What is the most wonderful thing about Rome? Of course, there is her richness of mementoes from past ages: from Etruscan shepherds’ encampment on the Capitol hill to early virtuous Republican times, through dark gothic ages of plagues and invasions and into the golden light of Renaissance and the Baroque when Rome once again reinvented itself and became transformed into majestic splendour.

For me, however, there are two features of this truly eternal city that mean so much.

First, Rome is not a high-rise city. Just look at the archetypal views of the city from the Pincio, from the Spanish steps, indeed from anywhere in the heart of the city. Church spires and domes stand out among domestic buildings. There are no skyscrapers such as one finds in London’s centre disfiguring the cityscape and demolishing the once famous view of the metropolis as painted by Canaletto where Wren’s city church spires rose and stood out from the rest of the buildings and where Saint Paul’s cupola crowned the urban scene.

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It’s so unlike today where one is often hard put to get a unobstructed photograph of the Dome – so hemmed is it by recent high rise office blocks (which will soon empty as work-places because of the increase in teleworking). High-rise capitals are sadly proliferating throughout the world making a capital in India look increasingly the same as a capital in Saudi Arabia or Thailand or China or Japan or the USA……. It would be difficult to apply those lines from Wordsworth’s sonnet written on London’s Westminster bridge today:

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

Rather it would have to be re-written as something like this:

Shard, cheese-grater, gherkin, walkie-talkie

Tomb-like stand despotic and so pawky

But Rome is unique: it stands out exactly because it is low-rise. May it ever remain like that!

London capital city:

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Rome capital city:

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The second feature I love so much about Rome is that one can still walk streets in its heart which have retained their age-old characteristics. These are the areas which escaped that misplaced attempt to give ‘regularity’ and ‘formality’ to the city’s maze of old alleys and streets. After Rome became capital of a united Italy in 1870 there were ‘piani regolatori’ (town planning schemes) put into operation which caused the ploughing of grand boulevards through Rome. Such roads as the Via Nazionale and the Via dei Fori Imperiali are the most prominent examples of this totalitarianistic town-planning. The new Italian rulers wanted to make Rome look like any other big European capital such as Vienna or Paris. Fortunately, much has remained unspoilt and untouched by the ogre of speculative new building such as has regrettably occurred to so much of London (and so many other cities).

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People do still live in the centre of Rome! The streets are still cobbled with those square lava stones called San Pietrini (so attractive but so tough if the right shoes aren’t worn). The lanes are shaded from the often torrid summer sun by their narrowness. Rome could, indeed, be described not only as the Eternal City but also as the archetypal Global Village.

Maggior Di Roma non c’e’…