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For well over a millennium, Rome controlled the destiny of all civilization known to Europe, but then it fell into dissolution and disrepair. Physically mutilated, economically paralyzed, politically senile, and militarily impotent by the late Middle Ages, Rome nevertheless remained a world power—as an idea. The force of Rome the lawgiver, teacher, and builder continued to radiate throughout Europe. Although the situation of the popes from the 6th to the 15th century was often
precarious, Rome knew glory as the fountainhead of Christianity and eventually won back its power and wealth and reestablished itself as a place of beauty, a source of learning, and a capital of the arts.Physical and human geographyThe landscapeLocation and layoutRome is located in central Italy on the Tiber (Tevere) River, 15 miles (24 kilometres) inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Rome's contemporary history reflects the long-standing tension between the spiritual power of the papacy and the political power of the Italian state capital. Rome was the last city-state to become part of a unified Italy, and it did so only under duress, after the invasion of Italian troops in 1870. The pope took refuge in the Vatican thereafter. Rome was made the capital of Italy (not without protests from Florence, which had been the capital since 1865), and the new state filled the city with ministries and barracks. Yet the Catholic church continued to reject Italian authority until a compromise was reached with Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1929, when both Italy and Vatican City recognized the sovereignty of the other. Mussolini, meanwhile, created a cult of personality that challenged that of the pope himself, and his Fascist Party tried to re-create the glories of Rome's imperial past through a massive public works program.
Since Mussolini's fall and the traumas of World War II, when the city was occupied by Germans, politics have continued to dominate Rome's agenda—although regionalism began, in the 1980s, to devolve some political power away from the capital. Lagging behind Milan and Turin economically, Rome has maintained a peripheral place within the Italian and European economies. It also has been plagued with perennial housing shortages and traffic congestion. However, the late 20th and early 21st centuries brought increased efforts to resolve Rome's infrastructural problems and to foster a Roman cultural revival.
The Roman countryside, the Campagna, was one of the last areas of central Italy to be settled in antiquity.The city
Rome was built on a defensible hilldominating
that dominated the last downstream, high-banked river crossing where traverse of the Tiber was facilitated by a midstream island.
The city of the seven hills, of treasures and tourists, and of fountains and cupolas lies mostly within the old city walls. The so-called Servian Wall, built almost certainly 12 years after the Gauls' destruction of Rome in 390 BC, enclosed most of the Esquiline and Caelian hills and all the other five. It was built into ramparts that dated from the early republic or even the late kingdom. Although Rome grew beyond the Servian defenses, no new wall was constructed until Aurelian began building in brick-faced concrete in AD 270. Almost 12 miles long and girdling about four square miles (10 square kilometres), this is the wall that Italian troops had to breach to claim their capital in 1870, and it is still largely intact.The ancient walled city of Rome embraces only 4 percent of the modern municipality's 582 square miles (1,507 square kilometres) and is the smallest of the city's 12 administrative zones. The walled centre is divided into 22 rioni ("districts"
This hill, Palatine Hill, was one of a group of hills, traditionally counted as seven, around which the ancient city grew. The other hills are the Capitoline, the Quirinal, the Viminal, the Esquiline, the Caelian, and the Aventine.
Rome's hot, dry summer days, with high temperatures often above 75 °F (24 °C), are frequently cooled in the afternoons by the ponentino, a west wind that rises from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city receives roughly 30 inches (750 mm) of precipitation annually; spring and autumn are the rainiest seasons. Frosts and occasional light snowfalls punctuate the otherwise mild winters, when high temperatures average just above 50 °F (10 °C). The tramontana, a stormy wind from the north, frequents the city in the winter.
The ancient centre of Rome is divided into 22 rioni (districts), the names of most dating fromclassical
Classical times, while surrounding it are 35 quartieri urbani ("urban sectors"
urban sectors) that began to be officially absorbedofficially
into the municipality after 1911. Within the city limits on the western and northwestern fringes are six large suburbi ("suburbs"), while beyond the municipal boundaries the commune of Rome about doubles the area of the city itself.About six miles
suburbs). About 6 miles (10 km) out from the centre ofRome
the city, a belt highway describes a huge circle around the capital, tying together the antiqueroads that led from everywhere to Rome: the Via Flaminia,
viae (roads)—among them the Via Appia (known in English as the Appian Way), the Via Aurelia,Via Appia
and the Via Flaminia—that led to ancient Rome. Masses of modern apartment buildings rise in the districts outside the centre,in which the small amount of
where, by contrast, contemporary construction isinconspicuous. Street frontages and show windows are often rebuilt to keep pace with the times, and the Romans succeed in harmonizing the new, the simply old, and the antique with a talent that they have demonstrated since the first extensions of the republican Forum were made under the emperors.
less conspicuous.
Indeed, ancient city walls still enclose much of the city centre, which is the area of Rome to which tourists flock. The so-called Servian Wall, named for the 6th-century-BC Roman king Servius Tullius but built almost certainly 12 years after the Gauls' destruction of Rome in 390 BC, enclosed most of the Esquiline and Caelian hills and all of the other five. It was built into ramparts that dated at least from the early Roman Republic. Although Rome grew beyond the Servian defenses, no new wall was constructed until the emperor Aurelian began building in brick-faced concrete in AD 270. Approximately 12.5 miles (20 km) long and girdling about 4 square miles (10 square km), the Aurelian Wall is still largely intact. Small as it is, the old city containssome 300 hotels and 300 pensioni
hundreds of hotels, more than 200 palazzi (palaces),20 churches, eight
several of the city's major parks, the residence of the Italian president, the houses ofParliament
parliament, offices ofcity
local and national government, and the great historical monuments, in addition to thousands of offices,workshops,
restaurants, and bars.It is there that the millions of tourists seem to descend annually.
Rome's hot, dry summer days, with temperatures often above 75° F (24° C), are frequently cooled in the afternoons by the ponentino, a west wind that rises from the Tyrrhenian Sea 15 miles away. The city receives about 33 inches (840 millimetres) of precipitation annually; spring and autumn are the rainiest seasons. Frosts and occasional light snowfalls punctuate the otherwise mild winters, when temperatures average about 45° F (7° C). The tramontana, a stormy wind from the north, frequents the city in the winter.
Many of the treasures of Rome no longer can be seen where they were placed originally, many can be seen only in other cities of the world, and many others still in Rome represent the spoils of conquest brought to the city from around the ancient world or the cannibalizing of one age or of one faith upon the creations of an earlier one. Rome was sacked first by the Gauls (see Celts) in 390 BC and subsequently by the Visigoths in AD 410, the Vandals in 455, the Normans in 1084, and troops of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V in 1527. Muslims laid it under siege in 846. The Great Fire of Rome—Nero's fire—occurred in AD 64, and fires and earthquakes ravaged individual buildings or whole areas fairly often over the millennia. But, of all these scourges, it was the stripping of the structures of antiquity for building materials, especially from the 9th century through the 16th, that destroyed more of Classical Rome than any other force. The heritage of the past that survives in Rome is nevertheless unsurpassed in any city of the West.Both
The main street in central Rome is the Via del Corso, an important thoroughfare since classical Classical times, when it was the Via Flaminia, the road to the Adriatic. Its present name comes from the horseraces horse races (corse) that were part of the Roman carnival celebrations. From the foot of the Capitoline Hill, the Corso runs to the Piazza del Popolo and through a gate in the city wall, the Porta del Popolo, there to resume its ancient name. It
The Corso begins spectacularly with the Vittoriano (1911), the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, first king of united Italy, constructed in Brescian marble to coincide with the 50th anniversary of unification. The nation's unknown soldier was interred there after World War I. A Neo-Baroque marble mountain, it is the whitest, biggest, tallest,
and possibly
most pompous of Rome's major monuments. Locals refer to it as the "wedding cake" or the "typewriter." Useful as well as ornamental, it contains a museum of the 19th-century cultural revival.
The Vittoriano was bombed by neofascist terrorists in December 1969 and was immediately closed to the public; it reopened in 2001.
Among the smart shops along the Corso are
, and the column of Marcus Aurelius.
San Marco was the first of Rome's parish churches to be built (c. AD 336) on the plan of a
Classical basilica (a public hall in pre-Christian Rome). The present church, third on the site, dates from the 9th century and was restored in the 15th by the Venetian pope Paul II, who also built a new papal residence, the Palazzo
Venezia ("Venetian Palace"), near the church. Thereafter, the basilica's priest was always a Venetian cardinal, sharing the palace with the Venetian embassy. Mussolini had his headquarters
in the Palazzo Venezia and harangued the crowds from the balcony from which Paul II had cheered the carnival races and given his papal benediction. The palace is now
an art museum and contains the Biblioteca dell'Istituto Nazionale d'Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte (Library of the National Institute of Archaeology and Art History).
While her son Napoleon languished on St. Helena,
Letizia Buonaparte languished in the Palazzo Bonaparte, now Palazzo Misciatelli. Across the way is the Palazzo Salviati, built by the
duc de Nevers in the 17th century
and owned in the 19th by Louis Bonaparte. The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is a late 15th-century building behind a 1734 facade.
It contains an art gallery, in which there are
works by Diego Velázquez, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and
as well as a Gian Lorenzo Bernini bust of the family pope, Innocent X. Behind
San Marcello, the Baroque reworking of a church founded in the 4th century, is the mid-17th-century Palazzo Ballestra, in which Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scotland (Charles Edward, the Young Pretender) was born in 1720 and to which he returned in 1788 to die.
The column of Marcus Aurelius, with reliefs showing his victory over Danubian tribes, was preserved from the assorted Christian looters of Rome because it was the property of a religious order. In the square around the column, the Piazza Colonna, are the Palazzo Chigi (1562), for many years the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now the official residence of the prime minister, and the Palazzo Wedekind. Although built in the 19th century, the Wedekind
is not without its plundered antique columns.
The Corso emerges onto the splendid oval Piazza del Popolo ("People's Square"), which is monumental without being intimidating
. Over a period of 300 years, it was constructed as the ceremonial entryway to Rome, and, although its elements are diverse in style and in age (13th century BC–19th century AD), a remarkable harmony prevails. In 1561 the Porta del Popolo, the medieval gate in the city wall, was rebuilt. Ninety-four years later its inner face was redone by Bernini for the grand entrance of Queen Christina, who had abandoned the Protestant throne of Sweden for the
hospitality of Catholic Rome. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V punctuated the
piazza's centre with an obelisk (13th century BC) brought by the emperor Augustus from Heliopolis in Egypt to the Circus Maximus.
The church next to the gate,
Santa Maria del Popolo, which stood for centuries before the piazza existed and gives its name to the area, was founded in 1227 to replace a 1099 chapel built over what was presumed to be the emperor Nero's tomb. It was replaced in 1472–77 by the present-day church, further disguised on the piazza frontage by a Neoclassical facade. The interior is fraught with the works of great Renaissance and Baroque artists. The main chapel has tombs by Andrea Sansovino and frescoes by Pinturicchio. In the Cerasi Chapel are Caravaggio's
The Conversion of St.
Paul and
The Crucifixion of St. Peter.
The Chigi Chapel, unique for the early 16th century in being a miniature church, was designed by Raphael. Bernini sculpted two of the four prophets in the corners.
At the opposite end of the piazza stand "twin" churches (1662) framing the entrance to three streets. The streets were there first, so the churches were ingeniously squeezed into awkward, different-sized plots between them.
Santa Maria in Montesanto, on the east, has an oval plan and dome, while
Santa Maria dei Miracoli, on the narrower plot toward the Tiber on the west, has a round dome. Carlo Rainaldi, the architect, turned both facades slightly inward to frame the welcoming parades that would proceed up the Corso between the two churches. One of the streets, the Via del Babuino, was one of many built by Sixtus V
Since lack of water had driven residents off the high ground, he restored the aqueduct of Alexander Severus, the Aqua Alexandrina, and gave it his own first name, Aqua Felice. He laid out new roads, the basis for the modern street plan of Rome. He also built the Vatican Library, saw to the completion of St. Peter's dome, rebuilt the papal palaces of the Vatican, the Quirinal, and S. Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran), refurbishing the squares in front of the last two, and built a new square at Sta. Maria Maggiore. He reerected four obelisks found among the ruins and restored a great number of fountains, dearly beloved of the Romans.An obelisk in the Piazza di Spagna is not his work but was discovered in the piazza in Campo Marzio in 1778 and
Running roughly southeast from the Piazza del Popolo, the Via del Babuino leads to the Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Square). An obelisk there was erected in 1857 to commemorate the 1854 promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The fountain there, the Barcaccia ("Scow"), is fed by the
Acqua Vergine,
an aqueduct of 19 BC, which escaped Gothic destruction because it was mainly underground and which was repaired in 1447. When the fountain was planned in the early 1600s by Bernini (believed to be Pietro, though some have attributed the work to his son, Gian Lorenzo), there was insufficient water pressure for spouting jets, so the shape of the Barcaccia
was conceived
: an ancient marble boat foundering endearingly in its marble bath.
The most striking architectural element in the piazza—indeed, one of the most striking in all of Rome—is the renowned Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti
, known as the Spanish Steps
(or Stairs). The staircase is a rare case of the failure of French cultural propaganda
: although they are called the Spanish Steps—the Spanish Embassy moved onto the square in the 17th century—they are unequivocally French. First suggested by the French about the time the Spanish Embassy was being installed, the idea was approved by papal authorities 100 years later and paid for with a legacy from a French diplomat. The stairs ascend to the French-built church and convent of Trinità dei Monti, begun in 1495 with a gift from the visiting French king Charles VIII and restored by Louis XVIII.
The English novelist Charles Dickens described the steps as thronged with unengaged "artist's models" in regional costume
; they are still crowded with loiterers in distinctive dress
from all over the world.
Indeed, since the end of the 16th century
the Piazza di Spagna
has been a stopping place for tourists as well as a destination for artists and writers. Young lords on the Grand Tour of Europe left their heavy touring coaches for refitting in a side street still called Via delle Carozze (
"Carriage Street"). The
English poet John Keats died in
The knowledge that Rome is eternal, that nothing lasts but nothing changes, gives rise to the local watchword, pazienza ("patience"). In this overcrowded, understaffed city, pazienza is demonstrated everywhere, every day. Except for brief, lowering, summer-lightning flashes of an underlying volatility, the Roman is apt to be cheery and courteous, a little less operatic in his reactions than many other Italians.
In Rome, as in the rest of Italy, all children are godsends and are demonstrably, publicly loved, patted, petted, cuddled, and kissed. Unmonied families make sacrifices to provide the biggest possible dolls and the flashiest possible tricycles. This continues far into life, with the man playing the role of adored but respectful princeling to his queen mother and imperious but indulgent king to his wife and children. In society outside the family the important thing is bella figura, or keeping face. Thus the dottore (the only degree the university of Rome gives is the doctorate) salutes the street sweeper as capo ("chief"), a gesture of respect called for by the uniform.
For 1,000 years, to be a citizen of Rome was to hold the keys to the world, to live in safety, pride, and relative comfort. Today there is still considerable pride in being a Romano di Roma, a Roman Roman. Among such are the "black nobility," families with papal titles who form a society within high society, shunning publicity and not given to great intimacy with the "white nobility," whose titles were conferred by mere temporal rulers.
a house on the piazza that is now a museum. A number of artists—those who have not been shouldered out by galleries and ultra-modish shops—still retain studios among the walled gardens of the nearby Via Margutta.
A bit farther east, both Romans and visitors alike continue to congregate at the café tables ranged on the plane-tree-shaded sidewalks of the Via Vittorio Veneto (Via Veneto), a street of grand hotels,
offices, and government buildings. Laid out in 1887
between the Villa Borghese gardens (to the north) and the Piazza Barberini (to the south), it runs downhill in a dogleg shape. During the 15 or so years of peak prosperity in Italian filmmaking, about 1950–65, international film celebrities abounded
At the same hour, less glittering Romans can be found in the Piazza Navona, on the flat plain in the bend of the Tiber that was the Campus Martius of classical times. The piazza retains the shape and some of the remains of Domitian's circus (AD 81–89), which remained intact until at least 1450. This is far more typical of central Rome than the Via Veneto, a mere centenarian and therefore a new street. Mussolini's regime cut some new routes through the city, mainly to render historic sites more accessible, but modern streets are rare in the historic centre.
The inhabitants who consider themselves the most nobly Roman of them all are the people of Trastevere (Across the Tiber). They have been in their neighbourhood for a very long time, although they are of neither pure nor primordial stock. Trastevere was the quarter for sailors and foreigners, whereas the founding fathers eastward across the river were soldiers and farmers. In the Middle Ages a number of palaces were the homes of powerful families, and palaces continued to be built during the Renaissance (the Palazzo Farnesina) and even in the 18th century (the Palazzo Corsini). Some authorities—not all from Trastevere—claim Sta. Maria in Trastevere as the oldest church in Rome, pointing out that under the empire the district was the home of Orientals with alien religions, among them a goodly number of Jews proselytized by SS. Peter and Paul. It is said that Alexander Severus (reigned 222–235) permitted Christians to foregather at this site under the leadership of Pope St. Calixtus I, and it is recorded that Pope St. Julius I either raised or rebuilt a church there in 341–352. Today's church is largely 12th-century Romanesque, with a beguiling mosaic facade.
Over the millennia the area has lost little of its vigour. The people have maintained the earthiest of Roman accents, and their taverns have remained generally faithful to simple fare, robust wine, and the unison bawling of irreverent songs. One of Rome's few secular statues—a top-hatted marble effigy of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, a 19th-century satirical dialect poet—stands near the Ponte (Bridge) Garibaldi.
Most of the streets are still narrow and without sidewalks, appearing only on the most detailed maps and baffling taxi drivers who do not live there. Every 100 paces or so the haphazard cobbled lanes open upon some surprising, small plaza with a church, a palace, a cloister, or a group of cafés.
Rome cannot be called an industrial city, although it has a substantial amount of medium and light industries. Factories are located mostly in the northwestern part of the city. The chief industries include engineering, electronics, chemicals, printing, clothing, and food processing. The major employers are the building, tourism, and motion-picture industries, the latter centred at Cinecittà (Cinema City), a few miles outside of Rome, and the government.
Traffic becomes a typical Roman dilemma because much of the municipal revenue is derived from the more than 1,000,000 automobiles and motor scooters that help render city life difficult. The average noise during waking hours is at or above the level that gradually induces deafness, whereas the speed of motor traffic, in spite of the audacity and acuity of the drivers, is four miles per hour.
In 45 BC Julius Caesar forbade any wagon to be led or driven during the daytime within the continuous built-up area of Rome. Unfortunately, the police force required for enforcement was seriously under strength so that generally during the daytime almost no traffic police were on duty. "Where can you find lodgings that give you a chance of sleep?" a celebrated writer demanded. "The roar of the wheeled traffic in the City's narrow, winding streets and the shouts of abuse . . . ," thus wrote Juvenal, who lived in Rome in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD. Beginning in 1973, both to reduce congestion and noise and air pollution, private vehicles were banned from parts of the city's ancient section.
Deterioration of the city's monuments has been accelerated by traffic fumes and vibration, yet the monuments themselves have impeded the one undertaking that could reduce road traffic: subway construction. Mussolini decreed the building of a subway from Rome's central railway station, the Stazione Termini, and by 1955 it was in operation along a seven-mile southwestern route via the Colosseum and the Porta S. Paolo to the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR), the exhibition grounds outside the city. (This line, called Line B, now extends to Ostia.)
In 1959 a comprehensive metropolitan subway system was approved. After five years of tunnelling through the bureaucracy, the first line of the system began tunnelling a route some 14 miles long under the streets. It was diverted to protect monuments, halted when it unearthed archaeological remains, and, at long last, resumed again. The second line (Line A) of the system, which was completed in 1980, runs from the district just north of St. Peter's via the Termini to Cinecittà, southeast of the city. Additional lines and extensions are to be constructed.
Rome is served by two international airports, the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, on the coast 15 miles southwest of the city, and the Ciampino Airport, about seven miles southeast.
Rome is governed by an elected council of 80 members. A mayor and an executive council of 14 members (with four reserves) are selected from among the council members. The council is responsible for such amenities as police protection, health services, transportation, and certain aspects of public assistance.
Rome is one of the most beautiful and exciting capitals in the Western world. According to local authorities, it is also the filthiest, noisiest, and most heavily indebted city in Italy.
The city that invented both concrete and the apartment house (insula) suffers a perennial housing shortage. The housing shortage persists because of the incessant arrival of job-seeking migrants from all over Italy but mostly from the impoverished south. All the plans, powers, agencies, and even state building funds are available, but three things impede construction: first, land cannot be built upon until the municipality supplies public services and schools (the city is so short of school space that schools sometimes operate classes in three successive shifts for 12 straight hours a day); second, Roman politics are more Byzantine—more labyrinthine and convoluted—than a 5th-century mosaic; third, the notorious glacier-slow Roman bureaucracy can, by paper shuffling alone, delay an approved project up to five years. Life in Rome remains an endless paper chase through the obscure corridors of petty authority.
The city's main institution of higher education is the University of Rome (founded 1303), whose buildings, the Città Universitaria, are located east of the Stazione Termini.
Many of the treasures of Rome no longer can be seen where they were placed originally, many can be seen only in other cities of the world, while many others still in Rome represent the spoils of conquest brought to the city from around the ancient world or the cannibalizing of one age or of one faith upon the creations of an earlier one. Rome was sacked first by the Gauls in 390 BC and subsequently by the Visigoths in AD 410, the Vandals in 445, the Normans in 1084, and Spanish troops in 1527. Muslims laid it under siege in 846. The Great Fire of Rome—Nero's fire—occurred in AD 64, and fires and earthquakes ravaged individual buildings or whole areas fairly often over the millennia. But, of all these scourges, it was the stripping of the structures of antiquity for building materials, especially from the 9th century through the 16th, that destroyed more of Classical Rome than any other force. The heritage of the past that survives in Rome is nevertheless unsurpassed in any city of the West, and it is so ubiquitous that its highlights must be comprehended in terms both of geography and of type.
. Although it has lost much of the glitter of its heyday—evocatively portrayed by Federico Fellini in his film La dolce vita (1960; "The Sweet Life")—the street remains a fashionable thoroughfare, animated until long after midnight.
The origins of Rome, as of all ancient cities, are wrapped in fable. The Roman fable is of Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars, abandoned on the flooding Tiber and deposited by the receding waters at the foot of the Palatine. Suckled by a she-wolf, they were reared by a shepherd and grew up to found Rome
. (The bronze statue of the maternally ferocious wolf
, now in the city's Capitoline Museums, is one of the
best-known works among the thousands of masterpieces in Rome.
) The Lupercal, the supposed cave of the she-wolf, was maintained as a shrine at least until the fall of the empire
. On the same side of the Palatine,
"Romulus's House," a timber-framed circular hut covered in clay-plastered wickerwork, also was kept in constant repair in ancient times. Modern excavations have revealed the emplacement of just such Iron Age huts from the period (8th–7th century BC) given in the fable for the founding of Rome. In addition, in 2007 a vaulted sanctuary thought to be the long-lost Lupercal was discovered 52 feet (16 metres) below the surface of the Palatine.
On this hill the columns of lost palaces rise in uncompromised beauty from fields of wildflowers and the dust of history.
This is the
landscape—Classical, with figures—that has stirred romantics since it was first limned by 17th-century etchers and sketchers. Before the emperors departed, virtually the entire hill was one vast palace.
By the 3rd century BC the Palatine was a superior residential district
. Rome's first emperor, Augustus, was born there in 63 BC and continued to live there after he became emperor. His private dwelling, built about 50 BC and never seriously modified, still stands.
It is known as the House of Livia, for his widow,
and has small, graceful rooms decorated with paintings. Other private houses, now excavated and visible, were incorporated into the foundations of the spreading imperial structures, which eventually projected down into the Forum on one side and onto the Circus Maximus on the other. The
emperor Tiberius built a palace to which Nero, Caligula, Trajan, Hadrian, and Septimius Severus made
additions. The biggest and richest structure of all was created for Domitian (reigned AD 81–96), whose architect achieved feats of construction engineering not seen before in Rome. Parts of the lavish structure—the richly marbled, centrally heated dining hall of which is among the chambers visible today—were occupied by popes after there were no more emperors, and then the hill was abandoned.
After some six centuries the great Roman families returned to the Palatine, planting 16th-century pleasure gardens and pavilions over past glories. A whole set of rooms from the private wing of Domitian's palace was preserved by incorporation into the Villa Mattei. Atop
Tiberius's palace the Farnese family built two aviaries and a garden house and laid out one of Europe's first botanical gardens—some parts of which have escaped archaeological excavation.
The Palazzo Senatorio incorporates remains of the facade of the Tabularium, a state-records office constructed in 78 BC and one of the first buildings to use concrete vaulting and employ the arch with the Classical architectural orders. After a popular uprising in 1143, a palace was built on the site for the revived 56-member Senate, supposedly elected by the people but by 1358 a body of one appointed by the pope; when it was rebuilt to Michelangelo's design, it was called the Palazzo Senatorio (Senate Palace).
The palace of the municipal councillors, the conservatori, is on the south side of the square opposite the Palazzo del Museo Capitolino (Capitoline Palace), which, as a papal collection of Classical works offered back to the citizens of Rome by Sixtus IV in 1471, became the first public museum of sculpture in the Western world. Now occupying both the Capitoline Palace and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, as well as a later private palace, the museum contains only objects found in Rome, including the famed Romulus and Remus wolf, the "Capitoline Venus," the "Dying Gaul," and the "Boy with Thorn," as well as the host of portrait busts that can, in imagination, repeople the Forum just below.The hill was the fortress and asylum of Romulus'
Capitoline Hill (Italian: Campidoglio) was the fortress and asylum of Romulus's Rome. The northern peak was the site of the Temple of Juno Moneta (the word money derives from the temple's function as the early mint) and the citadel emplacements now occupied by the
Vittoriano monument and the church of
Santa Maria d'Aracoeli. The southern crest, sacred to Jupiter, became
in 509 BC
the site of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the largest temple in central Italy. The tufa platform on which it was built, now exposed behind and beneath the Palazzo dei Conservatori, measured 203 by 174 feet (62 by 53 metres), probably with three rows of six columns across each facade and six columns and a pilaster on either flank. The first temple, of stuccoed volcanic stone quarried at the foot of the hill, had a timber roof faced with brightly painted terra-cottas. Three times it burned and was rebuilt, always of richer materials. The temple that Domitian built was marble with gilded roof tiles and gold-plated doors. It was filled with loot by victorious generals who came robed in purple to lay their laurel crowns before Jupiter after riding in triumph through the Forum. The
antique pavings of
the Clivus Capitolinus, the road leading up the hill from the Forum, survive today. In this centre of divine guidance, the Roman Senate held its first meeting every year.
Centuries later, in 1341, the Italian poet Petrarch was crowned with laurel among the ruins of
this capitol.
The church of
Santa Maria d'Aracoeli, built before the 6th century
and remade in its present form in the 13th, is lined with columns rifled from Classical buildings. It is the home of "Il Bambino," a
wooden statue (originally a 15th-century statue; now a copy) of the Christ Child, who is called upon to save desperately ill children.
The Capitoline today, still the seat of Roman government, is little changed from the 16th-century design conceived of by Michelangelo—one of the earliest examples of modern town planning. The resulting Piazza del Campidoglio, completed after Michelangelo's death, is framed by three palaces: the Palazzo Senatorio, the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and the Palazzo Nuovo (opposite and identical to the older Palazzo dei Conservatori). The centrepiece of the piazza is a replica of a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
The Palazzo Senatorio ("Senate Palace") incorporates remains of the facade of the Tabularium, a state records office constructed in 78 BC and one of the first buildings to use concrete vaulting and employ the arch with the Classical architectural orders. After a popular uprising in AD 1143, a palace was built on the site for the revived 56-member Senate, supposedly elected by the people but by 1358 a body of one appointed by the pope; when it was rebuilt to Michelangelo's design, it gained its present name.
The Palazzo dei Conservatori ("Palace of the Conservators"), on the south side of the square, was the initial site of a papal collection of Classical works offered back to the citizens of Rome by Sixtus IV in 1471. Following its completion in the 17th century, the Palazzo Nuovo ("New Palace"; later also called the Palazzo del Museo Capitolino [Capitoline Palace]) housed a portion of the large collection. In 1734 it was opened to the public as a museum. Now occupying both the Palazzo Nuovo and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, as well as a later private palace (Caffarelli-Clementino), the Musei Capitolini (Capitoline Museums) contain only objects found in Rome, including the famed bronze she-wolf, the Capitoline Venus, and the Dying Gaul, as well as a host of portrait busts that can, in imagination, repeople the Forum just below.
Though considerably built over with modern houses and
traveled by modern bus lines, the Aventine still bespeaks a Rome of the past, if not the Classical past. The repeated fires that swept the city destroyed all the
buildings of the era of the republic, and the Temple of Diana remains only as a street name. Under the 4th-century church of
Santa Prisca is one of the best-preserved
Mithraic basilicas in the city. The basilica of
Santa Sabina, little altered since the 5th century, is lined with 24 magnificent matching Corinthian columns rescued out of Christian charity from an abandoned pagan temple or palace. The Parco Savello, a small public park, was the walled area of the Savello family fortress, one of 12 that ringed the city in medieval times.
A romantic gem is the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta ("Knights of Malta Square"), designed in the late 1700s by Giambattista Piranesi, an engraver with the heart of a poet and the eye of an engineer. To the right of this obelisked and trophied square, set about with cypresses, is the
residence of the grand master of the Knights of Malta
(Hospitallers). The order's headquarters were moved permanently to Rome in 1834.
The Caelian includes the public park of Villa Celimontana
and a number of churches that date from the 4th to the 9th century. In the medieval confines of the only fortified abbey left in Rome stands
Santi Quattro Coronati, today sheltering nuns
. The basilica of
Santi Giovanni e Paolo, from the 5th century, stands in a piazza that has few buildings later than the Middle Ages. Alongside the church are the remains of the platform of the Temple of Claudius, dismantled partly
by Nero, completely by Vespasian. The round church of
San Stefano Rotondo (460–483) may have been
modeled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
The Hospital of St. John was founded in the Middle Ages as a dependence of
the church of San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran), just off the hill, and maintains its Romanesque gateway. The Hospital of St. Thomas, established at the same period, has disappeared save for its mosaic gateway, signed by
Cosmate, of the Cosmati school of carvers and decorators, and by his father, Jacobus. Nearby stands the Arch of Dolabella (AD 10), and not far away are the ruins of Nero's extension of the Claudian aqueduct. Also on the hill is the extensive Military Hospital of Celio.
ruins of the Baths of Caracalla (c. 206–216), the public baths of the emperor Caracalla, are found on the river flats behind the Caelian Hill. Among the towering remains set in a large park, the caldarium (steam room) is now used for summer opera performances. Much of the famed Farnese family collection of marbles was stripped from these baths.
Ruins of a portion of the emperor Nero's Golden House are found on the Esquiline, although the palace once occupied the Palatine and the Caelian hills as well. After the fire of AD 64 had destroyed so much of the city, Nero undertook to rebuild
more than 200 acres (81 hectares)
of it as a palace for himself: seawater and sulfur water were piped into its baths; flowers were sprinkled down through its fretted ivory ceilings; and the facade was covered in gold, from which the name Domus Aurea
(Golden House) derived. The expropriation so enraged the citizens that his successors hastened to efface all trace of Nero's incredible palace: the ornamental artificial lake was drained, and on its bed the Colosseum was erected for free entertainment; Trajan built magnificent baths—also with free admission—atop the domestic wing of the Golden House; and Domitian converted the portico on the edge of the Forum into Rome's smartest shopping street. The obliterators were aided by the fire of AD 104.
Less than 70 years after the Golden House had been started, nothing was left of it but a
huge gilded statue of Nero
, later destroyed by one of the early popes. The removal of the Golden House was so complete that later Romans could not remember where
it had stood. When the domestic wing of the palace was discovered under the remains of Trajan's Baths in the 15th century, the rooms painted in the Pompeiian style were thought at first to be decorated grottoes. Some years later, when the painter Raphael and his friends were let down on ropes to look, the style they imitated in decorating the Vatican loggias was called grottesche
The Colosseum that replaced Nero's lake is more correctly called the Flavian Amphitheatre. It was begun by Vespasian and inaugurated by Titus in AD 80. The oval stadium measures one-third of a mile around, with external dimensions of 615 by 415 feet. The 160-foot facade has three superimposed series of 80 arches and an attic story. The attached columns follow the order applied on the Theatre of Marcellus (13 BC): sturdy, unadorned Doric on the ground floor, more elegant Ionic next, and luxuriant Corinthian on top. The attic story bore corbels supporting masts from which royal sailors manipulated awnings to protect the 50,000 seats from the sun during the gladiatorial contests, combats with wild animals, sham battles, and, when the arena was flooded, naval displays. The main structural framework and facade are travertine, the secondary walls of volcanic tufa, the inner bowl and the arcade vaults of concrete. Until Pius VIII (reigned 1829–30) began conserving what was left, it had been a convenient quarry for 1,000 years.
The nearby Arch of Constantine was erected hastily in 315 to celebrate a victory two years earlier. Almost all the sculpture on this splendid arch was snatched from earlier monuments: a battle frieze from the Forum of Trajan, a series of Hadrianic roundels, and eight panels from a Marcus Aurelius monument.Not all the rooms of the Golden House on the Oppio have been excavated. Above them spread the remains of Trajan's Baths, theatrical decorations for the public garden, Parco di Traiano. They
(see also grotesque).
Trajan's Baths served as models for the
Baths of Caracalla
and Diocletian
, which
in turn
served as a pattern for the
basilica built by Maxentius. The bath building that housed the hot, warm, cold, and exercise rooms and the swimming pool was a huge
rectangular concrete structure lined with marble. It was surrounded by a garden enclosed in an outer rectangle of libraries, lecture halls, art galleries, and other facilities of a big community centre.
Caracalla's baths on the river flats behind the Caelian Hill covered more than six acres, part of which is occupied today by the modern glass-fronted buildings of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Among the towering remains set in a large park, the caldarium (steamroom) is now used for summer opera performances. Much of the famed Farnese collection of marbles was stripped from these baths.
The Baths of Diocletian are over the brow of the Viminal, and some idea of their size (130,000 square yards, or 110,000 square metres, for the main bath block) can be gained from the fact that the church of S. Bernardo was built into one of the chambers some 500 feet west of the central hall of the 92-foot-high frigidarium ("cold room"), into which Michelangelo built the cloister church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli in 1561.
The first seven halls of the Museo Nazionale Romano, also called the Museo delle Terme, are rooms of the frigidarium block. This matchless collection of antiquities includes wall paintings from villas, mosaics, sarcophagi, and sculptures, including the famous Ludovisi throne (Greek, 5th century BC), the Niobid from the Gardens of Sallust where the Via Veneto wends today, and the bronze "Pugilist" (2nd century BC), discovered in 1884 in a building site on the Quirinal.
Located between the Esquiline and the Palatine, the Basilica of Maxentius (also named after Constantine I, who completed it after dispatching Maxentius) was started about 311. This massive hall of justice and commerce was
covered by three groin vaults with three deeply coffered tunnel-vaulted bays on either side.
It was probably ruined by the earthquake of 847
and was also mined for its materials. One of the great Corinthian columns stands obelisk-like before
the Santa Maria Maggiore church on the Esquiline. The head of
a colossal statue of Constantine that once stood in the basilica now reposes in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.
Like much of the Esquiline, the adjacent Viminal and Quirinal hills lie in the heart of modern Rome. Heavily built upon and sclerotic with traffic, the former seems almost flattened under the Ministry of the Interior. The ancient Baths of Diocletian (c. 298–306) are northeast of the Viminal. Some idea of their size (130,
000 square yards [110,000 square metres] for the main bath block) can be gained from the fact that the church of San Bernardo was built into one of the chambers some 500 feet (150 metres) west of the central hall of the frigidarium (cold room), into which Michelangelo built the cloister church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in 1561. A portion of the Museo Nazionale Romano (National Museum of Rome) is housed in the baths complex. This matchless collection of antiquities includes wall paintings from villas, mosaics, sarcophagi, and sculptures.
The Quirinal, pierced by a modern traffic tunnel, has been a distinguished address since Pomponius Atticus, recipient of the statesman Cicero's letters, was a resident in the 1st century BC. Starting with the Crescentii, who planted the family fortress there in the Middle Ages, powerful Roman families built their homes in this location. The Palazzo Colonna, at the foot of the hill near the Via del Corso, is an art gallery open to the public;
its gardens, climbing the slope to the Piazza Quirinale, contain remnants of Caracalla's Temple of
Serapis. The piazza has been graced since antiquity with two large statues of men with rearing horses,
The Horse Tamers, or Castor and Pollux.
Closed on three sides by palaces, the piazza opens on the fourth to a splendid view over the Tiber.
The Palazzo del Quirinale (Quirinal Palace), built by Pope Gregory
XIII in 1574 as a summer palace away from the heat and malaria of the Vatican, was enlarged and embellished over the next 200 years by a succession of noted architects. The palace, with many extensions and wings, is huge, and its garden is five times as big as the building. From 1550 to 1870, the Quirinal rather than the Vatican was the official papal residence. In 1870 it became the royal palace of the new Kingdom of Italy and in 1948
the presidential palace. Both monarchs and presidents, however, have preferred to inhabit the homier
palazzetto ("little palace") at the far end.
The handsome buildings opposite are the stables (1730–40), built on the site of the Crescentii 10th-century stronghold. This zone is now used as a site for major art exhibitions. The Palazzo della Consulta (1734)
, erected for part of the papal administration, became the home of the Italian Constitutional Court in the 1950s. The Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, built by a cardinal of the Borghese
family in 1603, is still a private house.
The Palazzo Barberini farther up the
Quirinal, constructed during 1629–33 on the site of the old Palazzo Sforza, was occupied by the Barberini family until 1949. Part of the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica (National Gallery of Ancient Art) is housed here, the rest across the river in the Palazzo Corsini in the Trastevere rione (district). The
pictures, most of them works by celebrated masters, were contributed by distinguished families, including the
Barberini. Architecturally, the
Palazzo Barberini is important
because it marks a departure from the heavy-set four-square town houses of the early and High Renaissance. In the Rome region, only country villas had
been built on so open a plan, with two wings coming forward from an open, arcaded facade. Further, it pioneered the Baroque style in domestic architecture.
Carlo Maderno, who put the facade on St. Peter's Basilica, made the plans for the Palazzo Barberini, which were carried out after his death by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, assisted by Francesco Borromini. Each of these two rivals has a church just around the corner. After 20 years of apprenticeship, Borromini was given his first chance to do his own building. It was a church at an impossibly tiny site at the crossroads of
Quattro Fontane (
"Four Fountains," one of which is built into a niche in the church wall), but
his creation, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, was a triumph. To his revolutionary solutions
for site problems, for which he employed a brilliant variation on the oval, Borromini added a facade in 1667, the year he died, which responded to the waves of motion generated by the spatially complex interior.
His work created a sensation, and
his ideas were seized upon by Baroque artists, especially from other
countries. Bernini's
Sant'Andrea al Quirinale is also small, but it took 12 years to build (1658–70), late in his career. An oval building with the naves sculpted into the outer wall, it enlarges on concepts advanced by Michelangelo. Bernini's use of coloured marbles and shrewd lighting effects gives the small structure extra dimension. Nearby is the Teatro dell'Opera (Opera House), built in 1880 by Achille Sfondrini. It was acquired by the state in 1926 and is Rome's most important lyric theatre.
Behind the
Piazza del Popolo
is the Pincio
(Pincian Hill). During the Roman Empire the Pincio was covered with villas and gardens, but it was made into a public park only in the 19th century.
Toward sunset many Romans arrive to
stroll along the Pincio promenade.
On the hill is the Villa Borghese, which the Italian government purchased, along with its contents and grounds, at the turn of the 20th century. The grounds are now an extensive park containing numerous museums, academies, monuments, natural features, and other attractions. In the villa itself, the Galleria Borghese's collection features several Caravaggios, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, and Antonio Canova's Neoclassical nude statue of Pauline Bonaparte, for a time a Borghese princess, as Venus Victrix.
The 1544 Villa Medici was bought by Napoleon in 1801 to house the Accademia di Francia (French Academy), which is still in occupation. This academy, founded in 1666, is the oldest of many national academies established from the 17th to the 19th century to give architects, artists, writers, and musicians the opportunity to study the vast textbook that is the city itself and to use its museums and libraries. The Villa Giulia
was a typical mid-16th-century Roman suburban villa, conceived not as a dwelling but as a place for repose and entertainment during the afternoon and early evening. It houses the Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia (Villa Giulia National Museum), which has a collection of Etruscan art and artifacts of singular beauty and historical value.
Other attractions of the Borghese grounds include the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (National Gallery of Modern Art), founded in 1883, with an important collection of 19th- and 20th-century Italian art, and the Bioparco–Giardino Zoologico (Biopark–Zoological Garden), established in 1911.
Across the river, behind the river plain of Trastevere, is the Gianicolo (Janiculum Hill). The Janiculum crest was made into a park in 1870 to honour Giuseppe Garibaldi for his heroic but unsuccessful defense of the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849.
The Forum was the religious, civic, and commercial centre of
ancient Rome. After the time of Julius Caesar, though it became more imposing, it was only one (albeit the most distinguished) of several complexes serving the same functions. Essentially, it was a small
closed valley ringed by the Seven Hills. There were two meeting places, formal open spaces, in the northwest
corner—the political Comitium and the social
Forum (the name later applied to the entire
valley)—with shops down both sides. At the other end of the valley was the precinct of the high priest
of Roman religion and that of the Vestals, the keepers of the sacred flame. Between these two were the temples of the gods. Various emperors opened up the ends of the valley, and there was more building
, but the poles of activity did not alter.
Fires, earthquakes, and invasions repeatedly
leveled the buildings, and new ones were erected on their remains until the valley was covered by
many layers of debris, earth, and ashes. Medieval Romans called it Campo Vaccino (
"Cow Field") and the abutting Capitoline Hill
Monte Caprino (
"Goat Hill"). Excavation began late in the 19th century, and most of the accumulation has been dug away, down to the level at which Julius Caesar knew it.
Stratigraphic excavations supported the traditional dating of the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer cutting diagonally across the valley floor
6th century
Janus and Saturn, both of whom have temples
in the Forum valley, were among the gods of early Rome, and the Temple of Vesta, even in its last marble version (AD 191), retained the circular shape of a primitive clay-and-wattle hut. The forge of Vulcan, the Volcanal, had very early beginnings. The Regia, traditionally described as the residence of Numa Pompilius, the priest-king, became the administrative building for the pontifex maximus, who took on the ancient monarchy's priestly duties. The Temple of Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri) was built at the establishment of the republic.
The oldest formally consecrated monument was the open space of the social Forum. A roughly trapezoidal stretch of ground
, it was bare save for three plants essential to Mediterranean agriculture: the grape, the fig, and the olive. Centuries later, when the basilicas were built behind the bordering shops, they served as a protective palisade for the Forum and a covered extension of its open space. At the wide end of the Forum and to one side was the Comitium, in which the
popular assembly met.
Nearby lay the orators' platform, the Rostra, decorated in 338 BC with the iron rams (rostra) taken as trophies from the warships of Antium (now Anzio, Italy).
At the other end of the Comitium stood the Curia, where the Senate met. When it was destroyed by fire, along with the Basilica Porcia (184 BC, the first of the basilicas), Julius Caesar built a new and greatly enlarged one that encroached on the open space of the Comitium. For the assembly, he built a meeting hall in the Campus Martius, outside the valley altogether. He built a new and much bigger Rostra
across the wide end of the Forum. He supplanted the Basilica Sempronia (170 BC) on the western side of the Forum with his own Basilica Julia (54 BC), installing new shops in place of the old Tabernae Veteres ("Old Shops"). On the other side of the Forum already stood the shop-fronted Basilica Aemilia (179 BC)
Caesar also carried his building program onto the flat ground just north of the valley between the Quirinal and Esquiline hills, making his own forum of shops and temple, alongside which Augustus, Trajan, Nerva, and Vespasian later constructed their forums. Pompey's theatre in the bed of the Tiber (55 BC) was followed by the Theatre of Marcellus (13 BC). The great baths, Agrippa's grand concourse in the Campus Martius, the circuses, and the Colosseum all drew the populace away to other centres of activity. The political attraction of the Forum, already vitiated in Caesar's day, continued to decline.
Nevertheless, the halls and temples of the Forum were assiduously rebuilt, ever grander, and more were added. Caesar, after his death, was made a god, and his temple was erected between the Forum proper and the Regia. Eventually, the sacred open space was defiled with honorary columns and an equestrian statue of Domitian. The last thing to be erected in the Forum was a column, raised by Phocas, a Byzantine usurper (608), to honour himself. Septimius Severus placed his arch over the Via Sacra. Other temples were rammed into empty places, and the whole became a forest of towering columns, gleaming walls, and ornate statuary. The dazzling marble mountain of the Palatine flowed down into the Forum as well, and the opposite rim glittered with the splendours of the imperial forums.
Today the Forum is
a confusing boneyard of history. Although later buildings perpetuated the name and roughly the position of the first halls and temples, their ruins do not necessarily stand where earlier buildings stood, and many details of the earlier Forum are still the subject of scholarly speculation. Of the thousands of remaining columns, not many more than 50 stand erect
, and amid the ruins are Christian churches, thickets of trees and bushes, and hundreds upon hundreds of free-living cats.
Between the Caelian and the Esquiline, the end of the Forum valley is filled by the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, with the Palatine edging down from the north. The Colosseum (c. AD 70–82) that replaced Nero's ornamental lake is more correctly called the Flavian Amphitheatre, after the Flavian dynasty of emperors. It was begun by Vespasian and inaugurated by Titus in AD 80. The oval stadium measures about one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometre) around, with external dimensions of 620 by 513 feet (190 by 155 metres). The approximately 160-foot (48-metre) facade has three superimposed series of 80 arches and an attic story. The attached columns follow the order applied on the Theatre of Marcellus (13 BC): sturdy, unadorned Doric on the ground floor, more elegant Ionic next, and luxuriant Corinthian on top. The attic story bore corbels supporting masts from which royal sailors manipulated awnings to protect the 50,000 seats from the sun during the gladiatorial contests, combats with wild animals, sham battles, and, when the arena was flooded, naval displays. The main structural framework and facade are travertine, the secondary walls of volcanic tufa, the inner bowl and the arcade vaults of concrete. Until Pius VIII (reigned 1829–30) began conserving what was left, it had been a convenient quarry for 1,000 years.
The nearby Arch of Constantine was erected hastily to celebrate Constantine I's victory over Maxentius in 312. Almost all the sculpture on this splendid arch was snatched from earlier monuments: a battle frieze from the forum of Trajan, a series of Hadrianic roundels, and eight panels from a Marcus Aurelius monument.
Along a 1.5-mile (2.5-km) stretch of the Tiber, around a big
bend in its course, lie all the historic quarters of the river plain. On the
right (
west) bank are the
Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice
; built 1889–1910), the Castel Sant'Angelo
(Hadrian's Tomb), the entrance to Vatican City, and the Trastevere district. On the left (east) bank are the Forum Boarium, Forum Holitorium, Circus Flaminius, and Campus Martius.
At the bottom of the bend is Tiber Island.Castel Sant'Angelo and the bridges
Four of the 11 The island, 1,100 feet (335 metres) long and less than 330 feet (100 metres) wide at its widest, has been a place of healing since the Temple of Asclepius was erected after the plague of 291 BC; the largest building there is the Fatebenefratelli Hospital (also called the Hospital of San Giovanni di Dio). Facing the hospital is another of Rome's towered medieval family fortresses, this one built by the Pierleoni.
Several of the bridges along this part of the Tiber are of special interest. The Ponte Sant'Angelo , to which is in the main the ancient Pons Aelius, built about the same time as Hadrian's Tomb, which stands at one end of the bridge. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was asked to add angels , is in the main the Pons Aelius built in AD 134. A year later Hadrian began his tomb, just off the end of the bridge. A towering cylinder 20 metres to the Ponte Sant'Angelo in the 17th century. The Ponte Cestio, often rebuilt since the 1st century BC, leads from Tiber Island to Trastevere, on the west bank, while the Ponte Fabricio (62 BC), the oldest in Rome, links the island to the shore below the Capitoline, on the east bank. Just downstream from the island are the remains of the Ponte Rotto ("Broken Bridge") of the 2nd century BC and two bridges farther along. One of these, the modern Ponte Sublicio, is named for the wooden bridge defended on this part of the river by the legendary Roman hero Horatius and his comrades.
In AD 135 the emperor Hadrian began his tomb; a towering cylinder about 65 feet (20 metres) high on a square base, it was in size and form a typical imperial mausoleum. In 271 it was
incorporated into the Aurelian Wall and became a key fortress in the defense of Rome. In
the 6th century St. Gregory I, leading a procession to pray for the end to a plague, allegedly had a vision of the archangel Michael atop the tomb. The epidemic ceased, and the tomb-citadel became known as the Castel Sant'Angelo (Castle of the Holy Angel). In time it became a papal castle, with richly furnished and frescoed rooms, loggias for the view, a siege store of 5,800 gallons (22,000 litres) of oil and 770,000 pounds (350,000
kg) of grain, a centrally heated bathroom, a prison that incarcerated the artist Benvenuto Cellini, among others, and a still-intact fortified passage from the Vatican to carry the pope to refuge there. It is now a state museum with an arboured terrace.
The Trastevere ("Across the Tiber") district, long the home of powerful Roman families, features palaces built during the Renaissance (e.g., the Villa Farnesina) and later (e.g., the 18th-century Palazzo Corsini). Most of the streets are still narrow and without sidewalks. Every 100 paces or so the haphazard cobbled lanes open upon some surprising small piazza with a palace, a church, a cloister, or a group of cafés. In the later 20th century, Trastevere took on the characteristics of a rich bohemian neighbourhood with a high percentage of foreign residents.
Some authorities claim Santa Maria in Trastevere as the oldest church in Rome. It is said that Severus Alexander (reigned 222–235) permitted Christians to gather at this site under the leadership of the pope St. Calixtus I, and it is recorded that the pope St. Julius I either raised or rebuilt a church there in 341–352. Today's church is largely 12th-century Romanesque, with a beguiling mosaic facade.
On the shore by the Ponte Rotto is the site of the earliest cattle market (Forum Boarium) and vegetable market (Forum Holitorium),
girded with temples, of which two remain:
an elegant
marble structure of the 1st century BC and a nicely proportioned
rectangular Ionic building, perhaps a few decades older. Their dedications are
disputed—save that they are not, as they are popularly called, temples of Vesta and of Fortuna Virilis. In the 6th century the church of
Santa Maria in Cosmedin was built into the antique grain-commission offices. Some of the Forum Boarium columns can still be seen on the interior of the church, and one of its drain lids, fixed to the outer wall, was carved to represent a face with a gaping mouth. This
Classical manhole cover became the
dreaded Bocca della Verità (
"Mouth of
Truth"), which allegedly would crunch down upon the hand of anyone telling a lie.
Nearby is the Theatre of Marcellus, begun by Julius Caesar and completed in 13 BC by Augustus, who named it for a
nephew. It owes its preservation to its conversion into a fortress for one of the quarrelsome clans of the Middle Ages. Converted into a palace for the
Orsini family in the 16th century, it remains private property. The
Classical orders of the facade, adopted for the Colosseum, became the model for Renaissance architects.
From there northward
and inland as far
as the Via Flaminia (the modern Corso), the river plain was a vast plantation of temples, baths, and sports grounds until the Middle Ages, when the remaining Romans took up residence there.
The portion closest to Tiber Island was once a major republican racing and sports ground, the Circus Flaminius (220 BC), which in the 16th century became the Jewish ghetto.
For many years the neighbourhood retained a Jewish flavour,
but eventually it became ripe for conversion to luxurious flats. Nearby, the Largo Argentina, excavated 1926–29, contains four small temples of the 1st and 2nd centuries BC.
Also in the area, a crescent of buildings between the Piazza del Biscione and the Piazza dei Satiri
takes its curved shape from having been built into and around Pompey's Theatre, the first stone theatre building in Rome. Inspired by the Greek theatre of Mytilene, in which Pompey the Great had been so spectacularly entertained, it had a portico of 100 columns that was equipped to be a community centre almost as much as the baths. The Senate met there on the Ides of March in 44 BC, when Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times and fell at the foot of Pompey's statue. For almost 400 years, a piece of sculpture
unearthed nearby in 1550 and deposited in the Palazzo Spada
was erroneously believed to be the Pompey statue. A part of the theatre was fortified by the
Orsini family in the 12th century and later converted into the Palazzo Righetti, or Pio.
The rest of the river bend northward was known as the Campus Martius (Field of Mars). Marshy in places, with a few temples and public buildings, it was made into one of the grandeurs of Rome by
Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in the 1st century BC. The swamp became a lake, the Stagnum Agrippae, amid a landscape of lawns, baths, temples, and parks.
Today, interspersed among roughly 40 palaces and 100 churches are remnants of what the emperors later built there. The shape and some of the remains of Domitian's stadium (AD 81–89), which remained intact until at least 1450, are retained in the Piazza Navona. Even more spectacular are the reconstructed Ara Pacis Augustae ("Altar of Augustan Peace") and the Pantheon.
As almost nothing from Agrippa's time remained after the fire of AD 80
, the emperor Hadrian undertook to restore some of it. Among his works was the new Pantheon, one of the West's great buildings, extraordinary as architecture
and remarkable as a feat of engineering. This "Temple of All the Gods," imperial property, survived because it became a church, the gift of the Byzantine emperor Phocas to Pope Boniface IV in 608. This protected the building from everyone but the
popes: the bronze roof beams of the grandiose pedimental porch of 18
columns of Egyptian granite were stripped by Urban VIII, a 17th-century pope of the Barberini
family, who took them as raw material for the
interior of St. Peter's
Basilica—provoking the celebrated anonymous comment,
"Quod non fecerunt barberi, fecerunt
Barberini" ("What was not done by the barbarians was done by the
It has been suggested that the temple was designed by Hadrian himself, whose villa at Tivoli is another landmark in the development of architecture. The Pantheon was possibly the first monumental building of antiquity conceived as an interior. Evenly lighted from a single source—the open
"eye" (oculus) in the centre of the dome—the enormous interior, circular and richly marbled, is almost unchanged from
Classical times. Until the 20th century the dome was the largest ever built,
about 142 feet (43 metres) in diameter,
equal to the height of the building. Two things made its construction feasible: the magnificent quality of the mortar used in the concrete and the meticulous selection and grading of the aggregate, which became lighter in weight with increasing height.
There also is some brick ribbing in the lowest part of the dome and thrust-containing brick outer facing
bronze doors are still in place. Italy's first two kings are buried in the Pantheon, as are many artists, of whom Raphael is the most notable. Nearby are fragments of Agrippa's baths
The shattered drum of
Augustus's tomb marks the spot where he was buried in AD 14. The mausoleum became a 12th-century fortress of the Colonna
family, a 16th-century garden, a ring for Spanish bullfights in the 17th century, and then a concert hall until 1936, when it was scraped down to its impressive but mournful foundations by Mussolini, who may have planned to be buried there himself. Next to the tomb is the delicately beautiful white marble Ara Pacis
dedicated 9 BC). The altar, raised on steps, is enclosed in a sculptured screen. Bits of the friezes were discovered off the Corso in the 15th century, and the altar itself was dug up there in 1938 after 35 years of labour. The pieces unearthed earlier were bought back from museums, and the whole was reassembled to stand four streets away from its original location.
Among the palaces in the Campus Martius are the Palazzo di Montecitorio (17th century), designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which houses Italy's Chamber of Deputies
; the
Madama (17th century),
home of the Senate; and the Palazzo Spada (c. 1540), which houses the
Council of State. The Museo di Roma,
a museum that illustrates the life of the city through the ages, is in the Palazzo Braschi (18th century). The Brazilian
Embassy is in the Palazzo Pamphili
. The early 16th-century Palazzo di Firenze was the Florentine
Embassy until the union of Italy; it is now occupied by the Società Dante Alighieri, a society devoted to the teaching of Italian. The Palazzo della Sapienza, located near the Senate, is now the National Archives, but from 1431 to 1935 it was the seat of the University of Rome (founded 1303).
Three architecturally celebrated
buildings in
the palace-studded
river region are the Cancelleria, the Farnese, and the Massimo alle Colonne palaces. Because all the pertinent documents were destroyed in the
sack of Rome in 1527, the architect of the Palazzo della Cancelleria remains unknown. Dated 1486–98, it was built by Cardinal Raffaelo Riario out of a night's winnings at the gaming table. Seized by
Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–21), it has housed some portion of the Vatican chancellery ever since, except
during Napoleonic and revolutionary interruptions. A square building with a rusticated ground floor, its upper stories are plain and rhythmically pilastered, while the columned inner court is noble and deeply harmonious. The city's first High Renaissance building, it could be said to symbolize Rome's displacement of Florence as art capital of the
The Palazzo Farnese, the most monumental of Rome's Renaissance palaces and now the site of the French Embassy, was designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (a member of the Sangallo family of architects), who was succeeded after his death by Michelangelo, Giacomo da Vignola, and Giacomo della Porta. Sangallo followed the Renaissance precepts regarding the architectural orders on the lower floors, but Michelangelo's top story uses the traditional elements in a willful way, capping it all with an overpowering cornice—a personal expression that foreshadowed Mannerism, a leaching of Renaissance ideals, and the subsequent theatrical self-expression of Baroque. Michelangelo's project to join this palace to the Villa Farnesina, across the Tiber, by a bridge
but never completed. A portion of the proposed bridge can be seen
in the surviving arch over the Via Giulia, one of the city's most charming streets.
Mannerist architecture is typified by
Baldassarre Peruzzi's Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne (c. 1535), the name of which comes from a colonnaded palace on the site destroyed in the 1527 sack. It disregards all Renaissance canons, with its brooding entry and heavy cornice below a slightly bowed and airy facade punched with small windows. The Massimo family gave shelter to the German printers Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who produced Rome's first printed book in their house in 1467.
Some 25 of the original parish churches, or tituli, the first legal churches in Rome, still function. Most had been private houses in which the Christians illegally congregated, and some of these houses, as at
Santi Giovanni e Paolo, are still preserved underneath the present church buildings. Since the 4th century the tituli priests have been cardinals who, over the centuries, have rebuilt, enlarged, and embellished their churches.
Some early Christian churches were centrally rather than longitudinally organized, a plan dictated by the circular form of the imperial mausoleums into which they were built. A good example is Santa Costanza (c. AD 320), which also has a superb series of 4th-century vault mosaics in pagan designs. Although churches of this type were few, they had a strong influence on the development of the centrally planned house of worship.
However, it was the rectangular Roman basilica (a word used to designate a public hall in pre-Christian Rome and, later, an important church), with its open hall extending from end to end, that established the model for Western ecclesiastical architecture for centuries to come. The basilical church has a nave higher than the side aisles, from which it is separated by a colonnade on each side. It has either a cloistered court (atrium) or anteroom (narthex) or both at the west end and a semicircular projection (apse) at the east. In the 4th century AD Constantine I added the transept, a lateral aisle crossing the nave just before the apse, to the standard basilican plan, thus making the basilica a cross-shaped structure.
In the 4th century, basilicas were built to mark the burial places of martyrs. Most martyrs had been interred beyond the city walls in the catacombs, underground galleries with recesses used as tombs. When later sieges of Rome laid waste the
countryside, saintly relics were removed to the safety of city churches. During the Middle Ages, when the prevalence of malaria and of tomb robbers—there was a brisk commerce in religious relics—made ventures beyond the walls risky, some of the oratories and basilicas fell almost to ruin, and the location of some catacombs was forgotten.
Rome's basilicas,
four are designated as
major (maggiore), or papal: St. Peter's
(technically in Vatican City), San Giovanni in Laterano,
San Paolo Fuori le Mura
The basilicas established the model for Western ecclesiastical architecture for centuries to come. Basilica, a Greek word meaning royal, was used by the pre-Christian Romans to designate a public hall, but no surviving example of a Roman basilica anywhere in the empire is the architectural predecessor of the Christian basilica.
The basilical church has a nave higher than the aisles, from which it is separated by a colonnade on each side. It has either a cloistered court (atrium) or anteroom (narthex) or both at the west end and a semicircular projection (apse) at the east. The basilicas in Rome that are closest to the early Christian structures are the churches of competing cults, as strikingly exemplified by the Neo-Pythagorean-sect basilica of the Porta Maggiore, unearthed by the railroad viaduct in 1926.
Some early Christian churches were centrally rather than longitudinally organized, a plan dictated by the circular form of the imperial mausoleums into which they were built. A good example is Sta. Costanza (c. AD 320), which also has a superb series of 4th-century vault mosaics in pagan designs. Although churches of this type were few, they had a strong influence on the development of the centrally planned house of worship.
and Santa Maria Maggiore. The first three were all originally built under Constantine I. Under the Lateran Treaty with Vatican City (effective 1929–85), the Italian government granted the Holy See extraterritorial authority over major basilicas and other sites within Rome.
Protected by the fortified Castel Sant'Angelo, St. Peter's Basilica
was built over the traditional burial place of the
apostle Peter, from whom all popes claim succession. The spot was marked by a three-niched monument (aedicula) of AD 166–170. (Excavations in 1940–49 revealed well-preserved catacombs, with both pagan and Christian graves dating from the period of St. Peter's burial.) Constantine enclosed the aedicula within a shrine, and during the last 15 years of his life (
c. 322–337) he built his basilica around it. The shrine was sheltered by a curved open canopy supported by four serpentine pillars that he brought from the Middle East. The design, enormously magnified, was followed in making the baldachin (1623–33) over today's papal altar.
In spite of fires, depredations by invaders, and additions by various popes, the original basilica stood for
more than a millennium much as it had been built, but in 1506 Pope Julius II ordered it razed and a new St. Peter's built. His architect was Donato Bramante,
who in 1502 had completed the first great masterpiece of the High Renaissance, the Tempietto chapel in the courtyard of
San Pietro in Montorio
Bramante's ground plan for St. Peter's was central: a Greek cross, all
the arms of which are equal, around a central dome. Both he and the
pope died before much could be built. Successive architects, including Raphael, drew fresh plans. The last of them, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, died in 1546, and the 71-year-old Michelangelo was solicited to complete Sangallo's projects
He accepted but refused payment for his work on the basilica. Michelangelo adapted Bramante's original plan, the effect being more emotional and mighty, less classically serene. Of the exterior, only the back of the church, visible from the Vatican Gardens, and the dome are Michelangelo's. After his death Giacomo della Porta and Domenico Fontana, who executed the dome, altered the shape, making it taller and steeper than the original design.
The east end remained unfinished, and it was there that Carlo
Maderno was ordered to construct a nave, the clergy having won its century-long battle to have a longitudinal church (one in the shape of a Latin cross, rather than a Greek cross) for liturgical reasons.
Maderno added a Baroque facade in 1626. He was followed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who worked on both the
inside and the outside. His pontifical crowd-
funneling colonnade in the shape of a keyhole around the piazza, a fountain for the piazza, the breathtaking baldachin, his several major pieces of sculpture, his interior arrangements for the church, and his dazzling Scala Regia (
"Royal Stair") to the Vatican exhibit his legendary technical brilliance and his masterful showman's flair.
In the end, all the planning, labour, and faith of
numerous popes, priests, artists, and artisans produced a vast, gorgeous ceremonial chamber.
Today, amid the gleam and glitter of gold and bronze and precious stones, eddy throngs of awed, dwarfed humanity.
When Francesco Borromini redid the interior of
San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran) in 1646–50, little of the original Constantinian fabric remained after destruction by the Vandals (5th century), damage by earthquake (9th), two devastating fires (14th), and four consequent rebuildings.
Constantine had built a five-aisled basilica over the remains of the barracks of the imperial guard, the Equites Singulares. The
octagonal 5th-century baptistery had replaced that of the 4th century, which had been built into the baths of the House of Fausta, named for Constantine's second wife.
The bronze doors of the basilica came from the Curia (the Senate chamber in the Forum). The cloisters contain some of the finest examples of early 13th-century carved and inlaid decoration
of the Cosmatesque
(Cosmati) style. On the exterior a 1732 facade is topped with 15 giant statues
The basilica's piazza
is decorated with
an Egyptian obelisk (15th century BC), the oldest and tallest in Rome
, one of those
that had been taken to the city in ancient times and that was reerected by Pope Sixtus V late in the 16th century. At the same time,
Sixtus demolished the nearby old
Lateran Palace, from which the Sancta Sanctorum (the papal chapel) and the Scala Santa (
"Holy Stairs") were preserved. The Scala Santa had been the principal ceremonial stairway of the palace, but about the 8th or 9th century it began to be identified popularly as having been brought from Jerusalem by St. Helena, Constantine's mother, reportedly from Pontius Pilate's palace and thus as the stair climbed by
Jesus. The steps are protected by a wooden cover, and believers mount on their knees.
There is similar lack of record regarding St. Helena's acquisition of the True Cross, which is at Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme. This basilica was built into the palace in which St. Helena lived (317–322). At about this time a hall of the palace was converted into a church and two adjoining small rooms were converted into chapels. The rest of the palace continued to be lived in for centuries. The alleged relics of the cross, found in 1492 walled into a niche, are now in a modern chapel. The facade and narthex of the church are 1743 Rococo, the interior an earlier Baroque with a 12th-century Cosmatesque pavement, some antique columns, a few Renaissance details, and, somewhere within it all, part of a palace built around 180–211.
San Paolo Fuori le Mura (St.
Paul Outside the Walls)
basilica built by Constantine over the
grave of St. Paul, the Apostle, was replaced starting in 386 by a structure mammoth for its time
. It was faithfully restored after a fire in 1823 and thus remains an outstanding example of early basilical architecture. It has a single eastern apse, a lofty transept, and five majestic nave aisles. Before the Muslim
siege of Rome in 846, the approach to the basilica was a mile-long colonnade
from the Porta
San Paolo
("St. Paul's Gate").
Located on the Esquiline Hill,
Santa Maria Maggiore was founded in 432, just after the Council of Ephesus in 431, which
upheld the belief that Mary truly was the mother of God; it was thus the first great church of Mary in Rome. Behind its Neoclassic facade (1741–43), the original basilica has resisted change. Most of the mosaics
, lining the walls and bursting with blue and gold around the altar, date from the time it was built. When a new apse was added in the 13th century, it was also decorated with mosaics. Although the ceiling is Renaissance, the slabs of fine marble and the
Classical columns are pieces of original plunder from other buildings. The great treasure of the church is the Crib of Christ relic, five pieces of wood connected by bits of metal.
According to tradition, Pope Liberius (reigned 352–366)
had a vision of
Mary, who told him to erect a church where snow
would fall, miraculously, on the night of August 5. In remembrance, it "snows" white flower petals from the roof of the Pope Paul V chapel in
Santa Maria Maggiore every August 5.
In 1993 the basilica suffered some damage from a bomb.
Now in the midst of the Campo Verano cemetery, Rome's Catholic burying ground from 1830, San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura (St. Lawrence Outside the Walls) dates from the 4th century. The nave is a 13th-century basilica built by Pope Honorius III, and the chancel is another basilica built by Pope Pelagius II in the late 6th century as a replacement for the 4th-century original. On the inner part of the triumphal arch between the two is a 6th-century mosaic, and along the walls are giant Corinthian columns of rare marble taken from a non-Christian building.
The Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem) minor basilica was built into the palace in which St. Helena lived (317–322). About this time a hall of the palace was converted into a church, and two adjoining small rooms were converted into chapels. The rest of the palace continued to be lived in for centuries. Alleged relics of the True Cross, reputedly the wood of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, were found in 1492 walled into a niche and later were moved to a modern chapel. The facade and narthex of the church are 1743 Rococo, the interior an earlier Baroque with a 12th-century Cosmatesque pavement, some antique columns, a few Renaissance details, and, somewhere within it all, part of a palace built about 180–211.
Originally the Basilica Eudoxiana, San Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains) minor basilica was built in 432–440 with money from the empress Eudoxia for the veneration of the chains of the apostle Peter's Jerusalem imprisonment. Later his Roman chains were added. The chains became famous after they were mentioned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Michelangelo's thunderous Moses is on the tomb of Pope Julius II. Behind the main altar is a 4th-century sarcophagus with seven compartments, brought to Rome from Antioch (now in Turkey) during the 6th century in the belief that it contained relics of the seven Maccabees.
Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuit order,
was built during 1568–84. Over the following four centuries
it supplied one of the most pervasively influential designs for church building. Michelangelo offered the new order plans for their first church but died before his plans could be acted upon. Building began under Giacomo da Vignola
, very possibly following Michelangelo's ideas. The Jesuits, shock troops of the Counter-Reformation, proselytizers rather than liturgists, needed a new kind of church for their new approach. Vignola combined the central plan (for preaching) with the longitudinal plan (for ritual) by transforming the aisles into a series of chapels opening into the nave. The facade carried the
Classical orders upward, though only across the width of the tall nave, and the space above the lower aisles to either side was filled with a scroll. The ideas were not new in the history of architecture, but they were new to Rome and new to the age
, and they spread with rapidity.
Originally the Basilica Eudoxiana, S. Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains) was built in 432–440 with money from the empress Eudoxia for the veneration of the chains of St. Peter's Jerusalem imprisonment. Later, his Roman chains were added. The chains became famous after they were mentioned at the Council of Ephesus (431). Michelangelo's thunderous Moses is on the tomb of Julius II. Behind the main altar is a 4th-century sarcophagus with seven compartments, brought to Rome from Antioch during the 6th century in the belief that it contained relics of the seven Maccabees.
Built during 1605–26,
Santa Maria della Vittoria harbours an unfailing crowd-pleaser, Gian Lorenzo Bernini's
The Ecstasy of St.
Teresa (1645–52). It is
conceived entirely in theatrical terms, even to having the Cornaro family (in marble) seated in opera boxes at the sides of the chapel. Their eyes are directed at the central group in a niche framed in columns, exactly like a proscenium arch, the back wall concealed by gilded metal beams of glory, the scene lighted from above and behind by a hidden yellow-paned window. Amid this setting the angel hovers above the swooning
St. Teresa of Ávila, who is—and the illusion is nigh to perfect—borne into the air at the moment of her ecstatic mystical union with Christ. Extraordinarily convincing and utterly voluptuous, it has been both praised as a masterwork of consummate spirituality and condemned as
and prurient.
Of the scores of churches in the Campus Martius of historical, architectural, and artistic interest,
Sant'Agostino (1479–83) is perhaps the most Roman
. The church, constructed entirely of travertine looted from the Colosseum, was a favourite of many artists of the Renaissance period and beyond. Caravaggio painted the
Madonna with
Pilgrims; Raphael did the fresco of Isaiah.
Many expectant mothers and women wishing to conceive have prayed at the foot of the Madonna del Parto ("Madonna of Childbirth"; c. 1519), sculpted by Jacopo Sansovino.
Rome is as much a city of fountains as it is of churches or palaces, antiquities or urban problems. The more than 300 monumental fountains are an essential part of Rome's seductive powers. Part of the everyday
yet part of the daily surprise, they are points of personal, often sentimental attachment to the city. The Roman composer Ottorino Resphigi found in them inspiration for his orchestral tone poem Fontane di Roma (1917). In their ceaseless pouring forth, they also provide a sense of luxury: on her arrival in 1655, Queen Christina of Sweden, having watched the fountains in St. Peter's Square, reportedly gave her permission for them to be turned off, only to learn that they flowed all the time.
Every fountain has its history, and many have legends, the best known of which guarantees a return to Rome to those who toss coins into the Trevi Fountain. Restored after 1,000 years of silence by Pope Nicholas V in 1485, the fountain was renewed in the 17th century and then transformed from a handy source of household water into a scenic wonder. The huge fountain bulges into most of a tiny square and takes up the entire end of an abutting palace.
Nicola Salvi won a 1732 competition by designing a late Baroque marble mass of
allegorical figures and natural rock formations. It took 30 years to complete. Its water, from the ancient aqueduct called Acqua Vergine, long was considered Rome's softest and best tasting; for centuries, barrels of it were taken every week to the Vatican and carried off by the jugful by expatriate English tea brewers. Declared nonpotable in 1961, the waters are now recycled by electric pumps.
Out of the
rivalry between Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini that so enriched the Roman cityscape arose a legend, still believed and recounted today.
It explains that
on Bernini's allegorical Fountain of the Four Rivers, in Piazza Navona
, the statue
representing the Nile River
hides its head to avoid seeing the Borromini facade on the church opposite, and
the Río de la Plata figure raises its arm in alarm to prevent the building from falling. The fountain was
in fact
unveiled in 1651, a year before the church of
Sant'Agnese was begun, two years before Borromini was called in, and 15 years before the facade was completed.
oldest of the city's fountains is really a spring, the ancient Lacus Juturnae ("Pool of Juturna") in the Forum, restored in 1952 to the appearance it had in
the time of the emperor Augustus. A much newer fountain in the old city is one of the most admired. Inaugurated as simple jets of water in the Piazza Esedra (now the Piazza della Repubblica) by Pope Pius IX in 1870, just 10 days before the troops of united Italy broke into the city, it was probably the last public work dedicated by a pope in his role of temporal magistrate of the city. In 1901 the nymphs frolicking with sea beasts were added.
The least-liked fountain figure in Rome, unpopular since it was installed in 1587, is on the triumphal arch fountain in the Piazza
San Bernardo, commissioned by Pope Sixtus V. The figure is a pallid Moses, apparently in imitation of
the work by Michelangelo that adorns the tomb of Pope Julius II. Its sculptor, Prospero Bresciano, is said to have been so hurt by the public's jeers that he died of a broken heart.
Since ancient times, to be a citizen of Rome has been a source of pride. Today there is still considerable prestige in being a Romano di Roma, or "Roman" Roman. Among such Romans are the "black nobility," families with papal titles who form a society within high society, shunning publicity and not given to great intimacy with the "white nobility," whose titles were conferred by mere temporal rulers. The inhabitants who consider themselves the most nobly Roman of them all are the people of the Trastevere ("Across the Tiber") district. In ancient times, Trastevere was the quarter for sailors and foreigners, whereas the founding fathers eastward across the river were soldiers and farmers. From the Middle Ages a number of palaces there were the homes of powerful families.
Although the great majority of Romans are Catholics, the city also is home to a variety of other religious groups. Jewish people, for example, have lived in the city for thousands of years. Jews generally were not persecuted in Rome until the 16th-century pope Paul IV forced them into a ghetto (near Piazza Navona). Later popes carried on his anti-Jewish program. Except for brief respites under Napoleon I and the momentary Roman Republic of 1849, Jews were debarred from all the professions, government service, and landownership until 1870, when Rome was integrated into united Italy and religious persecution outlawed. Later redevelopment destroyed much of the ghetto, although some streets remain, and the position of some of the gates can still be seen.
During the 1930s and following World War II, Italians from all over the south and from rural Lazio arrived seeking work in the capital city. The population of Rome rose particularly rapidly in the 1950s and '60s, from just over 1,960,000 in 1951 to more than 2,610,000 in 1967. Population growth then slowed, as many Romans moved out of the city proper and into other parts of Roma province.
Since the 1970s Rome has attracted a large number of immigrants from outside Italy. In the early 21st century foreign residents included many relatively affluent people from other member countries of the European Union (EU), particularly France, and from the United States. However, a significant proportion of the city's immigrants worked in relatively low-paying jobs in the service sector; domestic work and retail trade were common occupations. Most of these immigrants had arrived from the Philippines, Romania, Poland, Peru, Egypt, China, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. Others had origins in Morocco, Senegal, Albania, or Ecuador, among other countries. In the main, this immigration has taken place without too much friction, but the late 20th and early 21st centuries did see a rise in racism and violence directed against immigrants. Much of the tension centred on the world of football (soccer), but a sense of unease about immigration was widespread.
Rome cannot be called an industrial city, although it has a fair amount of medium and light industries. Among these have been the engineering, electronics, and chemical industries, as well as printing, clothing manufacture, and food processing. Factories have been located mostly in the northwestern part of the city, but many closed or relocated during the 1980s and '90s. The construction industry remains important.
The city's sizeable publishing industry produces several influential dailies—La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, Il Tempo, and L'Unità—as well as a number of magazines. The motion-picture industry is centred at Cinecittà Studios (constructed in 1937), outside Rome.
Most of the major employers in the city are part of the services sector. Rome is a major market centre for central and southern Italy, although financial exchange remains concentrated in Milan. Government, with its many agencies and ministries, is a particularly large employer. Tourism, however, is the outstanding contributor to the economy of the city. Rome is a major cultural, shopping, and entertainment centre, attracting tens of millions of Italians and foreigners each year. The capital is also a frequent host to conferences and trade fairs. Many visitors, whether bona fide pilgrims or simply tourists interested in the main religious sites, have ties to the Roman Catholic Church. Indeed, the church itself—with its communications and souvenir businesses, as well as its direct employment of thousands of priests, nuns, and church workers—plays a significant role in Rome's economy as well.
Spectator sports contribute notably to the economy. Rome has two main football (soccer) teams, AS Roma and Lazio. The former is traditionally seen as the "city" team, while the latter attracts more support from the peripheries and rural Lazio. Both teams play at the Olympic stadium. Their matches are among the fiercest in world football.
Traffic is a typical Roman dilemma because much of the municipal revenue is derived from the more than a million automobiles and motor scooters that render city life difficult. The average noise during waking hours is at or above the level that gradually induces deafness, whereas the average speed of motor traffic, in spite of the audacity and acuity of the drivers, is utterly slow. Beginning in 1973, both to reduce congestion and noise and air pollution, private vehicles were banned from parts of the city's ancient section. Other attempts have been made to improve the traffic situation, particularly after the election of an environmentally minded mayor, Francesco Rutelli, in 1993. Nevertheless, the basic problems of traffic and parking remain central ones for the city and its province.
Deterioration of the city's monuments has been accelerated by traffic fumes and vibration, yet the monuments themselves long impeded an undertaking that could reduce road traffic: subway construction. In the first half of the 20th century Mussolini decreed the building of a subway from Rome's central railway station, the Stazione Termini, and by 1955 it was in operation along a southwestern route. In 1959 a comprehensive metropolitan subway system was approved. After five years of bureaucratic delays, construction of the first line of the system began. The route was diverted to protect monuments, and work on the line temporarily was halted when archaeological remains were unearthed. The second line of the system was completed in 1980. In the 1990s Mayor Rutelli extended the subway system and oversaw the construction of tramlines around the city. Additional lines and extensions have been planned, though the rich archaeological heritage of Rome remains an obstacle.
Rome is served by two international airports. The larger one, Leonardo da Vinci (Fiumicino) Airport, lies on the coast about 15 miles (24 km) southwest of the city. The smaller Ciampino Airport is about 7 miles (11 km) to the southeast.
The city, or comune (commune), of Rome is governed by a popularly elected communal council, a communal committee (an executive body), and a mayor. The mayor is elected directly through a two-round system. The council is responsible for such amenities as police protection, health services, transportation, and certain aspects of public assistance. The areas around the city, in Roma province, are governed by an elected provincial council, a provincial committee, and a committee president. Similarly, the government of the Lazio region comprises an elected regional council, a regional committee, and a committee president. The regional council passes laws and issues administrative regulations—subject to certain constitutional limitations—for the whole Lazio region.
The city that built some of the first apartment houses in the world (the insulae of ancient Rome) now suffers a perennial housing shortage. At the time of Italian unification in 1870, the population of the city was very low (about 226,000 inhabitants), and the landscape was marked by vast open spaces within the city walls. However, Rome's status as the capital of a united Italy soon led to rapid expansion, and the 1880s were marked by a so-called "building fever." Shantytowns occupied by poorer Romans soon sprang up in the rural-urban fringe known as the borgate romane. The exodus of lower-class Romans to the periphery was further encouraged by Mussolini, whose creation of grand boulevards in the city centre destroyed entire neighbourhoods there. Many of the numerous rural Italians who moved to Rome in the mid-20th century also crowded into the borgate. Some decent new housing was constructed on the outskirts—for example, the attractive working-class housing at Tiburtino, built in the early 1950s, and that in the vast EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma; "Universal Exhibition of Rome") complex, completed in the 1960s—but much of it was hastily built and substandard. The 1960s and '70s saw the construction of a number of huge suburban public housing estates, such as Spinaceto and Corviale, but they suffered from relative isolation, and many viewed them as depressing eyesores. Meanwhile, a lack of administrative oversight meant that a significant proportion of houses within Rome were illegally built. More recent immigration from outside Italy has put further pressure on the inadequate housing stock.
The city's preeminent institution of higher education is the University of Rome, founded in 1303 and known as La Sapienza. Its main buildings, the Città Universitaria, are located east of the Stazione Termini. A decentralization process begun in 1999 resulted in the creation of several "confederate" universities, which form part of the larger University of Rome but operate autonomously. Tens of thousands of students are enrolled in dozens of faculties and departments within the institution.