Rome: Six Days at the
Table of Empires

There are places in this world where the weight of human belief becomes almost physical, where the accumulated prayers of centuries seem to press against the walls and ask to be let out. Vatican City is such a place, and the traveller, arriving through the crowds of Termini and crossing the Tiber by afternoon, found it improbable that something so solemn could also be so unabashedly magnificent.

The Vatican Gardens were reached first — fifty acres of sculpted green enclosed within the ancient walls, the dome of St. Peter's rising above the cypress trees with the casual grandeur of something that has simply always been there. A guided tour, arranged in advance through the Vatican Museums office, led them through grottoes and Renaissance fountains, past Australian eucalyptus and Chinese bamboo brought as gifts across the centuries, past the small plaque that records Pope Nicholas III planting the first seed of all this, in 1279. The garden is a place of unexpected quiet in a very loud city.

Then the Sistine Chapel, and the traveller did what all travellers do — they stood, craned their neck, and were silenced. No preparation is adequate. The ceiling performs a kind of violence on the imagination. Michelangelo spent four years on his back to produce it, and looking up, four minutes feels insufficient. The Last Judgment on the altar wall, darker in mood and executed twenty years later, is arguably the more interesting work: a roiling, terrified mass of humanity being sorted, with the expression of a man who has seen too much of both.

St. Peter's Basilica as the afternoon light began to flatten was another matter entirely — less intimate, more cosmic. The nave is long enough to contain most cathedrals entire. Michelangelo's Pietà sits behind glass in the first chapel on the right, and the traveller stood before it longer than expected. Bernini's baldachin over the papal altar is absurd in its scale and perfect in its confidence. One gets the sense, in St. Peter's, that the people who built this were not hedging their bets.

Dinner was at Pizzarium — Gabriele Bonci's famous shop on Via della Meloria, a fifteen-minute walk north-west of the Vatican. Roman pizza al taglio: sold by weight, eaten standing up, the base thick and airy and charred at the edges, the toppings changed daily and occasionally bewildering in their invention. On this evening: potato and rosemary; mortadella with stracciatella; and something involving zucchini blossoms and anchovy that the traveller would think about for several days afterward. It cost eleven euros. It was, without qualification, excellent.

On the second day of their wandering the traveller rose before the heat and walked to the Colosseum in the early light, when the tour groups had not yet arrived and the stone was still the colour of old honey. The Flavian Amphitheatre, completed in 80AD, is the most famous ruin in the world and it earns that designation not through delicacy but through sheer unapologetic mass. It held fifty thousand spectators. The sound it must have made, full of them, is almost unimaginable. What remains — one third of the original structure, after centuries of earthquakes and stone theft — is still sufficient to make a person feel very small and very temporary.

The Basilica di San Clemente, a short walk south of the Colosseum, is one of Rome's great secrets: a three-tiered building in which you descend through a twelfth-century church, into a fourth-century church, and then into the remains of a second-century Roman temple to Mithras, all stacked directly on top of one another. This is Rome's most efficient metaphor for itself — it does not clear its history away; it simply builds on top of it and charges ten euros to go and look.

The Roman Forum at midmorning was, it must be admitted, overwhelming in its ambiguity. There is a great deal of rubble, and understanding what once stood where requires either a guide, the official audio tour, or a willingness to simply let the scale of the thing wash over you. The traveller chose the latter approach and found it surprisingly satisfying. The Temple of Saturn. The Arch of Septimius Severus. The house, somewhere under here, where Caesar was murdered. The Forum is a place where history has been stripped of its narrative and reduced to its bones, and the bones are magnificent.

Lunch was at Fuorinorma on Via dei Serpenti, a short walk from the Forum — a contemporary Roman kitchen doing Roman-adjacent things with excellent ingredients. The fried artichoke, tender and slightly bitter, was the sort of thing one eats in Rome and then spends years attempting to replicate at home with diminishing success.

The afternoon brought the Pantheon — Hadrian's temple to all the gods, built 118–125AD, and still the best-preserved large structure from the ancient world. The dome, a perfect hemisphere with an oculus at its peak, is forty-three metres in diameter and was the largest in the world for thirteen centuries. It rains through the hole in the ceiling, and the floor drains it away through a system installed by the Romans. When the winter sun is at precisely the right angle, it falls through the oculus and illuminates the entrance like a spotlight. The traveller was there in September and the light was doing something oblique and magnificent with the interior and the dust motes, which had the same aesthetic outcome.

Dinner at Grappolo d'Oro on Piazza della Cancelleria — a neighbourhood trattoria that has been feeding the people of the centro storico for decades. The cacio e pepe was flawless: just pasta, Pecorino, pepper, and technique. No embellishment required.

The Trevi Fountain at seven in the morning, before the city wakes, is a different thing entirely from the Trevi Fountain at noon. In the early light it is possible to stand at the edge of Nicola Salvi's great baroque theatre — all Neptune and rearing horses and allegorical rivers — and feel something approximating the awe it was designed to produce. The traveller did not throw a coin. They had been to Rome before, and the wish had apparently already been granted.

The Spanish Steps at the same early hour were empty of the tourists who would later colonise them entirely. The 137 stairs sweep upward from Piazza di Spagna to the church of Trinità dei Monti in a series of terraces that are elegant in a way that most outdoor staircases are not. It is illegal to eat on them. The traveller did not eat on them. They did, however, sit on them for a while in the early morning and find it very pleasant.

Caffe Greco on Via dei Condotti, Rome's oldest coffee house, open since 1760 — an interior of small dark rooms and gilt mirrors and the accumulated atmosphere of everyone who has sat here before, which is most of the great romantic poets, several emperors, and apparently Goethe. The espresso costs three euros at the bar. The traveller paid it without complaint, as tribute.

The Galleria Borghese in the afternoon was the day's great prize. This is one of the finest small museums in the world, housed in a cardinal's villa in the middle of the Villa Borghese park, and entry is strictly limited to two hours — which is just enough time to be undone by it. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne alone — the moment of transformation caught in marble, Daphne's fingers becoming laurel leaves, Apollo's expression frozen between desire and loss — is worth the trip to Rome entire. Canova's sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte as Venus, reclining with the composure of someone who knows exactly what they're doing, is perhaps the second best thing in the room. Titian and Caravaggio fill the walls. Book weeks in advance; they do not let extra people in under any circumstances.

Dinner at Trattoria Settimio dell'Arancio on Via del Pellegrino — a narrow, warm room near Campo de' Fiori. Roman cooking at its most reliable: the sort of place where the menu changes with what the market offered that morning and the wine comes from an unmarked bottle and is better than it has any right to be.

South of the Colosseum, away from the tour buses and the selfie sticks and the men in centurion costumes, Rome becomes itself again. On the fourth day of their wandering the traveller turned their face toward the Aventine Hill and Testaccio, the two districts that represent, perhaps more than any others, what the city looks like when it is not performing for visitors.

The Catacombs of St. Callixtus on the Via Appia Antica were the morning's first destination — a guided descent into the labyrinthine underground burial ground of the early Christians, where the bones of sixteen popes and several hundred thousand ordinary Romans have lain since the second century. The narrow passages, lit by bare bulbs, are lined with the rectangular niches where the bodies were placed. The guide spoke about martyrdom and faith with the calm authority of someone who has said these things many times and believes them still. It was sobering and genuinely strange, and the traveller emerged into the September sun feeling, in a difficult-to-articulate way, refreshed.

The Orange Garden on the Aventine Hill — Giardino degli Aranci — is one of Rome's finest free pleasures: a small, manicured park arranged on the brow of the hill, with a terrace overlooking the city that offers one of the best views in Rome for the price of a walk up some stairs. The orange trees are ordered in neat rows. The view across the rooftops to the dome of St. Peter's is the kind of thing that stops you mid-sentence. In the summer, theatrical performances are held here. In September, there are Italian couples and a great deal of good light.

Dinner that evening — at Roscioli Salumeria con Cucina on Via dei Giubbonari — was the meal of the entire journey. Roscioli is part deli, part restaurant, and the carbonara it produces is the standard by which all carbonara should be judged. The guanciale is rendered precisely. The egg and Pecorino emulsify into something between a sauce and a ceremony. The pasta has the correct resistance. There is a wine list of uncommon intelligence and the sommelier will not steer you wrong. The traveller ate the carbonara and the amatriciana on separate nights and is not yet able to declare a winner.

After dinner, Janiculum Hill — reached on foot through the darkening city — for the view. At night, from the Piazzale Garibaldi, Rome spreads below in amber and ochre, the domes rising above the roofline like punctuation marks in a very long sentence. The Trilussa Square in Trastevere afterward, for a glass of wine among the locals. Then home.

The fifth day was given over to architecture and the slow pleasures of walking without a plan. The Aventine Keyhole at the Priory of the Knights of Malta — a keyhole in a gate through which, if you queue briefly and apply your eye, you see St. Peter's dome perfectly framed by a tunnel of carefully trimmed hedges — is the most beautifully choreographed view in Rome, and costs nothing. Campo de' Fiori in the morning for the fruit and flower market, the bronze philosopher Giordano Bruno watching over everything from his plinth, burnt at the stake on this very spot in 1600 for the crime of being correct about astronomy. The Imperial Forums and the Capitoline Hill with its Michelangelo-designed piazza and the Palazzo Nuovo, which holds the best collection of Roman statuary in the city, including the original bronze equestrian Marcus Aurelius and the Capitoline Wolf.

Dinner on the fifth evening was at Roscioli again — the amatriciana this time, for the purposes of science. The verdict: the carbonara remains marginally superior, but the gap is narrow enough to require further investigation.

The final morning was Sunday, which meant Porta Portese — Rome's famous flea market, held along the Via Portuense every Sunday from dawn until early afternoon. The traveller found nothing they needed and several things they wanted. The market is enormous, chaotic, and very Roman in its cheerful indifference to organisation. Afterwards, coffee and a cornetto in Trastevere, and then the final walk to Santa Maria in Trastevere — the church that is, in the quiet of a Sunday morning, as close to stillness as Rome ever gets. The fourth-century mosaics glow gold on the apse. The medieval floor tiles are worn smooth. The bell outside rings for the nine o'clock mass and the tourists and the faithful and the lost all arrive together, as they have for seventeen hundred years, and find their pew.

The Leonardo da Vinci Airport at Fiumicino is reached from Trastevere in forty minutes by car or taxi, and from Termini by the Leonardo Express in thirty. The traveller took the taxi, because it was Sunday morning and the light on the Tiber was still doing something remarkable as they drove away, and they wanted to see it for as long as possible.