ROME

My wife and I spent five days in Rome last week. I haven't blogged on it before now, since I have spent most of this week digesting it.

It was amazing, "stupenda", "incredibile". If you are remotely interested in history, which I am, then it is very special to be in a city which has a continuous history of more than 2,750 years, 1,000 of which were spent at the heart of an empire which has brought so much to my culture, and 2,000 of which have been dominated by perhaps the most continuously successful organisation in the western world, namely the Catholic church. Indeed, those two things are related, since much of the church's success came from appropriating aspects of the imperial past which suited it. Not least its buildings; mediæval popes didn't have much time for pagan ancestors, but they appreciated a good bit of marble when they saw it. Pope Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican using bricks nicked from the Baths of Caracalla; while Benini's famous marble columns in St. Peter's Square came from the Forum and other Roman places. Many, though not all, of the Roman ruins, including the Coliseum, are in brick, since the marble cladding and niche statues that would have adorned them were pilfered long ago. As our entertaining guide at the Coliseum put it succinctly, the only well-preserved Roman buildings in Rome are ones that have a cross on the top. They include the Senate building; but that was because it became a church (though it no longer is).  

The original Roman settlement was on three of the seven hills, and the obvious place for everyone to meet was in the valley between them, in what eventually became the Forum. At the time it was a marshy swamp. But that didn't deter them; they simply dug a canal down to the Tiber and drained it. When the population of Rome fell drastically during the Dark Ages, the canal filled with silt, and backed up, covering the original ruins and leaving them deserted, except for enterprising builders looking for bits of old marble. It took Napoleon to recognise their potential value, and he was the first to organise their systematic excavation. The work has been going on ever since.

The Romans were a clever lot. They had invented water-resistant cement, and knew how to build arches in brick and stone, thereby allowing them to build huge buildings and decorate them. Aquaducts and underfloor heating (take note, British housebuilders) were a piece of cake, as were straight roads. Of course, it helped to have a lot of slaves around to do the heavy lifting - of an estimated population at its height of 1-1.5 million, up to 500,000 were slaves - but if you were not one of them, then life must have been pretty cushy. A free trip to the baths every day, followed by free entertainment in the Coliseum (animal or gladiator fights) or at the Circus Maximus (chariot racing), all the while eating free food paid for by the state. Money was so unnecessary that some people were paid in salt (the origin of the English word "salary" and Danish word "salær"). Yet the system contained the seeds of its own destruction. Having built his colossal baths, bigger than a modern football stadium, Caracalla disastrously extended Roman citizenship to everyone in the Empire. Not surprisingly, lots of barbarians on the outside wanted to get in; and since it was difficult to find enough auxiliaries to keep them out, the whole system was doomed to collapse.

Out of that collapse, the Jesus cult headed by the Bishop of Rome managed to restore the city to its former glory. At the start, its assets seemed unpromising; the Emperor Constantine donated the land used to build the church of St. John Lateran, still the cathedral church of the city, before haring off to found Constantinople, and Rome had a prestige associated with being the place of martyrdom for St. Paul and (especially) St. Peter. But there were hardly any people around - the population fell to between 50,000 and 70,000 - Italy was a political mess, and the early Popes had none of the military resources needed to succeed.

However, like the Chinese Communist Party, the Popes were masters at taking a long view. Claims were never abandoned, even if they could not be supported for hundreds of years. An ever increasing number of people found that it made more sense to worship one God than many, bringing new customers. Islam helped by removing competing centres of religious supremacy such as Jerusalem, Anitoch and Alexandria from Christian control. A succession of tough men hammered out a consistent message, which stressed imperial ideas such as hierarchy, and unswerving obedience to the man at the top. A thousand years later, Rome was again one of the great cities of the world.

Going round some of those splendours, such as the Sistine Chapel, the church of St. John Lateran, and the 23,000 sqm basilica of St. Peter's, I couldn't help being impressed. Side chapels that are as large and imposing as a whole church in Denmark, huge organs, fantastic works of art by some of the world's most famous painters. And yet. Somehow, it didn't feel any more holy than (say) the tiny Saxon church that I once visited on the shore of Essex. Indeed, it seemed less a tribute to the glory of God and more a tribute to the glory of the individual Pope that had built it. No wonder Martin Luther, an austere monk from a cold, northern climate, got annoyed at the Papacy when he visited Rome. All those wasted economic resources.

With three whole days to explore, we spent the first in the Vatican and the second in the Coliseum and other ruins. On the third day, we did a mixture of both. Rome is easy to get around, and we had plenty of stops for coffee, and plenty of cheap meals in family restaurants in the evening. Thinking back on it, I suppose I have merely whetted my appetite for a return visit.

Walter Blotscher