Rome diary: Ever-changing Eternal City

"Visitors to Old Rome had recalled the Colosseum as a moonlit ruin in solitude; visitors to New Rome recalled it, if they recalled it at all, as a floodlit monument on a traffic island," author John Pemble writes in a book exploring how Rome went from a must-see centre of civilization to just another tourist city. I took this photo during my trip to Rome in April.

 To modern-day travellers, Rome is just another big international city. But in centuries past, it was the city, the highly anticipated, requisite finale of every Grand Tour of the continent.

“By the early 17^th century, no education was deemed complete that had not encompassed Rome, the central shrine and academy of civilization, and an assurance of rebirth both historical and metaphysical,” writes John Pemble in The Rome We Have Lost, which explores how and why all that changed.

Pemble quotes several people distraught about the changes Rome underwent over the years, including Italian journalist Camilla Caderna, who wrote in 1922: "An unbroken plateau of concrete, a disgusting, suffocating magma of middle-class villas and high-density building invades the valleys, covers the hills, submerges the Campagna, thanks to the exploitation of the last available square foot, almost as though it had been intended to make it impossible to say, 'this was Rome.'"

I never saw Rome in its earlier grandeur, and I wasn't completing a Grand Tour, but in a research trip there last month, I was enchanted by the cityscapes, impressed by the quality of the museums and moved by the effort to turn ancient ruins into something meaningful for visitors. Rome will always have a touch of magic because, where else can you say: "Julius Caesar probably stepped just where I'm walking now"?  But elbow-to-elbow tourists, chaotic streets, spilling garbage and heavy commercialism are constant reminders that you are, after all, just in one great big city. 

Earlier travellers had higher expectations of their long-anticipated trip to Rome, which perhaps hadn't yet turned into an unbroken plateau of concrete. Here are a few of my favourite comments from writers seeing Rome for the first time:

 “At last—for the first time—I live! It beats everything…. It makes Venice-Florence-Oxford-London—seem like cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning through the streets in a fever of enjoyment.” Novelist Henry James, 1869, in a letter to his brother William James. Aged 26, Henry had reached Rome at the end of a long European tour.

Charles Dickens, by contrast, finds only disappointment: "...when after another mile or two, the Eternal City appeared, at length, in the distance; it looked like -- I am half afraid to write the word -- like LONDON!!! There it lay, under a thick cloud, with innumerable towers, and steeples, and roofs of houses, rising up into the sky, and high above them all, one Dome."

 “There seemed to be long streets of commonplace shops and houses, such as are to be found in any European town; there were busy people, equipages, ordinary walkers to and fro; a multitude of chattering strangers. It was no more my Rome: the Rome of anybody’s fancy, man or boy; degraded and fallen and lying asleep in the sun among a heap of ruins: than the Place de la Concorde in Paris is. A cloudy sky, a dull cold rain, and muddy streets, I was prepared for, but not for this: and I confess to having gone to bed, that night, in a very indifferent humour and with a very considerably quenched enthusiasm.” Charles Dickens, January 1845, Pictures from Italy.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who spent much time in Rome between 1786 and 1788, writes this of his arrival: “All the dreams of my youth have come to life; the first engravings I remember – my  father hung views of Rome in the hall—I now see in reality, and everything I have known for so long through paintings, drawings, etchings, woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models is now assembled before me. Wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world; everything is just as I imagined it, yet everything is new.”  Von Goethe, Nov. 1, 1786, Italian Journey.

Rome probably has more statues and statuary per square inch than any other city in the world. This statue of Caesar reminded me of how a general celebrating a triumph in ancient days would be accompanied by a slave warning him not to get too carried away, as he was only a man after all. Here, a seagull performs a similar service..

Trajan's market would have been a bustling centre of activity in the second century AD. It's been carefully preserved and an impressive museum brings Emperor Trajan's world to life. 

Castel Sant'Angelo, reached by the pedestrian-only Sant'Angelo bridge across the Tiber river, was originally built to hold the remains of Emperor Hadrian. There are statues at intervals all the way across the bridge, making it into a  kind of hallway of  artwork. One evening as I crossed the bridge, a bride and groom were using it as a backdrop for their wedding pictures: see below.