Let’s indulge in some fairly conservative arithmetic. In 509 BC, the Roman Republic was founded, which makes it at least 2,514 years that the city of Rome has been around. Discounting leap years, that equals 917,610 days, and no city can have lived a richer, fuller life in that time. ‘Tis a sad fact but true: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it can’t be seen in two.
But it can be experienced. The spirit of Rome is not a skittery, shy little thing, to be excavated only after relentless burrowing in little-known quarters of the city. It is an explosive, generous force, and if it doesn’t slap you across the face as soon as you walk out of the airport, it will certainly ambush you at its monuments, in its cafés, on its sidewalks, in its museums, in its churches. For that, 48 hours is plenty.
Getting around
Fortunately, not much of that limited time need be spent travelling. Rome is a big city, but many of its most prominent sights are clustered together, and if the buses are full, there’s always the underground rail. But in our grand quest To Know Rome, the best plan of action is to hire a scooter and buy a good city map. With a passport to confirm your age and a small deposit to confirm your solvency, anybody can rent a Vespa and have themselves a little Roman Holiday.
The Roman roads admittedly take some getting used to. It will, for the first couple of hours, seem as if the entire city has taken upon itself the task of forcing you onto the sidewalk, into the river, or simply into a premature demise, but that is mere paranoia; in reality, only about a third of the city is engaged in that task.
Once on your scooter, and once your heart has stopped doing a couple of thousand beats a minute, you can park in a quiet nook and debate the possibilities: shopping versus history. Rome’s streets are lined with global brands and boutiques, and it undoubtedly adds a certain je-ne-sais-quoi if you can point out that your Prada handbag was bought in Rome. But with only two days at hand, with Prada all over the place and on the Internet anyway, and with a city like Rome in front of you, the unpopular choice must be made. There is, let us remember, only one Pantheon/St Peters/Forum/Sistine Chapel, so history hopping is inevitable, even for self-affirmed avoiders of dusty monuments and endless museums. Over two mornings, then, the two best places to head for are the centrepieces of Rome’s two proudest eras — the Classical and the Renaissance.
Pagan days
In every sense, the heart of Ancient Rome was its Forum, now a higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of ruins that fire up the imagination so easily. Enough is left for the mind’s eye to Photoshop in the rest, to envision the temples to Jupiter, Saturn, Castor and Pollux, and Vesta in their complete majesty. For the less imaginative, there’s either the memory of Gladiator or the ever-present smooth-talkin’, dapper-lookin’, tourist-fleecin’ tour guides. They probably don’t know as much as that plump Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire sitting in your backpack, but let’s face it — you’re never going to navigate cracked marble, dodge Japanese tourists, and read up Page 374 on Septimus Severus at the same time. Much better to hand yourself over meekly to the guides and allow yourself to be told, charmingly if somewhat inaccurately, that slaves manually drained the marshy ground for the Forum to be built. (In fact, it was drained by the Cloaca Maxima, or the ‘Great Sewer’.)
Follow the Via Sacra from the Forum and you’ll come to the Colosseum, where again the spirits of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe hover gently above your shoulder to nudge your imagination. There were many such arenas in Ancient Greece and Rome, and although a number of those still exist in much better condition, Rome’s Colosseum remains the Colosseum; if anything, its incompleteness adds to its imperious grandness. Half of its outer wall has been snatched off, as if by a giant bite, and with the floor gone, a warren of tunnels, which was used to house animals and slaves before fights, looms menacingly below a modern metalled walkway.
Christian centre
Much less menace about Rome’s other historical showpiece — the Vatican and St Peter’s Cathedral. To walk into that giant piazza in front of St Peter’s is to walk into symbols of Christianity’s embracing arms, with two gigantic colonnades by Bernini, on either side, welcoming you into the fold. Bernini was the prototypical Baroque sculptor, and there was a majestic, graceful solidity about all his work; inside St Peter’s itself is Bernini’s bronze Baldacchino, a twisted canopy over the altar that rises up, gloriously tortured, towards the heavens.
Apart from the main nave and apse of St Peter’s, with Michelangelo’s Pieta on the right wall, the Vatican’s star attraction is undoubtedly the Sistine Chapel, with Michelangelo’s monumental Last Judgement fresco and his phenomenal ceiling panels, and wall paintings by Perugino, Sandro Botticelli and Ghirlandaio. The Sistine Chapel is a veritable storehouse of Renaissance and Mannerist masterpieces, a riot of colour and form by people who knew colour and form like the backs of their hands.
Or so they tell me. In a cruel twist of fate, after wandering around the piazza all morning, I reached the gates of the Sistine Chapel at 12.45pm, only to be told that admission closed at 12.30pm on Saturdays. This was a lesson harshly but duly learned; every place of interest will have its own set timings, and siesta time is accorded prime importance. Apart from all the guidebooks on the market, websites like Enjoy Rome (www.enjoyrome.com) include timings and entry fees of all major sightseeing locations; if there’s any homework at all to do be done before hitting Rome, this is it.
The way to the heart
Having not done that homework, as all good little tourists should, I had to content myself with eating lunch at the trattoria opposite the Sistine Chapel, which brings us rather nicely to my own personal favourite method of experiencing Rome. But perhaps that should come as no big surprise; if anybody knows how to eat, it’s the Italians, and Rome in particular has converted dining into an extended social fete. Sidewalks are intended more for tables to spill outdoors than for walking, buskers constantly yodel out the merits of this café versus the other, and the Italians I ended up talking to the most were solicitous, friendly restaurant owners.
Rome has its own unique vein of cuisine, and specialities that it is intensely and rightly proud of — spaghetti carbonara, with its rich sauce of eggs, bacon and pecorino cheese; oxtail; artichokes, fried or boiled; breaded, deep-fried fillets of cod; the famous, divine Roman saltimbocca, a veal cutlet with prosciutto, sage and marsala wine. Make sure to eat at as many sidewalk restaurants as you can. There’s no better way to observe Rome and Romans than to gaze glassy-eyed on a teeming piazza, in the midst of vociferous conversations at high decibels, with a carafe of house wine and a platter of pasta on the table in front of you.
Do as they do
Rome has a thriving nightlife, but there’s nothing too Roman about an Irish-replica pub, even if it is filled with Italians. Instead, in the late evening, make for the Piazza Navona, with Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain rearing proudly up in the centre. On some nights, a laser show lights up the marble façades of the surrounding buildings, which most Romans proceed to wilfully ignore; instead, they will thread through flower sellers, souvenir vendors and fortune tellers, looking for old friends or even new acquaintances to jaw the night away. Buy yourself a gelato, sit on a bench, and look; there’s a little more mousse in the hair, a little less toga on the body, but otherwise, in manner and in character, this could well be a square in Ancient Rome. In 917,610 days, Rome has changed; Romans, though, seem to have remained delightfully the same.
Helpful hotel touts
It’s sound enough advice in any big city, but particularly in Rome. If you’re looking for clean budget accommodation, you’ll find it near the main railway station, Roma Termini. Passengers coming off trains are actually met by hotel touts, but they’re less avaricious than touts elsewhere. Instead of plugging one hotel and assuring you that $2,000 per night will be well worth it, these agents ask for your budget, match it up against a list of nearby hotels and hostels, steer you towards a taxi, and direct the driver to his destination. Be sure to pick a hotel that includes breakfast in the tariff; when you’ve been dodging mad drivers and walking up and down the Seven Hills all day, you’ll be glad you had that extra croissant with Nutella in the morning.