A cosmopolitan city once more, Rome’s immigrants come from all over the world: from South America to Eastern Europe, and from the Philippines and Bangladesh and Eritrea. Some arrivals have made the perilous sea journey from Libya, just across the Mediterranean from Sicily. As it has been many times in the past, Rome is a city full of soldiers, who guard government buildings, embassies and piazzas against the latest perceived threat of terrorism. In February 2015, ISIS militants in Libya posted online their intention of descending on Rome.
Yet if Rome has changed greatly since it was liberated in 1944, the city centre has not. Mussolini’s unfinished projects – the Via della Conciliazione, the area around the Tomb Augustus and E-42 (now EUR) – were completed after the war (often by the same architects who began them, and who managed to leap from the sinking ship of Fascism just in time) and the Ara Pacis is enclosed by a new and controversial building by the American architect Richard Meier. Otherwise, though, hardly a brick has changed.
In consequence, though few tourists realize it, the Rome they see is very much Mussolini’s Rome. The main roads they find noisy include Mussolini’s boulevards that bulldozed their way through old neighbourhoods. If they look closely they will find Fascist insignia everywhere. Occasionally the fasces have been scratched out, leaving telltale outlines, but often even these remain intact and there are Fascist eagles and Anno Fascisti dates by the hundred. The facade of the former GIL youth organization centre in Trastevere still has its Fascist slogan: NECESSARIO VINCERE PIV NECESSARIO COMBATTERE. The Senior Judicial Advisory Office has a helmeted Mussolini above each window and in EUR a frieze still depicts Mussolini sitting proudly on a horse. By Foro Olimpico – formerly the Foro Mussolini – Roma and Lazio football fans make their way to the stadium beneath the 300-ton obelisk that still proclaims MUSSOLINI DUX.
Is this wrong? Perhaps a little. In Germany, Nazi insignia have been carefully removed. True, Mussolini’s regime was far less murderous than those of Hitler or Stalin, yet Italian Fascism is often treated lightly precisely because of this comparison. If it had existed in a calmer age its crimes would seem more shocking. A little disturbingly, in view of how badly Mussolini let his country down, some Italians feel nostalgia for the Fascist era, regarding it as a time when life, if not perfect, was easier, better organized and safer. As well as impracticable, it would be wrong for Fascist Rome to be erased, as it should be present in Rome’s historical layers, but there is a case for some of the more ostentatious monuments to be pulled down a peg or two. Perhaps they could be surrounded by another, even newer layer of Rome, in the form of a little disrespectful street art.
After two and a half millennia of floods, earthquakes, fires, plagues, sieges, attacks and political urban planning it is remarkable what has survived in Rome. Treasures have been preserved from the era of each sacking we have looked at. In the Capitoline Museum you can still see the foundations of the temple to Jupiter Best and Greatest that dominated the city’s skyline when Brennus and his Gauls attacked in 387 BC. In the Villa Giulia Etruscan Museum you can see the beautiful terracotta statue of Apollo that once decorated a temple in Rome’s first rival, Veii.
You can still see most of the Aurelian Wall that failed to keep out Alaric and his Visigoths in 410. You can cross the Bridge of Cestius by the Tiber Island that was built in Cicero’s time when the Roman Republic was fighting to survive. You can see classical temples, the remnants of the city’s great baths – of Caracalla, of Diocletian and Trajan – along with the ruins of Domitian’s Palace on the Palatine, Augustus’ tomb, and his exquisite Temple to Peace. And of course there is the greatest pagan Roman temple of them all: the Pantheon, which remains little changed from when it was built, almost nineteen centuries ago. Though the first St Peter’s is long gone, other churches from this early time still stand, including Santa Costanza, whose mosaics of rural scenes and staring blue faces catch the moment when paganism was melting away before Christianity.
You can see churches that were new when Totila’s Ostrogoths broke into the city, such as Santa Maria Maggiore and the exquisite Santa Sabina, which, after sixteen centuries, still has its original carved wooden doors. You can see the Asinarian Gate beside which Isaurians shimmied down a rope to let Totila’s army into Rome. A kilometre to the south-west you can walk through the Porta Latina above which Robert Guiscard’s soldiers slipped quietly into the city.
Of the Rome that existed in 1527 numerous medieval towers remain, though they can be hard to spot, as many have become merged with later blocks of housing. A few, like that of the Casa di Dante in Trastevere, remain much as they once were: standing on the corner of a medieval town house around a courtyard. Also in Trastevere you can find poky medieval homes with their telltale staircases on the outside. Near the Colosseum you can visit Paschal II’s magnificent revenge church, San Clemente, and if you descend into the deep excavations beneath you can see the remains of the church of his hated anti-pope predecessor, Clement III, along with – deeper again – a temple to Mithras and rooms from the town house of a wealthy classical Roman, who was probably also an early Christian. In the Castel Sant’Angelo you can visit the papal apartments where Benvenuto Cellini melted down Pope Clement’s golden tiaras. And of course there are Renaissance churches, palaces and, greatest of all, the Sistine Chapel.
Of the Rome that Garibaldi defended in 1849 it is hard to know where to begin as so much has survived. This is the Rome visitors are usually most conscious of with its fountains, its Renaissance and Baroque facades, its great parks, and of course St Peter’s and its square, encompassed by Bernini’s vast curved colonnades. Less often noticed are the images of the Madonna and clouds of cherubs that look down from almost every street corner, most of which appeared under the ultra-conservative popes of the early nineteenth century. Also overlooked are the sixteenth-century city walls that Garibaldi defended, whose damage during the French bombardment has been carefully repaired.
As we have just seen, almost every inch of Fascist Rome has survived. The Romans have even preserved mementos of the Nazi occupation. Look up at the walls of apartment blocks on Via Rasella and you will see small holes left by the shrapnel from the Gappisti bomb and by bullets fired up by the German soldiers. The city’s Gestapo headquarters on Via Tasso – where members of Rome’s resistance, Allied prisoners of war and some Jewish Romans were subjected to terrible tortures – has been preserved as a museum.
There are also less visible vestiges of the city’s long past, such as the Romans’ distinctive way of viewing the world. This is not always praiseworthy. After two thousand years of handouts Romans can be tough, fatalistic, and eager to catch whatever pennies chance sends their way. Some are downright corrupt. In 2014 a huge scandal was uncovered that became known as Mafia Capitale, in which city contracts were awarded to shell companies and hundreds of millions of euros of taxpayers’ money was stolen.
But the Romans are also very warm. For a city of three million people Rome can be an astonishingly friendly place that feels more like a village than a metropolis, and where everybody seems to know everybody else by their first name. Having been subjected to twenty centuries of imperial, papal, royal and Fascist self-aggrandizement Romans possess, as we have seen, a finely tuned sense of scepticism. Millennia of ups and downs have also given them their particular brand of cynical humour. One of its latest manifestations came in 2015 when ISIS Islamists in Libya announced their intention to descend on the city. Romans replied on Twitter with pictures of traffic jams, warning ISIS of transport strikes, or telling them, Let us know when you’ll get here and how many you’ll be so we can put the pasta on.1
Romans love grumbling and frequently complain that Rome is chaotic, that nothing works, and praise other places – almost anywhere will do – where they are certain everything is far better. Yet scratch a little and you will find that Romans are immensely proud of their city. As they should be.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WOULD LIKE to thank the libraries of Rome
and their librarians. I have spent many happy days researching in the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Library of the American Academy, the Library of the British School at Rome, the American Studies Centre, the Biblioteca di storia e contemporanea di Roma and the Deutsches Historiches Institut in Rom.
I would like to thank my agent, Georgia Garrett, and Will Atkinson and James Nightingale at Atlantic for their hard work to make a success of this book, and Margaret Stead for first having had faith in it. I would like to thank Matteo Canale, Tom Govero, Robert Twigger and Andrew Nadeau for their invaluable advice on the text. Most of all I would like to thank my wife Shannon and our children Alexander and Tatiana for putting up with my obsession with this city, which has become our home.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© LIANA MIUCCIO
Matthew Kneale was born in London in 1960, the son and grandson of writers. He studied Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. Fascinated with diverse cultures, he travelled to more than eighty countries and tried his hand at learning a number of foreign languages, including Japanese, Ethiopian Amharic, Romanian and Albanian. He has written five novels, including English Passengers, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year, and one previous work of non-fiction, An Atheist’s History of Belief. For the last fifteen years he has lived in Rome with his wife and two children.
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NOTES
Chapter One
1. Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (1960)
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
Chapter Two
1. 1. Eugene Dollman, Un Libero Schiavo (1968)
2. avid Karmon, The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome (2011)
3. rom Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints (1982)
4. Zozimus, A New History, Book V, Green and Chaplin (1814)
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. IX, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 2, trans. Chester D. Hartranft (1890)
10. Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Book III, The Vandalic War, trans. H.B Dewing (1916)
11. Ibid.
12. Jerome, Letter CXXVII (To Principia) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6, trans. W.H. Freemantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley (1893)
13. Orosius, A History Against the Pagans, Vol. 7
14. Ibid.
15. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, Vol. IX, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 2, trans. Chester D. Hartranft (1890)
16. Jerome, Letter CXXVII (To Principia) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6, trans. W.H. Freemantle, G. Lewis and W.G. Martley (1893)
17. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1966)
Chapter Three
1. Procopius of Caesarea, The Anecdota or Secret History, The Loeb Classic Library No. 290, trans. H.B. Dewing (1935)
2. Ibid.
3. Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, Letter, from Bryan Ward-Perkins, From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy, AD 300–850 (Oxford Historical Monographs) (1984)
4. Procopius of Caesarea, A History of the Wars, Vol. VI, xviii, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H.B. Dewing (1924)
5. Procopius of Caesarea, A History of the Wars, Vol. VI, xxv, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H.B. Dewing (1924)
6. Procopius of Caesarea, History of the Wars, Vol. II, xxii, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H.B. Dewing (1916)
7. Ibid.
8. Procopius of Caesarea, A History of the Wars, Vol. VII, xvii, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H.B. Dewing (1924)
9. Procopius of Caesarea, A History of the Wars, Vol. VII, xix, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H.B. Dewing (1924)
10. Ibid.
11. Procopius of Caesarea, A History of the Wars, Vol. VII, xx, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H. B. Dewing (1924)
12. Ibid.
13. Procopius of Caesarea, A History of the Wars, Vol. VII, xxii, Loeb Classic Library, trans. H.B. Dewing (1924)
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Paul the Deacon, History of the Langobards, trans. William Dudley Foulke (1907)
Chapter Four
1. The Annals of Lambert of Hersfeld, trans. G.A. Loud, Leeds History in Translation Website, Leeds University (2004)
2. Ibid.
3. William of Malmesbury, from G.A. Loud: The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest.
4. Amatus of Montecassino, from G.A. Loud, Conquerors and Churchmen in Norman Italy, in Variorum Collected Studies series, July 1999
5. Geoffrey of Malaterra, The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert Guiscard, trans. Kenneth Baxter Woolf, Michigan (2005)
6. Letter 18, of Henry IV, From Imperial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century, trans. Theodor E. Mommsen and Karl F. Morrison (1962)
7. Geoffrey Malaterra, The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert Guiscard, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf (2005)
8. Ibid.
9. William of Apulia, The Deeds of Robert Guiscard, trans. G.A. Loud (1096–99)
10. Geoffrey Malaterra, The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert Guiscard, trans. Kenneth Baxter Wolf (2005)
Chapter Five
1. From Dr Ludwig Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages (1923)
2. Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome, trans. James H. McGregor (1993)
3. Ibid.
4. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Anthony Bull (1956)
5. Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome, trans. James H. McGregor (1993)
6. I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, Vol. LXV (1902) p. 167
7. I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, Vol. XLI (1902) pp. 129–31
8. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Anthony Bull (1956)
9. I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, Vol. LXV (1902) p165–7
10. I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, Vol. XLV (1902) p133
11. Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome, trans. James H. McGregor (1993)
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Judith Hook, The Sack of Rome (1972)
16. I Diarii di Marino Sanuto, Vol. XLI (1902) p. 129–31
17. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, trans. George Anthony Bull (1956)
18. Ibid.
Chapter Six
1. John Francis Maguire, Rome: Its Rulers and its Institutions (1858)
2. Margaret Fuller in These Sad but Glorious Days: Dispatches from Europe 1846–50, eds Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (1991) disp
atch 22 December 1848
3. Margaret Fuller in These Sad but Glorious Days: Dispatches from Europe 1846–50, eds Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (1991) dispatch 20 February 1849
4. Hortense Cornu, quoted from Fenton Bresler, Napoleon III: A Life (1999)
5. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, letter to Thomas Moore, 25 March 1817
6. From J.A. Hilton, A Sign of Contradiction: English Travellers and the Fall of Papal Rome (2010)
7. William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (1863)
8. John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, third edition (1853)
9. William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (1863)
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Notebooks, 1858
11. Ruskin quotes from ‘ “It was dirty but it was Rome”, Dirt, Digression and the Picturesque’, in Richard Wrigley, Regarding Romantic Rome (2007)
12. William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (1863)
13. Mrs Hamilton Gray, Tour of the Sepulchres of Etruria, London 1840
14. Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846)
15. Sir George Head, Rome: A Tour of Many Days (1849)
16. Ibid.
17. Lady Morgan, Italy (1821)
18. Nathaniel, from eds Paolo Ludovici and Biancamaria Pisapia, Americans in Rome 1764–1870 (1984)
19. Sir George Head, Rome: A Tour of Many Days (1849).
20. Odo Russell in Noel Blakiston, The Roman Question: Extracts from the Despatches of Odo Russell from Rome 1858–70 (1962)
21. From Fiorello Bartoccini, Roma nell’Ottocento: Il tramonto della “Città Santa”: nascita di una Capitale (1985)
22. John Murray, Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, third edition (1853)
23. William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (1863)
24. Ibid.
25. From Susan Vandiver Nicassio, Imperial City: Rome under Napoleon (2005)
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