If Italy is written in my heart then Rome is inscribed in my soul. They say all roads lead to Rome and certainly all roads in my life lead there. Rome, for me, led to an awakening at a critical age in my existence, an awakening which shall never be erased from my consciousness as long as I live.

***

My first visit to Rome was as an eight-year old in the company of my Italian grandparents. They impressed upon me the sacred nature of the Campidoglio; I was overwhelmed by the Colosseum, so much larger does it seem to a little lad than when one grows up. I have vague recollections of Saint Peter’s Rome but many other visual memories have faded. Later, I thought I might have been too young to have appreciated Rome at that age but I was assured that I thoroughly enjoyed my first visit to the eternal city.

***

My second visit to Rome was at the age of fourteen. My mother (born in Milan, Rome University student and  naturalised British through her marriage with my English father) had arranged for me to stay with a family who lived in Rome but were  spending their summer in their seaside apartment at Ostia. Most days I would board the train at Ostia and alight at stazione Ostiense with a Blue Guide and tackle different parts of the city to visit. In January of that year I’d broken my leg in an accident on ice at school. The bone had not set properly, had to be re-broken and re-set, this time with a metal rod which was never removed. During my month at King’s College hospital I’d received visits from my class mates and, what with getting books from them and listening to the hospital radio, my being was opened up to the extraordinary world of music, painting and architecture.  A present of Bannister Fletcher’s ‘Architecture on the comparative method’ from a doctor friend was my constant reading and I was mesmerised by the plans of Imperial Roman forums, the great gothic cathedrals, through renaissance palaces to the start of the modern age of buildings.

 

 

So, for this second visit to Rome, which lasted weeks rather than days, I was rather better prepared than my first. Indeed, never, in any subsequent visit to Rome have I seen so much and walked so extensively. I remember calling in on a convent on the Appian Way when my several blisters had burst and having my feet bandaged by a nun. Another time I was offered peaches and Frascati wine as a lunch snack in a friary near the catacombs under San Lorenzo fuori le mura – and returned to Ostia and my host, who was amused by my first somewhat tipsy state. At the baths of Caracalla, so beloved by Shelley and where he was inspired to write his greatest work ‘Prometheus Unbound’, I witnessed my first opera, ‘Aida’ complete (naturally) with elephants. No photos but several guide books from this visit.

***

Years passed before I returned to Rome a third time and then, rather like Goethe’s second visit, (his’ Italian Journey’ describing his first visit remains one of my favourite books) I found disappointment in the city. It was winter and I remember eating in a trattoria by Saint Peter’s square but never actually wanting to enter into the great basilica itself. The façade was near, closing the wonderful key-hole shaped Bernini colonnade but my feet refused to climb the stairs into the centre of western Christianity. It was a strange time in my life when I’d decided to escape from the comfortable world of academia and become a labourer in England, working on a motorway building project. No pictures, again, from this visit.

***

When did I visit Rome, for the fourth time? It was in 2006 when I decided I would base myself in our little house in Longoio. It was an organised coach trip to see a Manet exhibition at the Vittoriale and where I also managed to see another on eighteenth century Roman art at the palazzo Venezia. I remember a strong, cold wind blowing all the time, a view from a little park where children were playing football in sight of the Colosseum, a walk past the Theatre of Marcellus and the placing of my hand in the Bocca della Verità, or mouth of truth. Fortunately my hand was not bitten off!

 

 

***

The fifth time was in 2008 in the company of an old uni friend who had bought a house in Anticoli Corrado, a village famed for the beauty of its women who are used as painters’ models.  This was a great walking tour starting from the Piazza del Popolo going down the Corso and then stepping up to the Janiculum past Bramante’s tenpietto and walking the length of the hill which offers the finest views of Rome. Spot the Pantheon, Trastevere, the Anglican church and Keats’ house below?

 

 

***

The sixth visit took place in 2011 when my wife and I met up with ex-school-mates and their wives. We joined them at the Piazza dell’Esedra after taking in a very comprehensive view of the national museum in the baths of Diocletian.

 

 

***

Should I include a fleeting visit changing trains on my way to Rome airport to catch a plane to Vietnam? My post on that is at:

A Solution to Miserable Weather

***

Then in 2014 our local choir of Ghivizzano was invited to sing in Saint Peters. Details of this seventh visit are described in my posts at

Our Choir Sings at Rome’s (and the World’s) Greatest Church

From Peter to Paul

Two Kinds of Song

Remembering Goethe, Tasso and Anita Garibaldi in Rome

***

Last year the choir of my old Cambridge College, King’s, sang in Saint Peter’s and, of course, I was there for my eighth visit. (See my posts at

Caput Mundi

Towards Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore

King’s College Choir Arrives at Saint Peter’s Basilica

Castling in Rome

***

This year I could not miss yet again meeting up with another ex-school-mate, now living in the USA with his American wife and whose visits to Italy and Europe I had avidly been following on facebook.

Some posts of this latest visit are at:

Happy Cats in Rome

Beware the Ides of March.

Terminal Infection for the Greatest City in the World

The World’s First Shopping Mall?

That makes nine visits (and a half?) so far to Rome, each one quite different from the other. But as they say ‘Roma, una vita non basta’. (A lifetime is not enough to visit Rome). I would undoubtedly add that I’d need nine lifetimes to visit Rome rather than nine visits but then I do not have the advantage of being a cat.