Italy Part 4: South to Rome

You're never far from a church, in the old centre of Rome.

We took the train from Florence to Rome, a Red Arrow service fully the match of any long-distance train I’ve used in Europe. Arrival at Termini was followed by a laborious, exhausting, panting, suitcase-dragging trek to a hotel further away than it looked on the map. I say ‘hotel’ – it was originally just an apartment in a fairly modern block. The bedrooms were a good size, and each had its own bathroom. Sadly they weren’t adjoining (en suite, as the daytime TV programmes put it), and a night-time pee meant opening and shutting doors as silently as possible and crossing the common corridor – and the need for some form of clothing.

Detail of the Colosseum. The brick reinforcement on the left was added in the 19th century. An earthquake of 1349 led to the collapse of much of the outer wall, and the whole site was used as a quarry for building materials for many centuries.

I’ve been to Rome many times. I can’t claim to be a Rome expert. My travelling companion knows a lot more about it than I do. But I can find my way around.

In a ten-day visit, It’s impossible to absorb more than a tiny fraction of the variety of Rome’s historic art and architecture. Charles Dickens wrote about the city in his ‘Pictures from Italy’. After describing some of the ‘holy’ relics housed in many of the churches, he says:

‘The rest is a vast wilderness of consecrated buildings of all shapes and fancies, blending one with another; of battered pillars of old Pagan temples, dug up from the ground and forced, like giant captives, to support the roofs of Christian churches; of pictures, bad, and wonderful, and impious, and ridiculous; of kneeling people, curling incense, tinkling bells, and sometimes (but not often) of a swelling organ; of Madonne, with their breasts stuck full of swords, arranged in a half-circle like a modern fan; of actual skeletons of dead saints, hideously attired in gaudy satins, silks, and velvets trimmed with gold: their withered crust of skull adorned with precious jewels, or with chaplets of crushed flowers; sometimes, of people gathered round the pulpit, and a monk within it stretching out the crucifix, and preaching fiercely: the sun just streaming down through some high window on the sail-cloth stretched above him and across the church, to keep his high-pitched voice from being lost among the echoes of the roof. Then my tired memory comes out upon a flight of steps, where knots of people are asleep, or basking in the light; and strolls away, among the rags, and smells, and palaces, and hovels, of an old Italian street.

Pope Francis doing his stuff of a Sunday morning. The window is quite distant, seen from the Piazza, and you need a longer telephoto lens than anything I had in the bag.

Above (all three): frescoes on the ceiling and dome of Il Gesu, the mother church of the Jesuits.
Over-the-top literally and aesthetically, but quite spectacular.

Detail of Bernini's 'Four Rivers' fountain in Piazza Navona. This is the River Plate.

Religion’s lost much of its hold these days, and anyway most of modern Rome was developed well after Charles Dickens’s time. Outside the historic core, a lot of it looks like any other big Italian city. But it’s not hard to make a connection between his account and what you see today. Perhaps one of the differences is the vast number of foreign tourists. Dickens describes tourists in Rome in satirical terms, but in the 19^th century there were not that many of them. On a Sunday morning, when today’s Pope makes his appearance at the Vatican balcony to bless the crowd, I would judge that Italians are a relatively small minority. The impact of mass tourism is everywhere, with vast quantities of globalized tourist tat indistinguishable from the stuff you see in London. Made in China or wherever, certainly not in Italy.

Mosaic decoration in Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome  (1140-43).

Of course, those parts of Rome dating back to the Renaissance and mediaeval times, not to mention ‘Ancient Rome’, carry the most potent historical message. But many of the streets we now see as typically Italian were built in the late 19^th or early 20^th centuries. Nevertheless they are sufficiently different from their London contemporaries that we see them as ‘typically Italian’, particularly those big apartment buildings planned around a courtyard with a grand, communal street entrance, generally with a formal classical façade.

Tourism is getting bigger all the time.

Prices have shot up. In the early seventies you could get a pretty good lunch with wine for around 3000 lire. Rome was cheap. Now the prices are comparable with London, much of the décor homogenized vaguely international, and the quality not always reliable. A bit like Paris in this respect. I’m very much in favour of the UK’s membership of the European Union, but the Euro currency is a different thing: almost anyone in Rome will tell you of the sneaky price increases that took place on the transition from the Lira to the common European currency. The same thing happened in the UK, although perhaps not as brazenly, when we moved from pounds, shillings and pence to decimal currency.

Mass tourism, destroying the very target of its attentions.