NO OTHER European city can be compared with Rome. For none has enjoyed so long – or absolute – a pre-eminence. Founded, it is said, by Romulus and Remus in the eighth century BC, Rome gradually came to dominate its neighbours, a monarchy succeeded by the republic. Rome’s territorial ambitions, in Gaul and elsewhere, were matched by the steady expansion of the great walled conurbation that sprawled over the seven hills between which the Tiber curves so majestically. Caesar’s astute nephew Octavian became, as Augustus, an emperor who ruled the Mediterranean and beyond, and Rome was vastly enriched under him and his successors. The Emperor Constantine (AD 306–37), who recognized Christianity as the official religion of the empire, transferred his capital to Byzantium, but Rome remained the seat of what was to become the western empire, her importance reinforced by the spiritual primacy of the bishops of Rome, the popes.
The western empire was effectively destroyed when Rome was sacked by Alaric the Goth in 410. But Rome remained the seat of the papacy and a major place of pilgrimage. Roman monuments which had been adapted to Christian purposes, or – like the great girdle of the city walls – remained of use, survived while others mouldered. Major religious buildings continued to be constructed and adorned, their design and decoration echoing in varying ways that of classical Rome or Christian Byzantium. The medieval papacy was a great power in western European political life, and from the fifteenth century a new age of construction began, driven largely by the aspirations of successive popes and their families, della Rovere and Borgia, Medici and Farnese in the Renaissance, Borghese and Pamphilj among others in the Seicento. Despite the more quiescent role of the papacy in the eighteenth century, Rome remained a major cultural centre where artists and archaeologists made vital contributions to the nascent neoclassical movement. The French invasion of 1798 was followed by a generation of Gallic bureaucracy, but in 1815 papal rule was reinstated. In 1871 Rome became the capital of the new kingdom of Italy, but it was only with the Concordat of 1929 that state and church were reconciled. Strict conservation rules have meant that the exponential growth of recent decades has largely spared the heart of the ancient city.
Rome, it is said, was not built in a day. The visitor with less than a month on his hands, as I had on my first visit in 1966, has to be selective. He would be advised to stay in the centre of the town, ideally near the Pantheon. And if you want to see the key sights, you must go off-season, in November perhaps or February. The Vatican in particular is not to be ventured at busy times. The layers of Rome are impacted, the ancient inextricably entwined with the modern – which in Roman terms means the post-imperial. Yet to some extent, it does make sense to take in the ancient and the modern cities separately, rather as the watercolourist Samuel Palmer did, surveying the first from the Capitol and the second from a point above the Piazza del Popolo where most visitors from the north traditionally arrived.
There is still no better way to get your bearings than to enter through the Porta del Popolo and find yourself in the piazza that owes its present form to the great neoclassical architect Giuseppe Valadier, confronted by the great Flaminian obelisk, with the paired churches flanking the central Corso beyond. But pause to enter the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. At close quarters there are works by Pinturicchio, by Raphael, by the sculptor Sansovino and by three of the great spirits of post-Renaissance Italian painting, Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio and Maratta.
From the piazza, the Corso – where Dickens saw the carnival crowds being bombarded with sugar plums – runs straight, lined by the façades of churches and palaces. In a piazza on the right is the triumphal column of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who died in AD 180, with the unfolding bas-relief of his campaigns in North Africa. The Corso debouches in the Piazza di Venezia, with the Renaissance Palazzo Venezia on the right, and, ahead, the Vittorio Emanuele Monument, the overblown pretension of which is shown up by the column below it commemorating the campaigns of a real conqueror, the Emperor Trajan. Leave this on the left and climb the great flight of steps to the Campidoglio. Ahead is the Palazzo Senatorio, with on either side the prodigious palaces that adhere more or less to Michelangelo’s design and are now museums. In the centre is a cast of the celebrated bronze equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius, preserved in the Christian era as it was thought to represent Constantine; the original has responsibly been moved to the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the right. The Capitoline Gallery in the same complex houses the outsize masterpiece of Guercino, the Martyrdom of Saint Petronilla completed in 1623, in which the young master from Cento proclaims himself one of the most brilliant artists of his century. The Palazzo Senatorio is more notable for its dramatic flight of steps. From the garden behind, look down on the Forum, the heart of ancient Rome, before returning to the Campidoglio itself to gaze over the centre of post-classical Rome, with its domes and roof terraces.
Trajan’s Column in the Forum of Trajan (107–13).
How you plan your Roman sightseeing must depend on opening hours – most churches close at 12 and only reopen after 4 – the availability of timed tickets to the Vatican museums and the Villa Borghese, for example, and of course the weather. There is a case for a chronological approach. Given a perfect morning, this might begin in the Forum, with the triumphal arches of Septimius Severus and Titus, and the Basilica of Maxentius which haunted Canaletto’s imagination long after his only visit. To the west is the ruin-strewn Palatine Hill, still a wonderfully atmospheric place to walk. Emerging at the southern exit of the Forum, you reach the most sophisticated of the triumphal arches of Rome, that of Constantine. The narrative reliefs are of particular distinction. The arch is dominated by the vast bulk of the Colosseum behind, more beautiful in ruin that it can ever have been in its original state. Nearby is the Domus Aurea, the ‘Golden House’ of the Emperor Nero, which is the best preserved of the palaces of ancient Rome and has recently been reopened. Ten minutes south-west of the Colosseum is the greatest of Rome’s thermal complexes, the brick Baths of Caracalla, prodigious in scale. One can walk back to the centre through the Circus of Maxentius, passing the splendid curved façade of the Theatre of Marcellus. If, at a later stage of your visit, you wish for a longer walk, make for Via Appia, the great Roman road south to Capua. From the Porta San Sebastiano a well-preserved section stretches southwards, shaded by pines. There are a number of Christian monuments, including the catacombs of Saints Calixtus and Sebastian, and numerous Roman tombs, some with portraits in high relief. The most celebrated is the Tomb of Caecilia Metella, which almost rivalled the vastly bigger Mausoleum of Hadrian, now the Castel Sant’Angelo, in popularity with landscape painters from the seventeenth century onwards.
The greatest single monument of classical Rome is the Pantheon, the wonderful porticoed domed rotunda built in 27 BC by Augustus’s associate, Agrippa. A miracle of structural engineering, with relieving arches that support a splendid coffered roof rising to the open central oculus, the Pantheon was appropriated by the Church and owes to this its remarkable state of preservation. Monuments to Raphael and to the kings of Italy, among others, sink into insignificance in the Pantheon’s majestic space. It is marvellous on a sunny day when a great beam of sunlight bursts through the oculus. Yet the place is perhaps more atmospheric when rain falls through it.
Via Appia Antica.
The Pantheon remains a pagan place. Yet the debt of the early Church to classical civilization cannot be overemphasized. One sees this in the fourth-century mosaics at Santa Costanza on the Via Nomentana, and in the great circular arcaded church of San Stefano Rotondo on the Coelian Hill. Nearby is Santi Quattro Coronati, with its wonderfully preserved frescoes of 1246, murals that draw much of their artistic sustenance from the long tradition of mosaics inspired by Byzantium. This tradition was never forgotten in Rome. It can be experienced still in the narrative compartments of the frieze of the great basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, and through the copies of the mosaics damaged in the tragic fire of 1823 in the second church of Rome, San Paolo fuori le Mura. It endured in the mosaic copies after the great masters of baroque Rome at St Peter’s.
But before visiting that greatest of Catholic shrines itself, the visitor should come to terms with the strata of Christian Rome. The many catacombs that can be visited reveal not only the confidence of the early Christians in their faith but also the fact that increasingly they were individuals of influence or wealth. These are moving places. I prefer the smaller complexes, such as Sant’Agnese near Santa Costanza east of the Porta Pia, where there are fewer visitors. At San Clemente, beyond the Colosseum, you can descend to the original church mentioned by Saint Jerome that underlies the existing medieval church with the frescoes by Masolino that heralded the arrival of what we now think of as the Florentine Renaissance in Rome.
There is, of course, no better way to explore Rome than on foot. Start perhaps in Trastevere, with the mosaic-fronted church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, where the mid-twelfth-century apse mosaics are true to the taste of Byzantium, while Pietro Cavallini’s narrative scenes below announce the revolution that was wrought in the last years of the following century. Hardly five minutes away is the church of Santa Cecilia, from the adjacent monastery of which – at certain hours – is accessible the extraordinary, if fragmentary, fresco of the Last Judgement of 1292 by Cavallini. Cavallini’s forms are true to the conventions he inherited, but have a largeness of scale and a humanity that paves the way for developments at Assisi and indeed parallels the art of Giotto. Beside Santa Maria in Trastevere a narrow street leads to the steps that mount to the church of San Pietro in Montorio on the hill above. To the right of the church is the small courtyard with Bramante’s diminutive tempietto, an exquisite microcosm of the architectural revolution of the late Quattrocento. In the church, on the right, is the chapel with frescoes of the Flagellation and prophets by the Venetian Sebastiano del Piombo, for whom Michelangelo supplied drawings. These too are revolutionary, challenging the Peruginesque conventions of earlier murals in the church.
On Sundays the churches of Trastevere are crowded, not least San Francesco a Ripa, a few minutes from Santa Cecilia, vaut le detour for Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s deeply moving statue of the Beata Ludovica Albertoni. Trastevere remains a working-class district. But it was not always so. A few minutes walk to the north is the Farnesina, the villa built by Agostino Chigi, a Sienese banker who employed a number of very distinguished artists in its decoration. Raphael’s Galatea is in a class of its own, but the frescoes of Sodoma and Baldassare Peruzzi are also impressive.
Bernini was the universal genius of seventeenth-century Rome – sculptor, painter, architect, impresario – and Borromini his equal in imagination. Neither should be studied in pedantic isolation, and a short walk helps to set their contribution in context. Set out early for the Porta Pia, the admirably astringent eastern gate designed by Michelangelo and built in 1561–4, which will happily outlive Sir Basil Spence’s nearby British Embassy, the travertine facings of which look like diseased concrete. Take the Via XX Settembre westwards towards the centre of Rome. After 600 metres, on the right, is Santa Susanna with, on the last altar to the left, Bernini’s celebrated Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, which epitomizes the fervency of Seicento Rome. In the morning light the very marble seems alive.
Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, portico, 1658–71
Michelangelo, Porta Pia, 1561–4.
Continue to the major crossing, the Quattro Fontane. As traffic roars nearby it is sobering to think that in the palace on the left, as recently as the 1920s, the daughter of the house, then Anna Maria Volpi, was regularly woken by the sound of sheep being driven along the cobbled street to market. On the far left corner is one of the architectural miracles of Rome, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, begun in 1637. The ingenious façade does not prepare you for the subtle movement of the elliptical space within. Further on, as if conceived in direct competition, is Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, built in 1658–61 for Cardinal Camillo Pamphilj. In the oval interior, marble and stucco are used to brilliant effect. On the first altar on the right is a moving late work (1676), the Death of Saint Francis Xavier, by the Genoese Giovanni Battista Gaulli, il Baciccio, who was the most dramatic painter of late baroque Rome. Heading on for the centre of the city, one route passes the Trevi Fountain, the baroque theatricality of which is evidently timeless in appeal.
The greatest of the fountains of Rome is Bernini’s stupendous Fontana dei Fiumi of 1651 in the centre of the Piazza Navona, west of the Pantheon, the successor of the Stadium of Domitian. The piazza, crowded now except in the early morning, is one of the most satisfying urban spaces in Italy, with its three fountains and the concave façade added by Borromini to Rinaldi’s Sant’Agnese in Agone on the west side.
The Piazza Navona is the ideal starting point for a circuit of churches which boast masterpieces that define the course of painting in Counter-Reformation Rome. Strike south for the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Three hundred metres west, on the north side, is the Chiesa Nuova, the church of the Oratorians. The vast ceiling was frescoed by Pietro Berretini da Cortona, Bernini’s only rival in the range of his gifts as both painter and architect. On the fourth altar to the left is the Visitation by Federico Barocci, a picture which profoundly moved the church’s austere founder, Saint Filippo Neri. Beyond, in the left transept, is Barocci’s incomparably lovely Presentation of the Virgin of 1594. On the high altar is a revered Madonna surrounded by cherubs and angels by Rubens, whose flanking groups of saints of 1606–8 express the artist’s excitement at receiving a major Roman commission.
Rubens admired Barocci but, as it happened, took little if any notice of the most revolutionary painter of the previous years in Rome, Michelangelo Merisi, il Caravaggio. Two hundred metres apart, to the north-east of the Piazza Navona, are two of Caravaggio’s most arresting works. Of these the later in date is the Madonna dei Pellegrini of 1605 at Sant’Agostino; the kneeling spectator looks up from the worn feet of the elderly peasants to the celestial purity of the Virgin. Caravaggio’s three canvasses in the chapel of Saint Matthew at San Luigi dei Francesi were painted between 1597 and 1602. Seeing these by artificial light we do not appreciate immediately how intelligently Caravaggio allowed for the natural illumination of a north-facing space. His majestic tenebrous compositions found classical reposts diagonally across the church in Domenichino’s frescoes of scenes from the life of Saint Cecilia, executed in 1616–17.
Why Domenichino’s was to be the defining influence of early Seicento Rome is well demonstrated at Sant’Andrea della Valle, hardly 400 metres away. Follow the south side of San Luigi and turn left on the Corso del Rinascimento. On the left is the sixteenth-century Palazzo della Sapienza; across the majestic courtyard is Sant’Ivo, most idiosyncratic of Borromini’s fantasies. There is little of fantasy in Rainaldi’s imposing façade of Sant’Andrea across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Inside, we are impelled to advance to the domed crossing, with Domenichino’s celebrated pendentives of the Evangelists (1621–8) and, above, Lanfranco’s luminous Paradise, finished in 1625. The vault of the presbytery was decorated in 1624–8 with scenes from the life of Saint Andrea by Domenichino, dynamic in their classicism and impressive in their narrative legibility. By comparison the large murals below by the Neapolitan Mattia Preti seem overwrought.
On leaving Sant’Andrea, follow the street to the right of the church until it ends and then turn left: fifty metres away is San Carlo ai Catinari. Domenichino’s Christian Virtues in the pendentives of the dome are of 1630; beautiful in colour, these are among the most satisfying creations of the Roman baroque. On leaving the church, turn left and left again to regain the Corso Vittorio Emanuele and make east for the Gesù, the main Roman church of the Jesuits, begun by Vignola and continued by Giacomo della Porta. The church might already have seemed somewhat old-fashioned when in 1672 Baciccio embarked on the decoration of the vault of the nave with the Triumph of the Name of Jesus, as well as the cupola and the tribune. The Genoese painter’s innate sense of drama, a sense fortified by experience of contemporary sculpture, animates what was by any standard an ambitious scheme.
The palaces of baroque Rome are less accessible than her churches. No tourist should fail, however, to see the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj on the Corso, entered from the Piazza del Collegio Romano. The Galleria is in a section of the palace reconstructed by Gabriele Valvassori in 1731–5 and contains the remarkable family collection, with major works by Titian, Caravaggio and Claude, as well as Velasquez’s arresting Portrait of Pope Innocent X (Pamphilj), the uncompromising realism of which inspired Francis Bacon, and Bernini’s more benign bust. For eighteenth-century visitors, the Galleria of the Palazzo Colonna, open less frequently, was a highlight of their Roman experience. And in its orchestration of pictures, notably landscapes, the Galleria still has no equal.
Rome boasts other remarkable collections of both sculptures and pictures. Pride of place must go to the Villa Borghese, built originally for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. It was redecorated for Marcantonio Borghese in the final decades of the Settecento by Antonio Asprucci. There was no pedantry in his neoclassicism, and the interiors he created constitute the perfect setting for a impressive dynastic collection. On the ground floor are the Roman marbles, outshone by a series of masterpieces by Bernini – of which the Apollo and Daphne is inevitably the most celebrated – and Canova’s horizontal Princess Pauline Borghese, Italian counterpart of Goya’s Duchess of Alba. Here too are the magnificent Caravaggios secured by the Borghese. Upstairs is the picture collection with two of the most significant milestones of the High Renaissance, Raphael’s Baglione Entombment, appropriated from Perugia, and Titian’s miraculous Sacred and Profane Love, both key early works of the artists.
Since 1929 the Vatican has theoretically been an independent state. Mussolini’s decision to open the Via del Conciliazione means that St Peter’s no longer takes the visitor by surprise. But the approach remains awe-inspiringly spectacular as the pilgrim or tourist advances into the vast piazza flanked by Bernini’s prodigious colonnades. Ahead is Maderno’s façade, finished in 1614, masking the church to which so many of his predecessors, including Bramante, Raphael and Sangallo, had contributed, crowned by the great dome begun by Michelangelo but completed by della Porta, who also built the two lower domes. Within, it is the baroque that dominates: Bernini’s baldachin; the mosaics after Domenichino, Sacchi, Maratta, Cortona and others; the sequence of papal tombs – among which Bernini’s to Popes Urban VIII and Alexander VII are of particular distinction. Canova’s monument to the last Stuarts in the left aisle was, rather touchingly, paid for by their kinsman King George IV. The tour parties inevitably cluster round Michelangelo’s peerless early Pietà.
The Vatican Museums are, even out of season, under siege. The new visitor centre is dire. But persevere. Most tourists head for the Sistine Chapel, where it is now virtually impossible to study, still less to enjoy, the frescoes by Perugino and his assistants, the epoch-making ceiling by Michelangelo or his great Last Judgement of the altar wall. It is easier to do justice to the equally cerebral frescoes in the Stanze di Raffaelo, commissioned like Michelangelo’s ceiling by Pope Julius II; the School of Athens is perhaps Raphael’s most extraordinary achievement. The force of numbers means, alas, that one can no longer enter the small chapel of Saint Nicholas decorated by Fra Angelico. This opens off the Sala dei Palafrenieri, from which is reached the Loggia di Raffaello, with the fifty-two biblical scenes devised by Raphael and his associates which exercised an immense influence on later iconography. The circuit of the palace continues with the Borgia Apartments, decorated at speed by Pinturicchio with the help of a troupe of assistants for Pope Alexander VI; here the sightseer has less competition.
The Vatican’s holding of antiquities is extraordinary. No visitor should miss the Courtyard of the Belvedere, transformed in 1773, which houses what were for some centuries many of the most famous classical sculptures in the world, including the Laocoön, discovered in 1506, the Apollo Belvedere and the Hermes. But the Museo Pio-Clementino also deserves a coup d’oeil, for it is the most complete such museum installation of the eighteenth century to survive, its collections due to a very proper wish on successive pontiffs’ part to preserve the archaeological inheritance of their state.
The Pinacoteca Vaticana, by contrast, celebrates the artistic tastes of the French. When in 1815 Canova recovered the pictures Bonaparte’s agents had appropriated from the Papal States for the Louvre, they were retained in Rome. In some instances – for example, the two predella panels taken from the otherwise complete Fra Angelico altarpiece at Perugia – the decision seems deplorable and should surely now be reversed. But it is nonetheless fascinating to see how systematically the towns of central Italy were raided. Raphael was high in the sights of the French, and is represented by three great altarpieces, the early Oddi Coronation of the Virgin from Perugia, the mature Madonna di Foligno with its breathtaking landscape and the late Transfiguration, so long regarded as one of the key masterpieces of western art. Almost equally revered was Domenichino’s Communion of Saint Jerome. A modern audience may be more moved by Caravaggio’s powerful Deposition. These pictures were all major public statements. Leonardo’s Saint Jerome may, to judge from the unprecedented prominence of the lion, have had a more personal message. Unapologetically old-fashioned in its arrangement, the Pinacoteca remains an oasis of near calm which no one interested in Italian painting can miss. Appropriately, it also houses Lawrence’s portrait of King George IV, who paid for the return of the works of art retrieved by Canova.
