101 things to do in Rome at least once in your life

Di Ilaria Beltramme

What do the ruins of the Palatine Hill have in common with the humble chairs of a vintage dairy? And what unites the unique flavour of pajata with the heady scent of roses in full bloom? The common thread is Rome's eternal existence which, step by step, hill by hill and century after century, winds its way around the many faces of the city - its most famous monuments as well as those secret corners where an imposing past unexpectedly reveals its riches. In these one hundred and one itineraries, Ilaria Beltramme invites the reader to discover the Eternal City in all its facets, from the masterpieces of Caravaggio to the working-class suburbs of Pier Paolo Pasolini, from contemplating Baroque architecture to sampling the city's oldest, most traditional dishes, and from the remains of the imperial age to the most vital, colourful markets of today. A Rome which resides in the majestic and in the humble - in the splendour of ancient nobility as well as in the memories and streets of its sovereign people. An immortal Rome, to explore in one hundred and one moves. One hundred and one walks, and one hundred and one experiences that you really should have at least once in your life.

Rome as you've never seen it!

• Lingua: Italiano
• Editore: Newton Compton Editori
• Data di uscita: 20 feb 2015
• ISBN: 9788854180246

Anteprima del libro

   1.

DRINK FROM A NASONE

In the beginning, there were the aqueducts, those aqueducts to which we owe so much of the city’s greatness. Then came the monumental fountains, created to decorate streets and squares, for the animals which passed through those streets and squares to drink from, to reutilise the ancient remains which the Roman earth has never ceased to regurgitate, and for the prestige of those who commissioned them. They became (and still remain) precious monuments, above all when it was artists like Giacomo della Porta and Gianlorenzo Bernini who had designed them.

These watery masterpieces did not, however, have very much to do with the thirst of the Romans, since supplying the city at the time were the acquaricciari, water sellers who took water decanted from the river to equitably distribute among the most crowded back-alleys as well as in the most elegant mansions.

But after the long-awaited unification of Italy in 1870 and with the city’s growing population, it became necessary to reorganise the entire urban water system. The solution was represented by around twenty cast-iron cylinders weighing about a hundred kilos each, from which fresh drinking water gurgled forth continuously for the use and consumption of the Roman people.

Thus, on the corpses of the old drinking troughs and those of the fountains and sarcophagi and all the other capitoline expedients for slaking the thirst for water as well as that for power, the public fountains of Rome were born. The water poured from three dragons’ heads set roughly halfway up a cylinder which was slimmer than those we find around the city today, but it is to these later fountains that they owe their local nickname nasone or ‘big-nose’, which refers to the newer, more practical drinking spout, smooth and curved with the famous little hole on top from which to make the water squirt out.

The first model has not totally vanished, however: three examples survive. One is in Piazza del Pantheon, two steps away from the Rotonda and its monumental fountain which, understandably, attract all the attention, another is in via delle Tre Cannelle, a cross-street of via IV Novembre, and the last can be found in via di San Teodoro, just behind the Palatine hill.

For almost two centuries, then, Roman citizens and tourists have been able to drink excellent water, always cool and completely free of charge, along all the most well-known routes. Some examples? If you find yourself in the Vatican, before setting off on a long walk in the sun you should head to via della Conciliazione or piazza Risorgimento, while at the Colosseum there is one right there on the square of the same name, and another, ideal for those setting off to discover the Celio district, is in via dei Santi Quattro Coronati. Visitors to Trastevere must instead stop about halfway along via Arenula, or in via della Lungaretta, near the splendid church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Those heading towards the Ara Pacis can fill up in piazza Monte d’oro, behind via Tomacelli and in vicolo del Lupo, a few metres from the Mausoleum of Augustus. No small luxury, seeing the price of a bottle of mineral water and the ridiculous temperatures the city reaches in summer.

To find them, you need only pay a little attention as you are walking. Generally, if the street is quiet you will hear the sound of the water first; otherwise you must sharpen your eyes and concentrate on the hidden corners behind an old palazzo or at the crossing of two alleys. Just walk up, open your bottle or canteen and help yourself. To drink directly from the fountain, instead, the secret lies in covering the opening at the end of the nasone and drinking from the jet which squirts from the little hole on the top of the spout: the simplest and most effective way of resolving any question of hygiene.

And yet, every summer the same controversy rears its head - why so much free water, isn’t it all just a waste? Not too long ago, a proposal was made to install taps to limit consumption, but after a couple of years it was decided to remove them, as the water in the tubes got too warm, stagnating disconcertingly before being drunk. Fortunately, there is no talk of ‘denasonifying’ the city. That really would be a pointless waste. Of memory, above all.

   2.

FALL IN LOVE IN FRONT OF THE SARCOPHAGUS OF THE SPOUSES IN THE VILLA GIULIA NATIONAL ETRUSCAN MUSEUM

Romantic, platonic, passionate, eternal love – how many adjectives we can add to the most precious word in the human vocabulary. And that love - real love - can even survive death is so obvious to as to be practically a cliché. We drive ourselves out of our minds suffering, hoping and searching, all in order to say that we are finally and definitively in love for ever, forever together.

But can a visit to a museum have anything to do with the search for love? Yes, it can, if that trip sets you before a unique testimony to eternal love, long-term relationships, respect, fraternity and, why not, everlasting alliance.

Falling in love again, or falling in love for the first time, becomes simple when you have an example of indissoluble union in front of you that dates back two thousand five hundred years: calling it marriage, or, just to keep things modern, living together, isn’t really the point, as something infinitely more profound and absolute emerges from those terracotta forms. She, lying on the triclinium (or kline, the Etruscan couch), leans gently but with assurance against the chest of her companion and smiles. He, lying behind her, embraces her with one arm, also smiling. In their hands, stretched out toward the visitor, there are unfortunately no longer any of the riches which once completed the sarcophagus.

Though once it was fine wines that the pair raised in a toast before their last journey, today nothing remains but empty hands and the indecipherable smiles on the faces of these Etruscan lovers. He almost seems to be presenting her to us: Look how happy we are, death does not frighten us.

It took the Sarcophagus of the Spouses no time at all to become one of the symbols of the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia and its most sought-out relic on every visit. Furthermore, in addition to being a striking fragment of the sophistication of this ancient civilization, which emerged from the mounds of the necropolises of Banditaccia in Cerveteri (a recommended day trip), the sarcophagus in question is also a work of art of absolute value as well as the precise symbol of a love which is eternal, the most complex and arduous adjective of all those mentioned a few paragraphs above.

We ought to put any glib or sugary ideas out of our minds, though: what we have before us is an archaic work, and these spouses make no pretence to any kind of realism. Even the smile - that same smile which one immediately reciprocates, as in a silent conversation between visitor and masterpiece of Etruscan funerary art - has little to do with any vague psychological introspection; even the couple’s features do not actually reflect their true, real physical form, but are rather a stylistic device, the mark of past contacts cultivated with Eastern civilization.

In those times, then, you smiled at death and faced the journey to the afterlife with serenity. The farewell was marked by a last party where men and women, fully equal and in accordance with tradition, were together, lying on the same triclinium, ready to become part of the city of the dead, to which the living would, however, remain very close.

And to the living, this couple seem to say something more: it is as if they communicate to us their profound freedom and grand culture which, by virtue of the mature, codified artistic technique, takes on a modern, as well as ideal, character. There they are, two perfect hosts, soft and rigid at the same time, looking at us watching them, loving one another and being loved in return with their gaze turned in the same direction, with the same objective, knowing that the new life that awaits them is an infinitely more serene version of the one just left. It is perfection.

The trick to making a love passed down through the ages last is conserved in a sculpted casket which alone would be the high-point of any loving couple’s visit, but after stopping here you can and must carry out an inspection of the entire inspiring collection of the museum, as well as its gardens, designed by Pope Julius III and then entrusted to the hands of expert architects, under the patient supervision of Michelangelo (who, unusually, Vasari says …did some things without (the Pope's) consent ). In fact, the whole design of the villa was studied in its smallest details by the man who would later inhabit it for at least one day a week and for the entire duration of his papacy, arriving from the Vatican to the Via Flaminia by river.

After buying your ticket, you enter a beautiful semi-circular courtyard which ends with a magnificent viewing point over a secluded nymphaeum (with water, rocks, ferns and goldfish).

At its sides, moving from left to right, are two gardens containing the section dedicated to the Sarcophagus of the Spouses and an (accurate) reproduction of the Temple of Alatri, built in 1891 by Adolfo Cozza (a bust of the designer stands in the same garden). Along the two arms of the semi-circle are the entrances to the rest of the vast, well-kept collection.

Once captured by the charm of the vases, the funeral troves, jewellery, statues, bronzes and pottery, hours fly by unnoticed, and your feet eat up yard after yard of museum floor. But you leave dreamy and gratified, the same smile on your lips as that of the lovers of Cerveteri, and in your heart - who knows – perhaps a spark of love.

   3.

SPEND AN AFTERNOON AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF MODERN ART

You would almost expect hear the sound of the hooves of the horses pulling a carriage towards you, so ‘turn of the century’ is the view that greets the eye, a view that looks like a movie set, an artfully arranged backdrop to evoke memories of retro clothes, walking sticks and spats. And in fact,it is a perfectly healthy fantasy in which to indulge if you decide to yield to it on a sunny day, when a visit to the pure white building of the National Gallery of Modern Art, the Palazzo delle Arti, is decidedly recommended. There is only one thing to bear in mind – the time required to fully enjoy the pleasures of the past: a stroll through leafy Villa Borghese, a genteel pause at the museum’s terrace cafè (where you enter when arriving from Viale Gramsci,) and finally, a visit to the collection, in a last delicious moment of profound and total wellbeing before returning to reality.

Despite its considerable size, its imposing portico and its monumental staircase, which is reflected in its counterpart across in the Villa Borghese, a visit here can easily be almost intimate, as one indulges in a slow stroll through the works of the collection (modern and contemporary art and sculpture from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), lingering in a ray of sun on the terrace of the Café des Arts where even the sparrows pecking the ground under the chairs seem part of the ballet of sophistication, impeccable poise and extreme courtesy with which one is surrounded immediately upon sitting down. In another context the whole thing could be a touch nauseating, but even the inevitable boorishness of a certain type of customer attracted by all this fancy service (with prices to match, of course) seems almost to evaporate against the beauty of the gallery building, which sets the whiteness of its walls against the sunlight and greenery all around. Furthermore, right here, with a metaphorical drink in an elegant bar on viale delle Belle Arti, Rome signs an armistice with the twentieth century, accepts the conditions and presents its best maritime pines to seal the newly-signed deal.

The building was constructed in 1911, the year of the Universal Exhibition, when the city did not yet suspect the fundamental betrayal that the twentieth century held in store, had not yet seen the rationalism of the University and EUR, the radical change of the face of the historical centre, and had not yet been wounded by post-war speculation and reckless, unregulated building. Here we find ourselves in a place where the idyll has just begun, where the New lowers its weapons before an old but high-ranking lady and patiently makes itself comfortable in her arms. The same feeling of conciliation is perceptible walking between the two sections of the museum’s permanent exhibition (and the entrance fee also gives access to the temporary ones, where there is always something beautiful to see).

Of course, it’s not always easy to appreciate nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures after admiring the myriad masterpieces of Caravaggio and Bernini scattered around Roman churches and collections, and the nineteenth century can often seem a little moralistic and rhetorical. But it is not hard work here, as you relax and set off on an illustrated journey that lasts a century. Fattori, Segantini and De Nittis with Le Corse al Bois de Boulogne (the Parisian dream entering the paintings of Italian artists, 1881) encounter the European culture of the day, Monet’s Pink Waterlilies, Cezanne’s Le Cabannon de Jourdan, Degas’s After the Bath, Courbet’s Poachers in the Snow and Van Gogh’s The Gardener. It is no coincidence that De Nittis’s scenes of bourgeois life and the dominant green foreground of the Van Gogh, in particular, face one another.

The art of the nineteenth century as it moves towards the most radical modernity, the transition between two very different sensibilities of the use of techniques and colours, are here in the same room. Everything seems to revolve around the black line that powerfully outlines the figure of the gardener and which is instead almost completely absent in the evanescence of the scene depicted in the painting by the Italian artist.

Like a ball of raven-black wool, that same black outline seems to wind along the corridors of the gallery, creeping among the first Futurists, becoming striking gesture in the Dadaism of Duchamp, urging on the creativity of Guttuso, De Chirico, and Savinio, before finally immersing itself in the forms of Capogrossi’s Superficie 290 (1958). And from here, the new direction of (finally) contemporary Italian art sets off to take possession of its own spaces: Mimmo Rotella, Vedova, Novelli, Burri, Fontana, the fifties and sixties of the last century. A time of protest is upon us, and blowing up, tearing apart and burning the codes of expression and all the conventions of the past has become an urgent need.

To acquire the works of these artists, Giulio Carlo Argan (future Mayor of Rome and an art historian of undisputed renown) and Palma Bucarelli (exemplary director of the museum during very trying times) often found themselves faced with attempts at genuine character assassination, and were turned into the improbable protagonists of a shameful scandal: that of the murder of figurative art. The two scholars did not listen to their critics and continued to acquire, to buy and to preserve what is now a vast and wonderful collection which should be visited in chronological order. Only then, in fact, will you have full satisfaction of seeing the decades flow before you in a white building of the early twentieth century, among comfortable velvet sofas and fine woodwork, lost in a turn-of- the-century dream.

   4.

DISCOVER THE STORIES OF THE RIVER AND ITS ISLAND

Murderous river. Dead, treacherous and filthy river. The river that hides archaeological treasures (even though in the eyes of the Roman working class, the most precious jewel that the Tevere has swallowed up was the charred remains of Er Ciriola’s boat-cum-dancehall moored at Ponte Sant'Angelo, symbol of that gay city which faced the years after the war when Rome was, like the title of Dino Risi’s 1956 film, ‘poor but beautiful’).

The things they say about the river of Rome. That it lies there on its deathbed, that it stinks when the summer heat beats down on its waters, that it’s useless except to entertain the ‘four cats’ (meaning few members) of the rowing club, that it’s just a receptacle for rats and disease: you could get sick just inhaling its miasma, and for God’s sake never end up in it, for that would mean certain, inescapable death. The days of the happy idyll between the city and its beloved (if capricious) river are over, the times of the mills, the ports of Ripa Grande and Ripetta, of laundry women and boatmen. The times when the river used to ‘come up’ in murderous flooding that drowned banks and roads, houses and churches, bridges and buildings, leaving behind mud and corpses to weep over. Gone are the times of diving off boats and days at the Renella, the little beach in Trastevere, and gone too is the Marana, immortalised by Alberto Sordi in the film Un Giorno In Pretura (A Day In Court, 1953).

Today, the Tevere, which once threaded its way through the labyrinth of Rome, making it unquestionably its own, seems destined to be just one more element of the capital, a calm, muddy, yellowish accessory flowing below the swarms of cars which bring the Lungotevere close to choking. It is the embankments which are often blamed for this progressive retreat of the river from the city, embankments erected for its defence almost two centuries ago.

And yet, there was a time when those waters constituted the border between city that had developed on the left bank and Trastevere, a shady place to steer well clear of. It is from this division that the pride of the inhabitants of Trastevere, the thirteenth district of Rome, springs; that feeling of being noantri (us), and not voantri (you lot), born on the nice side of the river - it is no coincidence that the Feast of Noantri is a tribute (somewhat bastardised of late) to the river that used to cut them off from the world but which was once worshipped as a god, and to the fiumaroli or rivermen, its priests. It is inconceivable to speak about the Tiber without mentioning this special ‘caste’ of Romans for whom the river is everything: life, sport, entertainment and love. Rowers and canoeists, fishermen or simply passionate swimmers, who spent their life ‘on the river’. They were the living memories of a ‘freshwater’ life which is almost impossible to find in Rome today.

Fortunately, on the 23rd of April 2003, the City set up a small fleet of boats which ferry visitors along two routes, from Ponte Duca d'Aosta to the Isola Tiberina and from Ponte Marconi to Ostia Antica. They are the last morsel of fiumarola life left to savour, it otherwise being left to the goodwill of those dedicated to the rediscovery of this river, those who walk along its banks (along the long cycle path which runs from Castel Giubileo to Porta Portese) on a sunny day, who are attracted by the history of the bridges which span it.

Starting from Ponte Cavour, also known as ‘suicide bridge’ since the awful night of July 9 1890 when Augustus Formilli threw his wife Rosa Angeloni off the footbridge which then stood at the port of Ripetta. Only a small article in the city’s crime pages, but one which had a huge impact on the Romans, so much so that the spot has since been chosen by many as a place to die, a reputation which, obeying the laws of transitive properties, was inherited by the new bridge (built in 1901 to replace the footbridge). And perhaps this sad tradition has something to do with the unusual spectacle of Mister Okay, the Belgian who for years leapt off it every new year’s day in a swallow dive, ignorant (probably) of the propitiatory undertones of his athleticism.

In Rome, however, there is only one bridge par excellence. It is called Ponte Sant'Angelo (and is so much ‘The Bridge of Rome’ that it has given its name to the surrounding district) and all the traffic to and from the Vatican used to pass across it. It is one of those places which symbolises the Rome of yesterday: here stood the scaffold used for Mastro Titta’s executions; here you came to buy fish in the morning; here you came to ask for favours and prayers from the priests who were once the masters of Rome; here in ancient times was the entrance to the tomb of the Emperor Elio Adriano. And here, too, passed much of the traffic of 1300, the first Holy Year and an event of immense importance established by Boniface VIII and cited by Dante in the eighteenth canto of his Inferno. The historical proof of all this centrality lies in the ten statues that Bernini and his school were asked to sculpt in order to decorate it, ten majestic angels that Clement IX commissioned in 1667 to represent the Passion of the Christ. They were realised by various employees of his workshop and upon each plinth were inscribed verses describing the stages of the climb to Calvary.

But although Ponte Sant'Angelo stands out in its monumentality, you have to go to Ponte Sisto, which is to be found at Palazzo Spada, at the end of the Lungotevere Tebaldi in the Piazza Farnese area, to enjoy the best view of it. Until the last Jubilee in 2000 it was still covered with a metal superstructure that had been added in 1877, but now, the fifteenth-century shape desired by Sixtus IV finally freed, it enchants. For its time it was a masterpiece, with its unusual sloping hump and the occhialone, the hole through the central pier which has for centuries has been used to measure the risk of flooding . On the other bank lies Trastevere, and a little further along, the river gives us one of its most captivating places, the Isola Tiberina.

Like a vast stone ship, the island cleaves the current and the centuries, creating a microcosm linked to the capital by two bridges, Ponte Cestio, whose construction outlasted three emperors, and Ponte Fabricio, still intact from 62 AD. A microcosm containing a hospital, the Caetani castle, one of the few surviving medieval buildings in Rome, a period pharmacy of unquestionable historical and architectural value, an ancient church and the restaurant of the unforgettable Sora Lella Fabrizi, actress and symbol of Rome.

The hospital, one of the most thrillingly scenic spots in Rome (so much so that it would almost be worth feigning illness to be hospitalized in those areas inaccessible to anybody not visiting patients) is not here by coincidence. This, in fact, is the place where nearly three centuries before Christ there stood a temple dedicated to Aesculapius, the god of health and medicine. The shape of the island itself recalls the founding of that temple, born as always from divine will, when a committee of wise men – seeking a remedy to a grave plague which had struck the city - was returning to Rome by ship, carrying snakes sacred to Aesculapius. It so happened that one of the reptiles escaped, seeking refuge in the vegetation of the island, upon whose banks the boat ran aground. That was sign enough. The land was consecrated to the god and, just to be sure, the remains of the vessel were buried under the slabs of travertine intended to simulate the forms of the ancient boat.

One detail of the landscape completes the picture: it is the last remaining stump of Ponte Senatorio bridge, later named Ponte Santa Maria and now known, more humbly, as Ponte Rotto or ‘Broken Bridge’. It was already in existence in Augustus’s day, as it was the emperor who organised its first restoration. Then came a succession of collapses and repairs, until a final, disastrous flood washed away the central section and the bridge was left to its fate, unconscious monument to the spirit of the river: friend, lover, god, but ever swaggering and capricious, so much so that one of Rome’s most famous fiumaroli, Eugenio Cornacchia, poet, sportsman and a great Roman, describing the beloved river in rhyme in 1978, warned

Ricordete che er fiume vede e sente

e l’urtima parola è sempre sua

Se dici li mortacci sotto ar ponte

subito l’eco t’arisponne: «li tua... aaa...»

Pure se l’aribatti dentro ar sonno

Lui t’aripete sempre «e de tu’ nonno... ooo!!!».

Remember that the river sees and hears

And always has the last word

Curse him under a bridge

And the echo’ll answer straight back: same to you…ooo

And even if you curse him in your sleep

He’ll always repeat …and your grandfather too...ooo!!!

   5.

LOVE MUSIC AT THE AUDITORIUM

For once, sensations, statistics and the experts are all in agreement: Rome is undergoing an unprecedented period of cultural renewal and rebirth. A very welcome change, and one which brings a city – one which by dint of its feeling eternal was threatened with paralysis and slow decline despite its immense archaeological and artistic heritage - closer to other European capitals.

The driving force and symbol of this vital change in the capital is music, which had long been lacking a specifically designed and properly equipped space to carry its notes beyond the halls of the Santa Cecilia Conservatory. To put it bluntly, a full-blown auditorium was needed, and five years before the millennium Jubilee building work began on what is today the Parco della Musica. It was the creator of the project, the architect Renzo Piano, who came up with the idea of using the large spaces to house a centre dedicated to good, properly-amplified music, but which could also be used as a focus for the daily life of the neighbourhoods to the north of the centre. A kind of new cultural hub set in the area between Parioli, the via Flaminio, the Olympic Village and Villa Glori, and not opening only for concerts, but also equipped with a number of stages, a theatre, areas for rehearsals and recording, a open-air auditorium, a museum, a bookshop, bars, offices and a rooftop garden of nearly forty thousand square meters and open to the public all day, every day.

It was a vast job, but what it has given the city is practically a new neighbourhood, as well as a smoother transition from the residential area of Tor di Quinto to the monumentality of the historic centre, and all without disrupting the view of nearby Villa Glori’s greenery or the pointless invasion of an area still which has remained relatively free from overbuilding. The solution was represented by three ‘shells’ designed by Piano, which, their shapes echoing the body of an ancient lute, engage with the surrounding greenery and bask in the Roman sun. Around them, covering an area of over fifty thousand square metres, are all the facilities foreseen in the original plan and the avenues of this musical village, which despite its contemporary face is by no means alien to the city.

There is another thing about Piano’s auditorium which must also be considered: it has become almost immediately an indispensable reference point for the city’s cultural life, as if Romans had always been able to cross its thresholds along via Marshal Pilsudski, whose freakish cacophony has actually been synonymous with evenings of culture for a relatively short time.

In reality, more than ten years have passed since the beginning of works, and about five since the inauguration of the Parco della Musica, and over this decade the world’s finest musicians in every genre, from classical to jazz, from rock to funk, have taken to the stage in its halls and its outdoor amphitheatre, plays have alternated with dance performances, artists and writers have been booked for exhibitions and public readings, and the Romans have felt a little more European, proud to have added Renzo Piano’s shells to the thousand treasures of their city. A city of which it will be said that its cultural renewal in the Third Millennium was built upon the refined notes of good music.

   6.

LEARN ABOUT PAINTING IN AN HOUR IN RAPHAEL’S ROOMS

Perhaps it would seem more appropriate to say that with a visit to Raphael's Rooms in the Vatican Museums you will learn about propaganda painting, rather than simply painting per se. And perhaps devoting just one hour would not really be enough time (especially after paying 15 euros for a ticket, and queues and security checks worthy of an international airport). But don’t be alarmed: here, at least, the boredom that usually accompanies the glorification of the ruling power (in any age and in any form) does not seem to have found a foothold.

Over the course of the exhibition (where right from the off the company of many, many - sometimes too many - ‘colleagues’ is all too evident), it is easy to be struck by the beauty of the frescoes of the painter from Urbino, but after getting used