so-called building yard of Italy in the later 1880s was a field of ruins among the classical ruins, infested by provincials whom the promise of work had drawn in by the thousand. Rome grew dirtier and more de¬crepit, littered with shacks and cardboard tents until well into the present century. Of the 1920 population of 800,000, it was re¬ported that nearly one fifth of all citizens lived in abusive dwellings.
Then came Fas¬cism, which ruthlessly swept them away. Wreckers moved into Trastevere and the slums near the Capitol, homes of those who could most truly claim Roman citizenship. A new central thoroughfare, the broad Via dei Fori Imperiali, was laid down from Musso¬lini's Palazzo Venezia to the Colosseum of the Caesars. One human touch was the rebuild¬ing of the old rione (district) fountains, the sculpted wells of the different parishes an important feature of tourist Rome today.
Monumental architecture of the past 50 years has not much disturbed the shabby but styl¬ish buildings of central Rome. No skyscraper out tops the 450 foot dome of St. Peter's. New look architecture, by exponents of the Introduction xiii school of Gio Ponti and Nervi, is almost wholly confined to the EUR complex, site of the aborted Universal Exposition of Rome in 1942 and Olympic venue of 1960a suburb bigger than Florence. On the whole, modern buildings look pretentious and ephemeral, and they fall far short of tradition.
Through the '50s and the '60s there was an uncon¬trolled expansion of building along the main exit roads, but this has now long since been checked and many who can't find reasonably priced housing in Rome have moved to satel¬lite towns in the Alban and Sabine hills. Rome has once again its Gypsy encampments among the arches of the old aqueducts, espe¬cially on the eastern approaches, Via Casilina and the Cinecitta area. But it is decreed that the city itself beautiful and pleasing in spite of everything shall be confined within its present limits.
Nearer the center, Rome begins to have the air of a city socially divided. On one side, com¬pact masses of old tenements crowd above mean streets. On the other, soaring yellow washed apartment blocks, five stories high with inner courtyards, are geometrically aligned. Poor or not so poor, your Roman likes living in a crowd, in the thick of things. The residential suburb, out at Monte Sacro or Garbatella, has little appeal for him.
In the urban sprawl a few features that match your expectations of Rome begin to take shape: a bridge with heroic statues along its parapets; a towering cake of frothy marble decorated with allegorical figures in extrava¬gant poses; a piazza and an obelisk under an umbrella of pine trees; a fountain pitted with age, bearing the notice ACQUA NON POTABILE which doesn't prevent street urchins from dashing up to drink at it. Street names touch a chord of school room memories:
Via Appia Nuova, Via Aurelia Antica. The very gratings and manhole covers are stamped SPQR, The Senate and Populace of Rome, an expression that links the citizen with his ancestor of 22 centuries ago and gives the stranger the eerie feeling that the dust he stirs has been stirred by the togas of Cato, Cicero, and Seneca. In Rome, 22 cen¬turies are just a few generations back.
You have arrived. You are in the city's heart. Your automobile is parked in the shadow of a stone she wolf, along with automobiles which have ROMA on their license plates. Italian in¬dex letters are abbreviations of the vehicle licensing towns, MI for Milan, GE for Genoa and so on except in Rome.
The Roman mo¬torist wears ROMA, spelled out in full. Like the SPQR, that was Mussolini's doing. He re¬asserted the grandeur that was ROME. He made Romans understand that they were the children of heroes and demigods. Up north, they tell us that Turin with its industry and Milan with its commerce are the true capital cities of Italy.
Rome is badly planned, badly sited, too far south, too enervating in summer, a town of lawyers, civ¬il servants, and tourists. But the Romans can smile at that. They know they inhabit the fountainhead of the Western world, not solely of Italy. They know that their town, and no other, collected the wisdom of Egypt and Greece, refined and enriched it, and supplied the nations which arose afterward with their laws, systems of government, religions, mili¬tary arts, and the foundations of their language and literature.
Those black-eyed urchins at the wall fountain, that gross wom¬an bawling from her tiny balcony, that grand¬father snoring on a cane chair at street level, that white robed child emerging from the side door of the church, that pallid waiter polishing the restaurant window with yester¬day's newspaper all can say, as their dis¬tant ancestors said, Civis Romanus sumI am a Roman citizen.
If they should travel to other parts of Italy they will note without surprise that most main streets are called Via Roma; that every medieval walled town has its Porta Romana, the gate that faces Rome; and that, on posts beside every main road, the distance to Rome is recorded every tenth of a kilometer.
Rome was not built in a day, though much of superficial Rome was built in less than a century. The old city grew organically, and still grows, and its growth is chronicled in its stones. When you look into this city you see how, like Troy, it exists on several levels. Un¬like the levels of Troy, these have each been a spiritual metropolis for whole societies of human beings, most of whom never set eyes on Rome. Under the swarming traffic lie traces of Etruscan Rome; ancient Veii and Caere, strongholds of Etruscan princes, are virtual¬ly part of modern Rome.
There is a Rome of the Republics and the Em¬perors, outcropping in unexpected places like barbershops, garage forecourts, and railroad sidings. There is an early Christian Rome, tunneling away in the catacombs, and a Dark Age Rome, when the pampered citizenry fled to Carthage and, on arrival, immediately wanted to know what was playing at the the¬ater. Engineers working on sewers or boring for extensions to the metro politana (the sub¬way) run afoul of the relics. A constant war is waged between archaeology departments and the town planners.
There are gaps in history's stratification. In the middle Ages the city was reduced to a ru¬ral slum on the banks of an evil smelling Tiber, and the malarial heirs of imperial grandeur borrowed classical pillars to repair their hovels. There is also Rome of the papa¬cies, and Rome of a period when the popes were hunted in and out like criminals. There is evidence of Byzantine Rome, of the dark little brick and tile churches that incorpo¬rated Rome's name in an architectural style (Romanesque), and of the sumptuous flower¬ing of the later Renaissance styles which are called Roman Baroque.
Rome, however, though rich in florid sculp¬tures, intricate ornamental motifs, and neo Introduction classical effects, cannot show us galleries of famous paintings the way many provincial centers can. For a capital city, it lacks a capi¬tal display of national artists. The Italian heritage is spread over the whole country; all major cities and many small towns and vil-lages have their share of the treasure.
Closer to the present day and to the sur¬face of Rome lies the early 19thcentury city, destination of Grand Tourists. That is the Rome of Gioacchino Belli, dialect poet and satirist, and of Goethe's and Stendhal's travel books. In the English quarter, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, the poet John Keats died and Mrs.
Babington kept her teashop. Students of the Risorgimentothe resur¬gence and reunification of Italy in the 19th century know a Rome of Garibaldi and his insurgents. From a vantage point on the Ja¬niculum, the hero on horseback surveys the terrain in bloody skirmishes and betrayals. Pigeons from St. Peter's Square love to fly up and perch on the saddle of that equestrian statue, so that it often looks as though Gari¬baldi is carrying the birds to market.
Toward the end of the last century, the Eter¬nal City spread its wings. On September 20, 1870 (Via Venti Settembre is one of the most durable of Italian street names), General Cadorna's regiment of bersaglieri breached the Porta Pia, proclaimed Rome capital of It¬aly, and made Pope Pius IX the prisoner of the Vatican.
The gold rush of merchants and contractors from the north, the arrival of hordes of bureaucrats from Florence, briefly the former capital, and of poor immigrants from Naples and Calabria, doubled the popu¬lation of 100,000 in days, and took it to half a million in months. The Via Nazionale and the Via Venti Settembre were christened and the city center slums were cleared for public buildings more in keeping with Rome's dignity. But the new city council rejected Garibaldi's scheme for diverting the Tiber. Without the Tiber, floods and all, Rome would not have been Rome.
Much of modern Rome, therefore, went up in a few years in the 1880s, decade of the gran febbre di Roma (great fever of Rome)a fever that ended with the pa¬tient's total collapse. Through greed and childish dreams, a newspaper said, the bankers have promoted building in a manner devoid of all prudence.... Every stage of construction depended on promissory notes .... When foreign bankers refused to discount notes, the paper tower crumbled.
The so-called building yard of Italy in the later 1880s was a field of ruins among the classical ruins, infested by provincials whom the promise of work had drawn in by the thousand. Rome grew dirtier and more de¬crepit, littered with shacks and cardboard tents until well into the present century. Of the 1920 population of 800,000, it was re¬ported that nearly one fifth of all citizens lived in abusive dwellings.
Then came Fas¬cism, which ruthlessly swept them away. Wreckers moved into Trastevere and the slums near the Capitol, homes of those who could most truly claim Roman citizenship. A new central thoroughfare, the broad Via dei Fori Imperiali, was laid down from Musso¬lini's Palazzo Venezia to the Colosseum of the Caesars. One human touch was the rebuild¬ing of the old rione (district) fountains, the sculpted wells of the different parishes an important feature of tourist Rome today.
Monumental architecture of the past 50 years has not much disturbed the shabby but styl¬ish buildings of central Rome. No skyscraper out tops the 450 foot dome of St. Peter's. New look architecture, by exponents of the Introduction xiii school of Gio Ponti and Nervi, is almost wholly confined to the EUR complex, site of the aborted Universal Exposition of Rome in 1942 and Olympic venue of 1960a suburb bigger than Florence. On the whole, modern buildings look pretentious and ephemeral, and they fall far short of tradition.
Through the '50s and the '60s there was an uncon¬trolled expansion of building along the main exit roads, but this has now long since been checked and many who can't find reasonably priced housing in Rome have moved to satel¬lite towns in the Alban and Sabine hills. Rome has once again its Gypsy encampments among the arches of the old aqueducts, espe¬cially on the eastern approaches, Via Casilina and the Cinecitta area. But it is decreed that the city itself beautiful and pleasing in spite of everything shall be confined within its present limits.
Labels: Rome
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