I first got to know Rome when I was a teenager, in the late 1960s. I spent some time there during the summer before I went to university, and again the following year during the 'long vacation'. In both years I had hitch-hiked from the UK - in the first year turning round and heading north again from Rome, whilst in the second year I carried on further south to Naples. I stayed at the Youth Hostel, which was a good 4 km north of the city centre, on the edge of the 1960 Olympic Park, and because there was a limit on the foreign currency one could take out of the UK at the time (£50 in total) I was endeavouring to live on £1 per day to include accommodation, food, entries to museums and so on. This was actually quite easily achieved in Italy at the time, where a tourist menu cost Lire 400 (at a time when there were Lire 1750 to the pound sterling). In Rome I walked almost everywhere, from the north to the south. I visited everything the diminutive 'Youth Hostellers' Guide to Italy' said I should visit, and although I got to know the city (and can still find my way round it) I didn't really get to like it.
Yes: I was hugely impressed by many of the things I saw - the Roman forum, the remains of the Caracalla Baths, the Colosseum, St Peter's Square, the Sistine Chapel, Piazza Navona and so on. But these were individual sites separated by swathes of hot, dusty pavements in the middle of August. Without a good map, I generally stuck to the main avenues linking the monuments and churches.
And looking back I realise two further things. Firstly I didn't know enough history (despite an A level in the subject) to put everything together (and my guide book was too small to even try to do so). And secondly I suppose I was dismayed by aspects of the religiosity of many of the places I visited. An uncle who had fought his way up Italy during the war had warned me about a land of 'fat priests and thin peasants', and the wealth and opulence of many of the major churches and basilicas I visited seemed totally over-the-top, given my protestant Methodist upbringing, and given also the obvious poverty of many of the neighbourhoods within which they stood. I was particularly appalled by a visit to the Scala Santa - supposedly the staircase from Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem which Christ had climbed before his interrogation and flagellation, and which devout elderly pilgrims, most of them clearly of peasant stock, were climbing on their knees before making financial offerings to the church. In reality the staircase could have been no older than early Renaissance. I was also surprised at how the main elements for celebration in several of the churches were long-dead popes - many being of very dubious morality - rather than the conventional symbols of Christianity.
Over the years since those teenage visits I have been in Rome on a number of further occasions - to collect data in the Italian Statistical Office, to give research seminars at the La Sapienza University, to visit friends, or just passing through for a few days en route to or from some other part of Italy. But Rome had never risen up my list of favourite Italian cities - in which Bologna, Venice and Verona (in alphabetical order) would hold the top places. [I should confess here that there are a number of major Italian cities that I have still not visited - Turin, Trieste, Genoa, Bari and Palermo being the most important.]
I have just spent a few days in Rome. And I am reappraising my position on the city. For the first time I have actually got to know an everyday neighbourhood and seen how ordinary life goes on among the big monuments and world-famous sights. I have used the local shops, caught the tram or the local bus, used the local restaurants, been greeted with 'Salve' (a rather nice ancient Roman greeting) instead of buon giorno. I have been asked directions by an Italian - which must be a sign of at least outwardly fitting in. And in the case of the neighbourhood I have been in, I have seen how its inhabitants can almost completely ignore the presence of the Colosseum on one corner. I have been reminded of a study in Paris some years ago carried out by the famous (or infamous?) psychologist Stanley Milgram, with the assistance of a local researcher named Jodelet where they found that people living in the 7th arrondissement, when asked to draw mental maps of their district, all left out the Eiffel Tower - the dominant feature of the quartier to most outsiders. I'm sure an analogous project in Rome would find something similar in many neighbourhoods.
But on this recent visit I have also got to know other parts of the city better - by not just walking between major monuments but also by using the excellent bus and tram system to get into new areas (for me) and exploring the back streets in ways I didn't do when I first visited. The juxtaposition of different historical elements is more comprehensible to me now, and it is delightful to spot the remains of Roman aqueducts or walls sitting incongruously between more modern constructions. But I have got to the feel of the everyday city - whether in the more middle class districts in the north-east or in the working-class (but gentrifying) parts of Trastevere.
There are, of course, many more tourists than there were in the late 1960s, and in some areas the hustling for their custom is obtrusive (as in many other cities). But even in Campo dei Fiori (a street market that is increasingly given over to tourist souvenirs) we had an excellent lunch in the company of Italians inside the restaurant (the seats outside seemed reserved for foreign tourists, and it may be that their food was not quite so lovingly prepared).
Nothing can change the Catholic history of Rome, and I note that 'pope-olatry' is still alive and well. At the Basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura a portrait of the present pope is continuously floodlit, but a €2 coin has to be inserted to light up the ancient mosaic of Christ in the apse. But on this visit I was not rushing from church to church, monument to monument, and perhaps I have become more mellow in the face of extreme Catholicism than I was as a teenager. I did have a chuckle at the church of St Agnes on Piazza Navona, though. The myth goes that Agnes was castigated (and ultimately martyred) for refusing to marry at the age of 13, so the fact that the background music playing in the church featured the wedding marches by both Mendelssohn and Wagner seemed particularly inappropriate. I tried to relive one of my teenage experiences in the city, when I would buy a couple of peaches for lunch (part of that campaign to spend less than £1 per day) and go to eat them under Bernini's colonnade surrounding St Peter's Square. But today, under the dual pressures of tourists and terrorism, one cannot enter the colonnade without being searched in the expectation of visiting the basilica itself.
Ultimately I realise that on this visit I have spent as much time in 'ordinary' areas of the city as around the big monuments (I didn't visit the Colosseum, or the forum, or St Peter's, or the Piazza del Popolo etc. etc.) - and my experience of Rome has been all the better for that. Perhaps I need to try that strategy out in other cities that have not hitherto been my favourites.
Yes: I was hugely impressed by many of the things I saw - the Roman forum, the remains of the Caracalla Baths, the Colosseum, St Peter's Square, the Sistine Chapel, Piazza Navona and so on. But these were individual sites separated by swathes of hot, dusty pavements in the middle of August. Without a good map, I generally stuck to the main avenues linking the monuments and churches.
And looking back I realise two further things. Firstly I didn't know enough history (despite an A level in the subject) to put everything together (and my guide book was too small to even try to do so). And secondly I suppose I was dismayed by aspects of the religiosity of many of the places I visited. An uncle who had fought his way up Italy during the war had warned me about a land of 'fat priests and thin peasants', and the wealth and opulence of many of the major churches and basilicas I visited seemed totally over-the-top, given my protestant Methodist upbringing, and given also the obvious poverty of many of the neighbourhoods within which they stood. I was particularly appalled by a visit to the Scala Santa - supposedly the staircase from Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem which Christ had climbed before his interrogation and flagellation, and which devout elderly pilgrims, most of them clearly of peasant stock, were climbing on their knees before making financial offerings to the church. In reality the staircase could have been no older than early Renaissance. I was also surprised at how the main elements for celebration in several of the churches were long-dead popes - many being of very dubious morality - rather than the conventional symbols of Christianity.
Over the years since those teenage visits I have been in Rome on a number of further occasions - to collect data in the Italian Statistical Office, to give research seminars at the La Sapienza University, to visit friends, or just passing through for a few days en route to or from some other part of Italy. But Rome had never risen up my list of favourite Italian cities - in which Bologna, Venice and Verona (in alphabetical order) would hold the top places. [I should confess here that there are a number of major Italian cities that I have still not visited - Turin, Trieste, Genoa, Bari and Palermo being the most important.]
I have just spent a few days in Rome. And I am reappraising my position on the city. For the first time I have actually got to know an everyday neighbourhood and seen how ordinary life goes on among the big monuments and world-famous sights. I have used the local shops, caught the tram or the local bus, used the local restaurants, been greeted with 'Salve' (a rather nice ancient Roman greeting) instead of buon giorno. I have been asked directions by an Italian - which must be a sign of at least outwardly fitting in. And in the case of the neighbourhood I have been in, I have seen how its inhabitants can almost completely ignore the presence of the Colosseum on one corner. I have been reminded of a study in Paris some years ago carried out by the famous (or infamous?) psychologist Stanley Milgram, with the assistance of a local researcher named Jodelet where they found that people living in the 7th arrondissement, when asked to draw mental maps of their district, all left out the Eiffel Tower - the dominant feature of the quartier to most outsiders. I'm sure an analogous project in Rome would find something similar in many neighbourhoods.
But on this recent visit I have also got to know other parts of the city better - by not just walking between major monuments but also by using the excellent bus and tram system to get into new areas (for me) and exploring the back streets in ways I didn't do when I first visited. The juxtaposition of different historical elements is more comprehensible to me now, and it is delightful to spot the remains of Roman aqueducts or walls sitting incongruously between more modern constructions. But I have got to the feel of the everyday city - whether in the more middle class districts in the north-east or in the working-class (but gentrifying) parts of Trastevere.
There are, of course, many more tourists than there were in the late 1960s, and in some areas the hustling for their custom is obtrusive (as in many other cities). But even in Campo dei Fiori (a street market that is increasingly given over to tourist souvenirs) we had an excellent lunch in the company of Italians inside the restaurant (the seats outside seemed reserved for foreign tourists, and it may be that their food was not quite so lovingly prepared).
Nothing can change the Catholic history of Rome, and I note that 'pope-olatry' is still alive and well. At the Basilica of San Paolo Fuori le Mura a portrait of the present pope is continuously floodlit, but a €2 coin has to be inserted to light up the ancient mosaic of Christ in the apse. But on this visit I was not rushing from church to church, monument to monument, and perhaps I have become more mellow in the face of extreme Catholicism than I was as a teenager. I did have a chuckle at the church of St Agnes on Piazza Navona, though. The myth goes that Agnes was castigated (and ultimately martyred) for refusing to marry at the age of 13, so the fact that the background music playing in the church featured the wedding marches by both Mendelssohn and Wagner seemed particularly inappropriate. I tried to relive one of my teenage experiences in the city, when I would buy a couple of peaches for lunch (part of that campaign to spend less than £1 per day) and go to eat them under Bernini's colonnade surrounding St Peter's Square. But today, under the dual pressures of tourists and terrorism, one cannot enter the colonnade without being searched in the expectation of visiting the basilica itself.
Ultimately I realise that on this visit I have spent as much time in 'ordinary' areas of the city as around the big monuments (I didn't visit the Colosseum, or the forum, or St Peter's, or the Piazza del Popolo etc. etc.) - and my experience of Rome has been all the better for that. Perhaps I need to try that strategy out in other cities that have not hitherto been my favourites.
