ROME IS NOW a sprawling metropolis of almost three million people. Today’s pilgrims arrive on high-speed trains and budget air flights. Romans take the motorway ring road to visit out of town shopping malls. The Colosseum, the Pyramid of Cestius and the Circus Maximus each has its own underground station. The Lateran has a superstore. The offices of Mussolini’s Ministry of Africa houses the UN Food and Agricultural Organization. The city’s mayor, Virginia Raggi (Rome’s first female ruler since Marozia in the tenth century), represents a populist party, the Five Star Movement.
A cosmopolitan city once more, Rome’s immigrants come from all over the world: from South America to Eastern Europe, and from the Philippines and Bangladesh and Eritrea. Some arrivals have made the perilous sea journey from Libya, just across the Mediterranean from Sicily. As it has been many times in the past, Rome is a city full of soldiers, who guard government buildings, embassies and piazzas against the latest perceived threat of terrorism. In February 2015, ISIS militants in Libya posted online their intention of descending on Rome.
Yet if Rome has changed greatly since it was liberated in 1944, the city centre has not. Mussolini’s unfinished projects – the Via della Conciliazione, the area around the Tomb Augustus and E-42 (now EUR) – were completed after the war (often by the same architects who began them, and who managed to leap from the sinking ship of Fascism just in time) and the Ara Pacis is enclosed by a new and controversial building by the American architect Richard Meier. Otherwise, though, hardly a brick has changed.
In consequence, though few tourists realize it, the Rome they see is very much Mussolini’s Rome. The main roads they find noisy include Mussolini’s boulevards that bulldozed their way through old neighbourhoods. If they look closely they will find Fascist insignia everywhere. Occasionally the fasces have been scratched out, leaving telltale outlines, but often even these remain intact and there are Fascist eagles and Anno Fascisti dates by the hundred. The facade of the former GIL youth organization centre in Trastevere still has its Fascist slogan: NECESSARIO VINCERE PIV NECESSARIO COMBATTERE. The Senior Judicial Advisory Office has a helmeted Mussolini above each window and in EUR a frieze still depicts Mussolini sitting proudly on a horse. By Foro Olimpico – formerly the Foro Mussolini – Roma and Lazio football fans make their way to the stadium beneath the 300-ton obelisk that still proclaims MUSSOLINI DUX.
Is this wrong? Perhaps a little. In Germany, Nazi insignia have been carefully removed. True, Mussolini’s regime was far less murderous than those of Hitler or Stalin, yet Italian Fascism is often treated lightly precisely because of this comparison. If it had existed in a calmer age its crimes would seem more shocking. A little disturbingly, in view of how badly Mussolini let his country down, some Italians feel nostalgia for the Fascist era, regarding it as a time when life, if not perfect, was easier, better organized and safer. As well as impracticable, it would be wrong for Fascist Rome to be erased, as it should be present in Rome’s historical layers, but there is a case for some of the more ostentatious monuments to be pulled down a peg or two. Perhaps they could be surrounded by another, even newer layer of Rome, in the form of a little disrespectful street art.
After two and a half millennia of floods, earthquakes, fires, plagues, sieges, attacks and political urban planning it is remarkable what has survived in Rome. Treasures have been preserved from the era of each sacking we have looked at. In the Capitoline Museum you can still see the foundations of the temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest that dominated the city’s skyline when Brennus and his Gauls attacked in 387 BC. In the Villa Giulia Etruscan Museum you can see the beautiful terracotta statue of Apollo that once decorated a temple in Rome’s first rival, Veii.
You can still see most of the Aurelian Wall that failed to keep out Alaric and his Visigoths in 410. You can cross the Bridge of Cestius by the Tiber Island that was built in Cicero’s time when the Roman Republic was fighting to survive. You can see classical temples, the remnants of the city’s great baths – of Caracalla, of Diocletian and Trajan – along with the ruins of Domitian’s Palace on the Palatine, Augustus’ tomb, and his exquisite Temple to Peace. And of course there is the greatest pagan Roman temple of them all: the Pantheon, which remains little changed from when it was built, almost nineteen centuries ago. Though the first St Peter’s is long gone, other churches from this early time still stand, including Santa Costanza, whose mosaics of rural scenes and staring blue faces catch the moment when paganism was melting away before Christianity.
You can see churches that were new when Totila’s Ostrogoths broke into the city, such as Santa Maria Maggiore and the exquisite Santa Sabina, which, after sixteen centuries, still has its original carved wooden doors. You can see the Asinarian Gate beside which Isaurians shimmied down a rope to let Totila’s army into Rome. A kilometre to the south-west you can walk through the Porta Latina above which Robert Guiscard’s soldiers slipped quietly into the city.
Of the Rome that existed in 1527 numerous medieval towers remain, though they can be hard to spot, as many have become merged with later blocks of housing. A few, like that of the Casa di Dante in Trastevere, remain much as they once were: standing on the corner of a medieval town house around a courtyard. Also in Trastevere you can find poky medieval homes with their telltale staircases on the outside. Near the Colosseum you can visit Paschal II’s magnificent revenge church, San Clemente, and if you descend into the deep excavations beneath you can see the remains of the church of his hated anti-pope predecessor, Clement III, along with – deeper again – a temple to Mithras and rooms from the town house of a wealthy classical Roman, who was probably also an early Christian. In the Castel Sant’Angelo you can visit the papal apartments where Benvenuto Cellini melted down Pope Clement’s golden tiaras. And of course there are Renaissance churches, palaces and, greatest of all, the Sistine Chapel.
Of the Rome that Garibaldi defended in 1849 it is hard to know where to begin as so much has survived. This is the Rome visitors are usually most conscious of with its fountains, its Renaissance and Baroque facades, its great parks, and of course St Peter’s and its square, encompassed by Bernini’s vast curved colonnades. Less often noticed are the images of the Madonna and clouds of cherubs that look down from almost every street corner, most of which appeared under the ultra-conservative popes of the early nineteenth century. Also overlooked are the sixteenth-century city walls that Garibaldi defended, whose damage during the French bombardment has been carefully repaired.
As we have just seen, almost every inch of Fascist Rome has survived. The Romans have even preserved mementos of the Nazi occupation. Look up at the walls of apartment blocks on Via Rasella and you will see small holes left by the shrapnel from the Gappisti bomb and by bullets fired up by the German soldiers. The city’s Gestapo headquarters on Via Tasso – where members of Rome’s resistance, Allied prisoners of war and some Jewish Romans were subjected to terrible tortures – has been preserved as a museum.
There are also less visible vestiges of the city’s long past, such as the Romans’ distinctive way of viewing the world. This is not always praiseworthy. After two thousand years of handouts Romans can be tough, fatalistic, and eager to catch whatever pennies chance sends their way. Some are downright corrupt. In 2014 a huge scandal was uncovered that became known as Mafia Capitale, in which city contracts were awarded to shell companies and hundreds of millions of euros of taxpayers’ money was stolen.
But the Romans are also very warm. For a city of three million people Rome can be an astonishingly friendly place that feels more like a village than a metropolis, and where everybody seems to know everybody else by their first name. Having been subjected to twenty centuries of imperial, papal, royal and Fascist self-aggrandizement Romans possess, as we have seen, a finely tuned sense of scepticism. Millennia of ups and downs have also given them their particular brand of cynical humour. One of its latest manifestations came in 2015 when ISIS Islamists in Libya announced their intention to descend on the city. Romans replied on Twitter with pictures of traffic jams, warning ISIS of transport strikes, or telling them, Let us know when you’ll get here and how many you’ll be so we can put the pasta on.1
Romans love grumbling and frequently complain that Rome is chaotic, that nothing works, and praise other places – almost anywhere will do – where they are certain everything is far better. Yet scratch a little and you will find that Romans are immensely proud of their city. As they should be.