Rome

national capital, Italy

WRITTEN BY
John Foot See All Contributors
Professor of Modern Italian History, Department of Italian, University
College London, London, England. Author of Milan Since the Miracle:
City, Culture, and Identity and others.
See Article History
Alternative Title: Roma
Rome, Italian Roma, historic city and capital of
Roma provincia (province), of Lazio regione (region), and of the
country of Italy. Rome is located in the central portion of the Italian
peninsula, on the Tiber River about 15 miles (24 km) inland from
the Tyrrhenian Sea. Once the capital of an ancient republic and empire
whose armies and polity defined the Western world in antiquity and
left seemingly indelible imprints thereafter, the spiritual and physical
seat of the Roman Catholic Church, and the site of major pinnacles of
artistic and intellectual achievement, Rome is the Eternal City,
remaining today a political capital, a religious centre, and a memorial
to the creative imagination of the past. Area city, 496 square miles
(1,285 square km); province, 2,066 square miles (5,352 square km).
Pop. (2011) city, 2,617,175; province, 3,997,465; (2007 est.) urban
agglom., 3,339,000; (2016 est.) city, 2,873,494; province, 4,353,738.

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RomeAn aerial view of Rome, Italy.© Photodisc/Thinkstock

Rome, ItalyRome, Italy.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

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Lithuania

Character Of The City

RomeTime-lapse video of Rome.© Kirill Neiezhmakov;

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For well over a millennium, Rome controlled the destiny of all

civilization known to Europe, but then it fell into dissolution and

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disrepair. Physically mutilated, economically paralyzed, politically
senile, and militarily impotent by the late Middle Ages, Rome
nevertheless remained a world power—as an idea. The force of Rome
the lawgiver, teacher, and builder continued to radiate throughout
Europe. Although the situation of the popes from the 6th to the 15th
century was often precarious, Rome knew glory as the fountainhead
of Christianity and eventually won back its power and wealth and
reestablished itself as a place of beauty, a source of learning, and a
capital of the arts.

Rome’s contemporary history reflects the long-standing tension

between the spiritual power of the papacy and the political power of
the Italian state capital. Rome was the last city-state to become part of
a unified Italy, and it did so only under duress, after the invasion of
Italian troops in 1870. The pope took refuge in the Vatican thereafter.
Rome was made the capital of Italy (not without protests
from Florence, which had been the capital since 1865), and the new
state filled the city with ministries and barracks. Yet the Catholic
church continued to reject Italian authority until a compromise was
reached with Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1929, when both
Italy and Vatican City recognized the sovereignty of the other.
Mussolini, meanwhile, created a cult of personality that challenged
that of the pope himself, and his Fascist Party tried to re-create the
glories of Rome’s imperial past through a massive public
works program.

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 Rome: ColosseumColosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre), Rome, c. AD 70–82.©
Goodshoot/Jupiterimages

Since Mussolini’s fall and the traumas of World War II, when the city
was occupied by Germans, politics have continued to dominate
Rome’s agenda—although regionalism began, in the 1980s, to devolve
some political power away from the capital. Lagging
behind Milan and Turin economically, Rome has maintained
a peripheral place within the Italian and European economies. It also
has been plagued with perennial housing shortages and traffic
congestion. However, the late 20th and early 21st centuries brought
increased efforts to resolve Rome’s infrastructural problems and to
foster a Roman cultural revival.

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 Mussolini, BenitoBenito Mussolini.Photos.com/Thinkstock

Landscape
City site
The Roman countryside, the Campagna, was one of the last areas of
central Italy to be settled in antiquity. Rome was built on a defensible
hill that dominated the last downstream, high-banked river crossing
where traverse of the Tiber was facilitated by a midstream island. This
hill, Palatine Hill, was one of a group of hills, traditionally counted as
seven, around which the ancient city grew. The other hills are the

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Capitoline, the Quirinal, the Viminal, the Esquiline, the Caelian, and
the Aventine.

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RomeThis map of Rome appeared in the 10th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1902–
03.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Rome; Vatican CitySt. Peter's Basilica and the Tiber River, Rome.© vvoe/Fotolia

Climate
Rome’s hot, dry summer days, with high temperatures often above 75
°F (24 °C), are frequently cooled in the afternoons by the ponentino, a
west wind that rises from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city receives
roughly 30 inches (750 mm) of precipitation annually; spring and
autumn are the rainiest seasons. Frosts and occasional light snowfalls
punctuate the otherwise mild winters, when high temperatures
average just above 50 °F (10 °C). The tramontana, a cold, dry wind
from the north, frequents the city in the winter.

City layout

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Travel along ancient Rome's lava-paved Appian Way stretching across southeastern
ItalyParts of the Appian Way, the first great Roman road, can still be seen
today.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article

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 Rome: tunnels and underground chambersLearn about Rome's numerous tunnels
and underground chambers, which undermine the city and imperil its
buildings.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzSee all videos for this article

The ancient centre of Rome is divided into 22 rioni (districts), the

names of most dating from Classical times, while surrounding it are
35 quartieri urbani (urban sectors) that began to be officially
absorbed into the municipality after 1911. Within the city limits on the
western and northwestern fringes are six large suburbi (suburbs).
About 6 miles (10 km) out from the centre of the city, a belt highway
describes a huge circle around the capital, tying together the
antique viae (roads)—among them the Via Appia (known in English as
the Appian Way), the Via Aurelia, and the Via Flaminia—that led
to ancient Rome. Masses of modern apartment buildings rise in the
districts outside the centre, where, by contrast, contemporary
construction is less conspicuous.

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RomeCity centre and metropolitan area of Rome, Italy.Encyclopædia Britannica,
Inc.

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Roman Empire: masonryLearn about the infrastructure of imperial Rome,
particularly Roman masonry.© Open University (A Britannica Publishing
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Indeed, ancient city walls still enclose much of the city centre, which is
the area of Rome to which tourists flock. The so-called Servian Wall,
named for the 6th-century-BCE Roman king Servius Tullius but built
almost certainly 12 years after the Gauls’ destruction of Rome in
390 BCE, enclosed most of the Esquiline and Caelian hills and all of the
other five. It was built into ramparts that dated at least from the
early Roman Republic. Although Rome grew beyond the Servian
defenses, no new wall was constructed until the
emperor Aurelian began building in brick-faced concrete in 270 CE.
Approximately 12.5 miles (20 km) long and girdling about 4 square
miles (10 square km), the Aurelian Wall is still largely intact. Small as
it is, the old city contains hundreds of hotels, more than
200 palazzi (palaces), several of the city’s major parks, the residence
of the Italian president, the houses of parliament, offices of local and
national government, and the great historical monuments, in addition
to thousands of offices, restaurants, and bars.

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Many of the treasures of Rome no longer can be seen where they were
placed originally, many can be seen only in other cities of the world,
and many others still in Rome represent the spoils of conquest
brought to the city from around the ancient world or the cannibalizing
of one age or of one faith upon the creations of an earlier one. Rome
was sacked first by the Gauls (see Celts) in 390 BCE and subsequently
by the Visigoths in 410 CE, the Vandals in 455, the Normans in 1084,
and troops of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V in 1527. Muslims
laid it under siege in 846. The Great Fire of Rome—Nero’s fire—
occurred in 64 CE, and fires and earthquakes ravaged individual
buildings or whole areas fairly often over the millennia. But, of all
these scourges, it was the stripping of the structures of antiquity for
building materials, especially from the 9th century through the 16th,
that destroyed more of Classical Rome than any other force. The
heritage of the past that survives in Rome is nevertheless unsurpassed
in any city of the West.

Via del Corso and environs

The main street in central Rome is the Via del Corso, an important
thoroughfare since Classical times, when it was the Via Flaminia, the
road to the Adriatic. Its present name comes from the horse races
(corse) that were part of the Roman carnival celebrations. From the
foot of the Capitoline Hill, the Corso runs to the Piazza del Popolo and
through a gate in the city wall, the Porta del Popolo, there to resume
its ancient name.

Vittoriano

The Corso begins spectacularly with the Vittoriano (1911), the

monument to Victor Emmanuel II, first king of united Italy,
constructed in Brescian marble to coincide with the 50th anniversary
of unification. The nation’s unknown soldier was interred there
after World War I. A Neo-Baroque marble mountain, it is the whitest,
biggest, tallest, and possibly most pompous of Rome’s major
monuments. Locals refer to it as the “wedding cake” or the

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“typewriter.” Useful as well as ornamental, it contains a museum of
the 19th-century cultural revival. The Vittoriano was bombed by
neofascist terrorists in December 1969 and was immediately closed to
the public; it reopened in 2001.

Churches and palaces

Among the smart shops along the Corso are churches, palaces, and the
column of Marcus Aurelius. San Marco was the first of Rome’s parish
churches to be built (c. 336 CE) on the plan of a Classical basilica (a
public hall in pre-Christian Rome). The present church, third on the
site, dates from the 9th century and was restored in the 15th by the
Venetian pope Paul II, who also built a new papal residence,
the Palazzo Venezia (“Venetian Palace”), near the church. Thereafter,
the basilica’s priest was always a Venetian cardinal, sharing
the palace with the Venetian embassy. Mussolini had his headquarters
in the Palazzo Venezia and harangued the crowds from the balcony
from which Paul II had cheered the carnival races and given his
papal benediction. The palace is now an art museum and contains the
Biblioteca dell’Istituto Nazionale d’Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte
(Library of the National Institute of Archaeology and Art History).

While her son Napoleon languished on St. Helena, Letizia

Buonaparte languished in the Palazzo Bonaparte, now Palazzo
Misciatelli. Across the way is the Palazzo Salviati, built by the duc de
Nevers in the 17th century and owned in the 19th by Louis Bonaparte.
The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is a late 15th-century building behind a
1734 facade. It contains an art gallery, in which there are works
by Diego Velázquez, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and Caravaggio, as well
as a Gian Lorenzo Bernini bust of the family pope, Innocent X. Behind
San Marcello, the Baroque reworking of a church founded in the 4th
century, is the mid-17th-century Palazzo Ballestra, in which Bonnie
Prince Charlie of Scotland (Charles Edward, the Young Pretender) was
born in 1720 and to which he returned in 1788 to die.

The column of Marcus Aurelius, with reliefs showing his victory over
Danubian tribes, was preserved from the assorted Christian looters of

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Rome because it was the property of a religious order. In the square
around the column, the Piazza Colonna, are the Palazzo Chigi (1562),
for many years the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now the official
residence of the prime minister, and the Palazzo Wedekind. Although
built in the 19th century, the Wedekind is not without its plundered
antique columns.

MORE ABOUT THIS TOPIC

• Italy: The acquisition of Venetia and Rome
• Italy: The role of Rome
• Western architecture: Origins and development in Rome
• Western painting: Rome and Italy, c. 600–850
• Hellenistic age: The coming of Rome (225–133)
• Art market: The rise of Rome
• Art market: Rome as an art centre
• Government: Rome
Piazza del Popolo

The Corso emerges onto the splendid oval Piazza del Popolo (“People’s
Square”), which is monumental without being intimidating. Over a
period of 300 years, it was constructed as the ceremonial entryway to
Rome, and, although its elements are diverse in style and in age (13th
century BCE–19th century CE), a remarkable harmony prevails. In 1561
the Porta del Popolo, the medieval gate in the city wall, was rebuilt.
Ninety-four years later its inner face was redone by Bernini for the
grand entrance of Queen Christina, who had abandoned the Protestant
throne of Sweden for the hospitality of Catholic Rome. In 1589
Pope Sixtus V punctuated the piazza’s centre with an obelisk (13th
century BCE) brought by the
emperor Augustus from Heliopolis in Egypt to the Circus Maximus.

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The church next to the gate, Santa Maria del Popolo, which stood for
centuries before the piazza existed and gives its name to the area, was
founded in 1227 to replace a 1099 chapel built over what was
presumed to be the emperor Nero’s tomb. It was replaced in 1472–77
by the present-day church, further disguised on the piazza frontage by
a Neoclassical facade. The interior is fraught with the works of
great Renaissance and Baroque artists. The main chapel has tombs
by Andrea Sansovino and frescoes by Pinturicchio. In the Cerasi
Chapel are Caravaggio’s The Conversion of St. Paul and The
Crucifixion of St. Peter. The Chigi Chapel, unique for the early 16th
century in being a miniature church, was designed
by Raphael. Bernini sculpted two of the four prophets in the corners.

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 Caravaggio: The Conversion of St. Paul (second version)The Conversion of
St. Paul (second version), oil on canvas by Caravaggio, 1601; in Santa Maria
del Popolo, Rome.SCALA/Art Resource, New York
At the opposite end of the piazza stand “twin” churches (1662) framing
the entrance to three streets. The streets were there first, so the
churches were ingeniously squeezed into awkward, different-sized
plots between them. Santa Maria in Montesanto, on the east, has an
oval plan and dome, while Santa Maria dei Miracoli, on the narrower
plot toward the Tiber on the west, has a round dome. Carlo Rainaldi,
the architect, turned both facades slightly inward to frame the
welcoming parades that would proceed up the Corso between the two
churches. One of the streets, the Via del Babuino, was one of many
built by Sixtus V.

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Piazza di Spagna

Running roughly southeast from the Piazza del Popolo, the Via del
Babuino leads to the Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Square). An obelisk
there was erected in 1857 to commemorate the 1854 promulgation of
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The fountain there, the
Barcaccia (“Scow”), is fed by the Acqua Vergine, an aqueduct of 19 BCE,
which escaped Gothic destruction because it was mainly underground
and which was repaired in 1447. When the fountain was planned in
the early 1600s by Bernini (believed to be Pietro, though some have
attributed the work to his son, Gian Lorenzo), there was insufficient
water pressure for spouting jets, so the shape of the Barcaccia was
conceived: an ancient marble boat foundering endearingly in its
marble bath.

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 Rome: BarcacciaBarcaccia (“Scow”) fountain, usually attributed to Pietro
Bernini, 1627–29, Piazza di Spagna, Rome.© Jeffrey S. Campbell

The most striking architectural element in the piazza—indeed, one of

the most striking in all of Rome—is the renowned Scalinata della
Trinità dei Monti, known as the Spanish Steps (or Stairs). The
staircase is a rare case of the failure of French cultural propaganda:
although they are called the Spanish Steps—the Spanish Embassy
moved onto the square in the 17th century—they are unequivocally
French. First suggested by the French about the time the Spanish
Embassy was being installed, the idea was approved by papal
authorities 100 years later and paid for with a legacy from a French
diplomat. The stairs ascend to the French-built church and convent
of Trinità dei Monti, begun in 1495 with a gift from the visiting French
king Charles VIII and restored by Louis XVIII.

Spanish StepsScalinata della Trinità dei Monti, known as the Spanish Steps
(or Stairs), 18th century, Rome.© stocker1970/Shutterstock.com

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The English novelist Charles Dickens described the steps as thronged
with unengaged “artist’s models” in regional costume; they are still
crowded with loiterers in distinctive dress from all over the world.
Indeed, since the end of the 16th century the Piazza di Spagna has
been a stopping place for tourists as well as a destination for artists
and writers. Young lords on the Grand Tour of Europe left their heavy
touring coaches for refitting in a side street still called Via delle
Carozze (“Carriage Street”). The English poet John Keats died in a
house on the piazza that is now a museum. A number of artists—those
who have not been shouldered out by galleries and ultra-modish
shops—still retain studios among the walled gardens of the nearby Via
Margutta.

Spanish StepsScalinata della Trinità dei Monti, known as the Spanish Steps
(or Stairs), 18th century, Rome.© Jeffrey S. Campbell

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Via Vittorio Veneto

A bit farther east, both Romans and visitors alike continue to

congregate at the café tables ranged on the plane-tree-shaded
sidewalks of the Via Vittorio Veneto (Via Veneto), a street of grand
hotels, offices, and government buildings. Laid out in 1887 between
the Villa Borghese gardens (to the north) and the Piazza Barberini (to
the south), it runs downhill in a dogleg shape. During the 15 or so
years of peak prosperity in Italian filmmaking, about 1950–65,
international film celebrities abounded. Although it has lost much of
the glitter of its heyday—evocatively portrayed by Federico Fellini in
his film La dolce vita (1960; “The Sweet Life”)—the street remains a
fashionable thoroughfare, animated until long after midnight.

The Seven Hills

The Palatine

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Rome: Romulus and RemusOverview of the founding of Rome, including a
discussion of Romulus and Remus.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzSee
all videos for this article

The origins of Rome, as of all ancient cities, are wrapped in fable. The
Roman fable is of Romulus and Remus, twin sons of Mars, abandoned
on the flooding Tiber and deposited by the receding waters at the foot
of the Palatine. Suckled by a she-wolf, they were reared by a shepherd
and grew up to found Rome. (The bronze statue of the maternally
ferocious wolf, now in the city’s Capitoline Museums, is one of the
best-known works among the thousands of masterpieces in Rome.)
The Lupercal, the supposed cave of the she-wolf, was maintained as a
shrine at least until the fall of the empire. On the same side of the
Palatine, “Romulus’s House,” a timber-framed circular hut covered in
clay-plastered wickerwork, also was kept in constant repair in ancient
times. Modern excavations have revealed the emplacement of just
such Iron Age huts from the period (8th–7th century BCE) given in the
fable for the founding of Rome. In addition, in 2007 a vaulted
sanctuary thought to be the long-lost Lupercal was discovered 52 feet
(16 metres) below the surface of the Palatine.

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 Romulus and RemusLegendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus,
with their wolf foster mother, bronze sculpture; in the Capitoline Museums,
Rome. The wolf traditionally has been identified as Etruscan, c. 500–480 BC,
though some early 21st-century research suggests medieval origins. The
twins date from the 16th century.© irisphoto1/Fotolia

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Italy: The role of Rome

Rome was in practice part of Carolingian Italy, but the popes had a great deal of

autonomy and also religious status. Nicholas...

On this hill the columns of lost palaces rise in uncompromised beauty

from fields of wildflowers and the dust of history. This is the
landscape—Classical, with figures—that has stirred romantics since it
was first limned by 17th-century etchers and sketchers. Before the
emperors departed, virtually the entire hill was one vast palace.

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 Circus MaximusSite of the Circus Maximus, Rome, with the ruins of the
imperial palace on Palatine Hill in the background.Tom Corser

By the 3rd century BCE the Palatine was a superior residential district.
Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, was born there in 63 BCE and
continued to live there after he became emperor. His private dwelling,
built about 50 BCE and never seriously modified, still stands. It is
known as the House of Livia, for his widow, and has small, graceful
rooms decorated with paintings. Other private houses, now excavated
and visible, were incorporated into the foundations of the spreading
imperial structures, which eventually projected down into
the Forum on one side and onto the Circus Maximus on the other. The
emperor Tiberius built a palace to
which Nero, Caligula, Trajan, Hadrian, and Septimius Severus made
additions. The biggest and richest structure of all was created
for Domitian (reigned 81–96 CE), whose architect achieved feats of
construction engineering not seen before in Rome. Parts of the lavish
structure—the richly marbled, centrally heated dining hall of which is
among the chambers visible today—were occupied by popes after there
were no more emperors, and then the hill was abandoned.

Frescoed wall of fruit trees, palms, and oleanders from the garden room,
Villa of Livia, Rome, c. 50 BC. In the Museo Nazionale Romano,
Rome.SCALA/Art Resource, New York

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After some six centuries the great Roman families returned to the
Palatine, planting 16th-century pleasure gardens and pavilions over
past glories. A whole set of rooms from the private wing of Domitian’s
palace was preserved by incorporation into the Villa Mattei. Atop
Tiberius’s palace the Farnese family built two aviaries and a garden
house and laid out one of Europe’s first botanical gardens—some parts
of which have escaped archaeological excavation.

The Capitoline

The Capitoline Hill (Italian: Campidoglio) was the fortress and asylum
of Romulus’s Rome. The northern peak was the site of the Temple
of Juno Moneta (the word money derives from the temple’s function
as the early mint) and the citadel emplacements now occupied by the
Vittoriano monument and the church of Santa Maria d’Aracoeli. The
southern crest, sacred to Jupiter, became in 509 BCE the site of
the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the largest temple in
central Italy. The tufa platform on which it was built, now exposed
behind and beneath the Palazzo dei Conservatori, measured 203 by
174 feet (62 by 53 metres), probably with three rows of six columns
across each facade and six columns and a pilaster on either flank. The
first temple, of stuccoed volcanic stone quarried at the foot of the hill,
had a timber roof faced with brightly painted terra-cottas. Three times
it burned and was rebuilt, always of richer materials. The temple that
Domitian built was marble with gilded roof tiles and gold-plated
doors. It was filled with loot by victorious generals who came robed in
purple to lay their laurel crowns before Jupiter after riding in triumph
through the Forum. The antique pavings of the Clivus Capitolinus, the
road leading up the hill from the Forum, survive today. In this centre
of divine guidance, the Roman Senate held its first meeting every year.
Centuries later, in 1341, the Italian poet Petrarch was crowned with
laurel among the ruins of this capitol.

The church of Santa Maria d’Aracoeli, built before the 6th century and
remade in its present form in the 13th, is lined with columns rifled
from Classical buildings. It is the home of “Il Bambino,” a wooden

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statue (originally a 15th-century statue; now a copy) of the Christ
Child, who is called upon to save desperately ill children.

The Capitoline today, still the seat of Roman government, is little

changed from the 16th-century design conceived of by Michelangelo—
one of the earliest examples of modern town planning. The resulting
Piazza del Campidoglio, completed after Michelangelo’s death, is
framed by three palaces: the Palazzo Senatorio, the Palazzo dei
Conservatori, and the Palazzo Nuovo (opposite and identical to the
older Palazzo dei Conservatori). The centrepiece of the piazza is a
replica of a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.

The Palazzo Senatorio (“Senate Palace”) incorporates remains of the

facade of the Tabularium, a state records office constructed in
78 BCE and one of the first buildings to use concrete vaulting and
employ the arch with the Classical architectural orders. After a popular
uprising in 1143 CE, a palace was built on the site for the revived 56-
member Senate, supposedly elected by the people but by 1358 a body
of one appointed by the pope; when it was rebuilt to Michelangelo’s
design, it gained its present name.

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Rome: Palazzo SenatorioPalazzo Senatorio (background right) facing the ruins of the Roman Forum, Rome.© Ron
Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Rome: Palazzo SenatorioRuins of the Roman Forum with the Palazzo Senatorio in the background, Rome.© Ron
Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

The Palazzo dei Conservatori (“Palace of the Conservators”), on the

south side of the square, was the initial site of a papal collection of
Classical works offered back to the citizens of Rome by Sixtus IV in
1471. Following its completion in the 17th century, the Palazzo Nuovo
(“New Palace”; later also called the Palazzo del Museo Capitolino
[Capitoline Palace]) housed a portion of the large collection. In 1734 it
was opened to the public as a museum. Now occupying both the
Palazzo Nuovo and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, as well as a later
private palace (Caffarelli-Clementino), the Musei Capitolini
(Capitoline Museums) contain only objects found in Rome, including
the famed bronze she-wolf, the Capitoline Venus, and the Dying Gaul,

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as well as a host of portrait busts that can, in imagination, repeople the
Forum just below.

The Aventine

Though considerably built over with modern houses and traveled by

modern bus lines, the Aventine still bespeaks a Rome of the past, if not
the Classical past. The repeated fires that swept the city destroyed all
the buildings of the era of the republic, and the Temple
of Diana remains only as a street name. Under the 4th-century church
of Santa Prisca is one of the best-preserved Mithraic basilicas in the
city. The basilica of Santa Sabina, little altered since the 5th century, is
lined with 24 magnificent matching Corinthian columns rescued out of
Christian charity from an abandoned pagan temple or palace.
The Parco Savello, a small public park, was the walled area of the
Savello family fortress, one of 12 that ringed the city in medieval times.

A romantic gem is the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta (“Knights of Malta

Square”), designed in the late 1700s by Giambattista Piranesi, an
engraver with the heart of a poet and the eye of an engineer. To the
right of this obelisked and trophied square, set about with cypresses, is
the residence of the grand master of the Knights of
Malta (Hospitallers). The order’s headquarters were moved
permanently to Rome in 1834.

The Caelian

The Caelian includes the public park of Villa Celimontana and a

number of churches that date from the 4th to the 9th century. In the
medieval confines of the only fortified abbey left in Rome stands Santi
Quattro Coronati, today sheltering nuns. The basilica of Santi
Giovanni e Paolo, from the 5th century, stands in a piazza that has few
buildings later than the Middle Ages. Alongside the church are the
remains of the platform of the Temple of Claudius, dismantled partly
by Nero, completely by Vespasian. The round church of San Stefano

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Rotondo (460–483) may have been modeled on the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The Hospital of St. John was founded in the Middle Ages as a

dependence of the church of San Giovanni in Laterano (St. John
Lateran), just off the hill, and maintains its Romanesque gateway.
The Hospital of St. Thomas, established at the same period, has
disappeared save for its mosaic gateway, signed by Cosmate, of
the Cosmati school of carvers and decorators, and by his father,
Jacobus. Nearby stands the Arch of Dolabella (10 CE), and not far away
are the ruins of Nero’s extension of the Claudian aqueduct. Also on the
hill is the extensive Military Hospital of Celio.

The ruins of the Baths of Caracalla (c. 206–216), the public baths of
the emperor Caracalla, are found on the river flats behind the Caelian
Hill. Among the towering remains set in a large park,
the caldarium (steam room) is now used for summer opera
performances. Much of the famed Farnese family collection of marbles
was stripped from these baths.

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 Caracalla, Baths ofThe Baths of Caracalla, Rome.David Edgar
The Esquiline

Ruins of a portion of the emperor Nero’s Golden House are found on

the Esquiline, although the palace once occupied the Palatine and the
Caelian hills as well. After the fire of 64 CE had destroyed so much of
the city, Nero undertook to rebuild more than 200 acres (81 hectares)
of it as a palace for himself: seawater and sulfur water were piped into
its baths; flowers were sprinkled down through its fretted ivory
ceilings; and the facade was covered in gold, from which the
name Domus Aurea (Golden House) derived. The expropriation so
enraged the citizens that his successors hastened to efface all trace of
Nero’s incredible palace: the ornamental artificial lake was drained,
and on its bed the Colosseum was erected for free
entertainment; Trajan built magnificent baths—also with free
admission—atop the domestic wing of the Golden House;
and Domitian converted the portico on the edge of the Forum into
Rome’s smartest shopping street. The obliterators were aided by the
fire of 104 CE. Less than 70 years after the Golden House had been
started, nothing was left of it but a huge gilded statue of Nero, later
destroyed by one of the early popes. The removal of the Golden House
was so complete that later Romans could not remember where it had
stood. When the domestic wing of the palace was discovered under the
remains of Trajan’s Baths in the 15th century, the rooms painted in
the Pompeiian style were thought at first to be decorated grottoes.
Some years later, when the painter Raphael and his friends were let
down on ropes to look, the style they imitated in decorating the
Vatican loggias was called grottesche (see also grotesque).

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cryptoporticusThe cryptoporticus built by Nero to connect his Golden House
with other imperial palaces on Palatine Hill, Rome.Marina/MM

Trajan’s Baths served as models for the Baths of Caracalla and

Diocletian, which in turn served as a pattern for the basilica built
by Maxentius. The bath building that housed the hot, warm, cold, and
exercise rooms and the swimming pool was a huge rectangular
concrete structure lined with marble. It was surrounded by a garden
enclosed in an outer rectangle of libraries, lecture halls, art galleries,
and other facilities of a big community centre.

Located between the Esquiline and the Palatine, the Basilica of

Maxentius (also named after Constantine I, who completed it after
dispatching Maxentius) was started about 311. This massive hall
of justice and commerce was covered by three groin vaults with three

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deeply coffered tunnel-vaulted bays on either side. It was probably
ruined by the earthquake of 847 and was also mined for its materials.
One of the great Corinthian columns stands obelisk-like before the
Santa Maria Maggiore church on the Esquiline. The head of a colossal
statue of Constantine that once stood in the basilica now reposes in
the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

Rome: Basilica of MaxentiusBasilica of Maxentius (also called Basilica of

Constantine), Rome, begun c. 311.© Leonid Andronov/Fotolia
The Viminal and Quirinal

Like much of the Esquiline, the adjacent Viminal and Quirinal hills lie
in the heart of modern Rome. Heavily built upon and sclerotic with
traffic, the former seems almost flattened under the Ministry of the
Interior. The ancient Baths of Diocletian (c. 298–306) are northeast of
the Viminal. Some idea of their size (130,000 square yards [110,000
square metres] for the main bath block) can be gained from the fact
that the church of San Bernardo was built into one of the chambers

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some 500 feet (150 metres) west of the central hall of
the frigidarium (cold room), into which Michelangelo built the
cloister church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in 1561. A portion of
the Museo Nazionale Romano (National Museum of Rome) is housed
in the baths complex. This matchless collection of antiquities includes
wall paintings from villas, mosaics, sarcophagi, and sculptures.

Baths of DiocletianBaths of Diocletian, Rome.Giovanni Dall'Orto

The Quirinal, pierced by a modern traffic tunnel, has been a

distinguished address since Pomponius Atticus, recipient of the
statesman Cicero’s letters, was a resident in the 1st century BCE.
Starting with the Crescentii, who planted the family fortress there in
the Middle Ages, powerful Roman families built their homes in this
location. The Palazzo Colonna, at the foot of the hill near the Via del
Corso, is an art gallery open to the public; its gardens, climbing the
slope to the Piazza Quirinale, contain remnants of Caracalla’s Temple
of Serapis. The piazza has been graced since antiquity with two large
statues of men with rearing horses, The Horse Tamers, or Castor and

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Pollux. Closed on three sides by palaces, the piazza opens on the
fourth to a splendid view over the Tiber.

The Palazzo del Quirinale (Quirinal Palace), built by Pope Gregory

XIII in 1574 as a summer palace away from the heat and malaria of
the Vatican, was enlarged and embellished over the next 200 years by
a succession of noted architects. The palace, with many extensions and
wings, is huge, and its garden is five times as big as the building. From
1550 to 1870, the Quirinal rather than the Vatican was the official
papal residence. In 1870 it became the royal palace of the new
Kingdom of Italy and in 1948 the presidential palace. Both monarchs
and presidents, however, have preferred to inhabit the
homier palazzetto (“little palace”) at the far end.

The handsome buildings opposite are the stables (1730–40), built on

the site of the Crescentii 10th-century stronghold. This zone is now
used as a site for major art exhibitions. The Palazzo della Consulta
(1734), erected for part of the papal administration, became the home
of the Italian Constitutional Court in the 1950s. The Palazzo
Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, built by a cardinal of the Borghese family in
1603, is still a private house.

The Palazzo Barberini farther up the Quirinal, constructed during

1629–33 on the site of the old Palazzo Sforza, was occupied by
the Barberini family until 1949. Part of the collection of the Galleria
Nazionale d’Arte Antica (National Gallery of Ancient Art) is housed
here, the rest across the river in the Palazzo Corsini in the
Trastevere rione (district). The pictures, most of them works by
celebrated masters, were contributed by distinguished families,
including the Barberini. Architecturally, the Palazzo Barberini is
important because it marks a departure from the heavy-set four-
square town houses of the early and High Renaissance. In the Rome
region, only country villas had been built on so open a plan, with two
wings coming forward from an open, arcaded facade. Further, it
pioneered the Baroque style in domestic architecture.

Carlo Maderno, who put the facade on St. Peter’s Basilica, made the
plans for the Palazzo Barberini, which were carried out after his death

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by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, assisted by Francesco Borromini. Each of
these two rivals has a church just around the corner. After 20 years of
apprenticeship, Borromini was given his first chance to do his own
building. It was a church at an impossibly tiny site at the crossroads of
Quattro Fontane (“Four Fountains,” one of which is built into
a niche in the church wall), but his creation, San Carlo alle Quattro
Fontane, was a triumph. To his revolutionary solutions for site
problems, for which he employed a brilliant variation on the oval,
Borromini added a facade in 1667, the year he died, which responded
to the waves of motion generated by the spatially complex interior. His
work created a sensation, and his ideas were seized upon by Baroque
artists, especially from other countries. Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al
Quirinale is also small, but it took 12 years to build (1658–70), late in
his career. An oval building with the naves sculpted into the outer wall,
it enlarges on concepts advanced by Michelangelo. Bernini’s use of
coloured marbles and shrewd lighting effects gives the small structure
extra dimension. Nearby is the Teatro dell’Opera (Opera House), built
in 1880 by Achille Sfondrini. It was acquired by the state in 1926 and
is Rome’s most important lyric theatre.

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 San Carlo alle Quattro FontaneSan Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome.Jean-
Christophe BENOIST

Other hills

Behind the Piazza del Popolo is the Pincio (Pincian Hill). During the
Roman Empire the Pincio was covered with villas and gardens, but it
was made into a public park only in the 19th century. Toward sunset
many Romans arrive to stroll along the Pincio promenade.

On the hill is the Villa Borghese, which the Italian government

purchased, along with its contents and grounds, at the turn of the 20th
century. The grounds are now an extensive park containing numerous
museums, academies, monuments, natural features, and other
attractions. In the villa itself, the Galleria Borghese’s collection
features several Caravaggios, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love,

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and Antonio Canova’s Neoclassical nude statue of Pauline Bonaparte,
for a time a Borghese princess, as Venus Victrix.

Canova, Antonio: Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as Venus VictrixPaolina

Borghese Bonaparte as Venus Victrix, marble sculpture by Antonio Canova,
1805–08; in the Borghese Gallery, Rome.© Luxerendering/Shutterstock.com

The 1544 Villa Medici was bought by Napoleon in 1801 to house the
Accademia di Francia (French Academy), which is still in occupation.
This academy, founded in 1666, is the oldest of many national
academies established from the 17th to the 19th century to give
architects, artists, writers, and musicians the opportunity to study the
vast textbook that is the city itself and to use its museums and
libraries. The Villa Giulia was a typical mid-16th-century Roman
suburban villa, conceived not as a dwelling but as a place for repose
and entertainment during the afternoon and early evening. It houses
the Museo Nazionale di Villa Giulia (Villa Giulia National Museum),
which has a collection of Etruscan art and artifacts of singular beauty

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and historical value. Other attractions of the Borghese grounds include
the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (National Gallery of Modern
Art), founded in 1883, with an important collection of 19th- and 20th-
century Italian art, and the Bioparco–Giardino Zoologico (Biopark–
Zoological Garden), established in 1911.

Medici, VillaVilla Medici, Rome.© Mirek Hejnicki/Shutterstock.com

Across the river, behind the river plain of Trastevere, is the Gianicolo
(Janiculum Hill). The Janiculum crest was made into a park in 1870 to
honour Giuseppe Garibaldi for his heroic but unsuccessful defense of
the short-lived Roman Republic of 1849.

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The Forum

Roman ForumLearn about the ancient buildings of the Roman Forum,

Rome.© Open University (A Britannica Publishing Partner)See all videos for this
article

The Forum was the religious, civic, and commercial centre of ancient
Rome. After the time of Julius Caesar, though it became more
imposing, it was only one (albeit the most distinguished) of several
complexes serving the same functions. Essentially, it was a small
closed valley ringed by the Seven Hills. There were two meeting places,
formal open spaces, in the northwest corner—the political Comitium
and the social Forum (the name later applied to the entire valley)—
with shops down both sides. At the other end of the valley was the
precinct of the high priest of Roman religion and that of the Vestals,
the keepers of the sacred flame. Between these two were the temples of
the gods. Various emperors opened up the ends of the valley, and
there was more building, but the poles of activity did not alter.

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 Roman ForumThe Column of Phocas (left foreground) and the Temple of
Antoninus and Faustina (left background) among the ruins of the Roman
Forum, Rome.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

Fires, earthquakes, and invasions repeatedly leveled the buildings, and

new ones were erected on their remains until the valley was covered by
many layers of debris, earth, and ashes. Medieval Romans called it
Campo Vaccino (“Cow Field”) and the abutting Capitoline Hill Monte
Caprino (“Goat Hill”). Excavation began late in the 19th century, and
most of the accumulation has been dug away, down to the level at
which Julius Caesar knew it. Stratigraphic excavations supported the
traditional dating of the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, a sewer
cutting diagonally across the valley floor, to the 6th century BCE.

Janus and Saturn, both of whom have temples in the Forum valley,
were among the gods of early Rome, and the Temple of Vesta, even in

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its last marble version (191 CE), retained the circular shape of a
primitive clay-and-wattle hut. The forge of Vulcan, the Volcanal, had
very early beginnings. The Regia, traditionally described as the
residence of Numa Pompilius, the priest-king, became the
administrative building for the pontifex maximus, who took on the
ancient monarchy’s priestly duties. The Temple of Castor and Pollux
(the Dioscuri) was built at the establishment of the republic.

Roman Forum: Temple of VestaTemple of Vesta, Roman Forum, Rome.©

Shawn McCullars

The oldest formally consecrated monument was the open space of the
social Forum. A roughly trapezoidal stretch of ground, it was bare save
for three plants essential to Mediterranean agriculture: the grape, the
fig, and the olive. Centuries later, when the basilicas were built behind

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the bordering shops, they served as a protective palisade for the
Forum and a covered extension of its open space. At the wide end of
the Forum and to one side was the Comitium, in which the popular
assembly met. Nearby lay the orators’ platform, the Rostra, decorated
in 338 BCE with the iron rams (rostra) taken as trophies from the
warships of Antium (now Anzio, Italy).

At the other end of the Comitium stood the Curia, where

the Senate met. When it was destroyed by fire, along with the Basilica
Porcia (184 BCE, the first of the basilicas), Julius Caesar built a new
and greatly enlarged one that encroached on the open space of the
Comitium. For the assembly, he built a meeting hall in the Campus
Martius, outside the valley altogether. He built a new and much bigger
Rostra across the wide end of the Forum. He supplanted the Basilica
Sempronia (170 BCE) on the western side of the Forum with his own
Basilica Julia (54 BCE), installing new shops in place of the old
Tabernae Veteres (“Old Shops”). On the other side of the Forum
already stood the shop-fronted Basilica Aemilia (179 BCE).

Caesar also carried his building program onto the flat ground just
north of the valley between the Quirinal and Esquiline hills, making
his own forum of shops and temple, alongside
which Augustus, Trajan, Nerva, and Vespasian later constructed their
forums. Pompey’s theatre in the bed of the Tiber (55 BCE) was followed
by the Theatre of Marcellus (13 BCE). The great baths, Agrippa’s grand
concourse in the Campus Martius, the circuses, and the Colosseum all
drew the populace away to other centres of activity. The political
attraction of the Forum, already vitiated in Caesar’s day, continued to
decline.

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 Trajan's ForumTrajan's Forum, Rome; designed by Apollodorus of
Damascus.Markus Bernet

Nevertheless, the halls and temples of the Forum were assiduously

rebuilt, ever grander, and more were added. Caesar, after his death,
was made a god, and his temple was erected between the Forum
proper and the Regia. Eventually, the sacred open space was defiled
with honorary columns and an equestrian statue of Domitian. The last
thing to be erected in the Forum was a column, raised by Phocas,
a Byzantine usurper (608), to honour himself. Septimius
Severus placed his arch over the Via Sacra. Other temples were
rammed into empty places, and the whole became a forest of towering
columns, gleaming walls, and ornate statuary. The dazzling marble
mountain of the Palatine flowed down into the Forum as well, and the
opposite rim glittered with the splendours of the imperial forums.

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Roman ForumThe Temple of Saturn (foreground) and the Arch of Septimius
Severus in the Forum of Rome.© spooh/iStock.com
Today the Forum is a confusing boneyard of history. Although later
buildings perpetuated the name and roughly the position of the first
halls and temples, their ruins do not necessarily stand where earlier
buildings stood, and many details of the earlier Forum are still the
subject of scholarly speculation. Of the thousands of remaining
columns, not many more than 50 stand erect, and amid the ruins are
Christian churches, thickets of trees and bushes, and hundreds upon
hundreds of free-living cats.

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 The ruins of the Roman Forum, Rome.Photos.com/Thinkstock

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 The Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine

Rome: ColosseumOverview of the Colosseum, Rome.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH,

MainzSee all videos for this article

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 ColosseumStudying the effects of local construction on the Colosseum,
Rome.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzSee all videos for this article

Between the Caelian and the Esquiline, the end of the Forum valley is
filled by the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, with the Palatine
edging down from the north. The Colosseum (c. 70–82 CE) that
replaced Nero’s ornamental lake is more correctly called the Flavian
Amphitheatre, after the Flavian dynasty of emperors. It was begun
by Vespasian and inaugurated by Titus in 80 CE. The oval stadium
measures about one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometre) around,
with external dimensions of 620 by 513 feet (190 by 155 metres). The
approximately 160-foot (48-metre) facade has three superimposed
series of 80 arches and an attic story. The attached columns follow the
order applied on the Theatre of Marcellus (13 BCE): sturdy,
unadorned Doric on the ground floor, more elegant Ionic next, and
luxuriant Corinthian on top. The attic story bore corbels supporting
masts from which royal sailors manipulated awnings to protect the
50,000 seats from the sun during the gladiatorial contests, combats
with wild animals, sham battles, and, when the arena was flooded,
naval displays. The main structural framework and facade
are travertine, the secondary walls of volcanic tufa, the inner bowl and
the arcade vaults of concrete. Until Pius VIII (reigned 1829–30) began
conserving what was left, it had been a convenient quarry for 1,000
years.

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Rome: ColosseumColosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre), Rome, c. AD 70–82.© Goodshoot/Jupiterimages

Rome: ColosseumInterior of the Colosseum, Rome.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)

The nearby Arch of Constantine was erected hastily to

celebrate Constantine I’s victory over Maxentius in 312. Almost all the
sculpture on this splendid arch was snatched from earlier monuments:
a battle frieze from the forum of Trajan, a series
of Hadrianic roundels, and eight panels from a Marcus
Aurelius monument.

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 Constantine, Arch ofThe Arch of Constantine, Rome.© Jeff
Banke/Shutterstock.com

The river lands

Along a 1.5-mile (2.5-km) stretch of the Tiber, around a big bend in its
course, lie all the historic quarters of the river plain. On the right
(west) bank are the Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice; built 1889–
1910), the Castel Sant’Angelo (Hadrian’s Tomb), the entrance
to Vatican City, and the Trastevere district. On the left (east) bank are
the Forum Boarium, Forum Holitorium, Circus Flaminius,
and Campus Martius.

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 Castel Sant'AngeloCastel Sant'Angelo, Rome.Dallas and John Heaton from
Stone—CLICK/Chicago

At the bottom of the bend is Tiber Island. The island, 1,100 feet (335
metres) long and less than 330 feet (100 metres) wide at its widest,
has been a place of healing since the Temple of Asclepius was erected
after the plague of 291 BCE; the largest building there is the
Fatebenefratelli Hospital (also called the Hospital of San Giovanni di
Dio). Facing the hospital is another of Rome’s
towered medieval family fortresses, this one built by the Pierleoni.

Several of the bridges along this part of the Tiber are of special
interest. The Ponte Sant’Angelo is in the main the ancient Pons Aelius,
built about the same time as Hadrian’s Tomb, which stands at one end
of the bridge. Gian Lorenzo Bernini was asked to add angels to the
Ponte Sant’Angelo in the 17th century. The Ponte Cestio, often rebuilt
since the 1st century BCE, leads from Tiber Island to Trastevere, on the

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west bank, while the Ponte Fabricio (62 BCE), the oldest in Rome, links
the island to the shore below the Capitoline, on the east bank. Just
downstream from the island are the remains of the Ponte Rotto
(“Broken Bridge”) of the 2nd century BCE and two bridges farther
along. One of these, the modern Ponte Sublicio, is named for the
wooden bridge defended on this part of the river by the legendary
Roman hero Horatius and his comrades.

Tiber River, RomeSant'Angelo Bridge over the Tiber River, Rome.© Shawn
McCullars

Castel Sant’Angelo

In 135 CE the emperor Hadrian began his tomb; a towering cylinder

about 65 feet (20 metres) high on a square base, it was in size and
form a typical imperial mausoleum. In 271 it was incorporated into

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 the Aurelian Wall and became a key fortress in the defense of Rome.
In the 6th century St. Gregory I, leading a procession to pray for the
end to a plague, allegedly had a vision of the archangel Michael atop
the tomb. The epidemic ceased, and the tomb-citadel became known
as the Castel Sant’Angelo (Castle of the Holy Angel). In time it became
a papal castle, with richly furnished and frescoed rooms, loggias for
the view, a siege store of 5,800 gallons (22,000 litres) of oil and
770,000 pounds (350,000 kg) of grain, a centrally heated bathroom, a
prison that incarcerated the artist Benvenuto Cellini, among others,
and a still-intact fortified passage from the Vatican to carry the pope to
refuge there. It is now a state museum with an arboured terrace.

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Castel Sant'AngeloCastel Sant'Angelo, Rome.Andreas Tille

HadrianMarble portrait bust of Roman emperor Hadrian, c. 117–138 CE; in the collection of the Braccio Nuovo
Gallery, Chiaramonti Museum, Vatican Museums, Vatican City.Photos.com/Thinkstock

Trastevere

The Trastevere (“Across the Tiber”) district, long the home of powerful
Roman families, features palaces built during the Renaissance (e.g.,
the Villa Farnesina) and later (e.g., the 18th-century Palazzo Corsini).
Most of the streets are still narrow and without sidewalks. Every 100
paces or so the haphazard cobbled lanes open upon some surprising
small piazza with a palace, a church, a cloister, or a group of cafés. In
the later 20th century, Trastevere took on the characteristics of a rich
bohemian neighbourhood with a high percentage of foreign residents.

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Some authorities claim Santa Maria in Trastevere as the oldest church
in Rome. It is said that Severus Alexander (reigned 222–235)
permitted Christians to gather at this site under the leadership of the
pope St. Calixtus I, and it is recorded that the pope St. Julius I either
raised or rebuilt a church there in 341–352. Today’s church is largely
12th-century Romanesque, with a beguiling mosaic facade.

The lower east bank

On the shore by the Ponte Rotto is the site of the earliest cattle market
(Forum Boarium) and vegetable market (Forum Holitorium), girded
with temples, of which two remain: an elegant circular marble
structure of the 1st century BCE and a nicely proportioned
rectangular Ionic building, perhaps a few decades older. Their
dedications are disputed—save that they are not, as they are popularly
called, temples of Vesta and of Fortuna Virilis. In the 6th century the
church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin was built into the antique grain-
commission offices. Some of the Forum Boarium columns can still be
seen on the interior of the church, and one of its drain lids, fixed to the
outer wall, was carved to represent a face with a gaping mouth. This
Classical manhole cover became the dreaded Bocca della Verità
(“Mouth of Truth”), which allegedly would crunch down upon the
hand of anyone telling a lie.

Nearby is the Theatre of Marcellus, begun by Julius Caesar and

completed in 13 BCE by Augustus, who named it for a nephew. It owes
its preservation to its conversion into a fortress for one of the
quarrelsome clans of the Middle Ages. Converted into a palace for
the Orsini family in the 16th century, it remains private property. The
Classical orders of the facade, adopted for the Colosseum, became the
model for Renaissance architects.

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 Marcellus, Theatre ofThe Theatre of Marcellus, Rome.© Danilo
Ascione/Shutterstock.com

From there northward and inland as far as the Via Flaminia (the
modern Corso), the river plain was a vast plantation of temples, baths,
and sports grounds until the Middle Ages, when the remaining
Romans took up residence there. The portion closest to Tiber Island
was once a major republican racing and sports ground, the Circus
Flaminius (220 BCE), which in the 16th century became the Jewish
ghetto. For many years the neighbourhood retained a Jewish flavour,
but eventually it became ripe for conversion to luxurious flats. Nearby,
the Largo Argentina, excavated 1926–29, contains four small temples
of the 1st and 2nd centuries BCE.

Also in the area, a crescent of buildings between the Piazza del

Biscione and the Piazza dei Satiri takes its curved shape from having
been built into and around Pompey’s Theatre, the first stone theatre
building in Rome. Inspired by the Greek theatre of Mytilene, in
which Pompey the Great had been so spectacularly entertained, it had
a portico of 100 columns that was equipped to be a community
centre almost as much as the baths. The Senate met there on the Ides
of March in 44 BCE, when Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times and fell
at the foot of Pompey’s statue. For almost 400 years, a piece of

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sculpture unearthed nearby in 1550 and deposited in the Palazzo
Spada was erroneously believed to be the Pompey statue. A part of the
theatre was fortified by the Orsini family in the 12th century and later
converted into the Palazzo Righetti, or Pio.

Campus Martius

The rest of the river bend northward was known as the Campus
Martius (Field of Mars). Marshy in places, with a few temples and
public buildings, it was made into one of the grandeurs of Rome
by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in the 1st century BCE. The swamp
became a lake, the Stagnum Agrippae, amid a landscape of lawns,
baths, temples, and parks. Today, interspersed among roughly 40
palaces and 100 churches are remnants of what the emperors later
built there. The shape and some of the remains of Domitian’s stadium
(81–89 CE), which remained intact until at least 1450, are retained in
the Piazza Navona. Even more spectacular are the reconstructed Ara
Pacis Augustae (“Altar of Augustan Peace”) and the Pantheon.

Rome: Piazza NavonaPiazza Navona, Rome, with the church of Sant'Agnese

in Agone, designed by Francesco Borromini, and (foreground) the Fountain
of the Moor, originally designed by Giacomo della Porta and revised by Gian
Lorenzo Bernini.© Stephen Simpson/FPG International

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As almost nothing from Agrippa’s time remained after the fire of
80 CE, the emperor Hadrian undertook to restore some of it. Among
his works was the new Pantheon, one of the West’s great buildings,
extraordinary as architecture and remarkable as a feat of engineering.
This “Temple of All the Gods,” imperial property, survived because it
became a church, the gift of the Byzantine emperor Phocas to
Pope Boniface IV in 608. This protected the building from everyone
but the popes: the bronze roof beams of the grandiose pedimental
porch of 18 columns of Egyptian granite were stripped by Urban VIII,
a 17th-century pope of the Barberini family, who took them as raw
material for the interior of St. Peter’s Basilica—provoking the
celebrated anonymous comment, “Quod non fecerunt barberi,
fecerunt Barberini” (“What was not done by the barbarians was done
by the Barberini”).

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 PantheonExterior of the Pantheon, begun 27 BC, rebuilt c. AD 118–128,
Rome.© Jeffrey S. Campbell

It has been suggested that the temple was designed by Hadrian

himself, whose villa at Tivoli is another landmark in the development
of architecture. The Pantheon was possibly the first monumental
building of antiquity conceived as an interior. Evenly lighted from a
single source—the open “eye” (oculus) in the centre of the dome—the
enormous interior, circular and richly marbled, is almost unchanged
from Classical times. Until the 20th century the dome was the largest
ever built, about 142 feet (43 metres) in diameter, equal to the height
of the building. Two things made its construction feasible: the
magnificent quality of the mortar used in the concrete and
the meticulous selection and grading of the aggregate, which became
lighter in weight with increasing height. There also is some brick
ribbing in the lowest part of the dome and thrust-containing brick
outer facing. The original bronze doors are still in place. Italy’s first
two kings are buried in the Pantheon, as are many artists, of
whom Raphael is the most notable. Nearby are fragments of Agrippa’s
baths.

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Pantheon: oculusThe oculus in the Pantheon, Rome.

Pannini, Giovanni Paolo: painting of the interior of the Pantheon, RomeInterior of the Pantheon, Rome, oil on
canvas by Giovanni Paolo Pannini, 1732. 119 × 98.4 cm.In a private collection

The shattered drum of Augustus’s tomb marks the spot where he was
buried in 14 CE. The mausoleum became a 12th-century fortress of
the Colonna family, a 16th-century garden, a ring for Spanish
bullfights in the 17th century, and then a concert hall until 1936, when
it was scraped down to its impressive but mournful foundations by
Mussolini, who may have planned to be buried there himself. Next to
the tomb is the delicately beautiful white marble Ara Pacis (dedicated
9 BCE). The altar, raised on steps, is enclosed in a sculptured screen.
Bits of the friezes were discovered off the Corso in the 15th century,
and the altar itself was dug up there in 1938 after 35 years of labour.
The pieces unearthed earlier were bought back from museums, and

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the whole was reassembled to stand four streets away from its original
location.

Ara PacisDetail from the Ara Pacis shrine, Rome.Marina/MM

Among the palaces in the Campus Martius are the Palazzo di
Montecitorio (17th century), designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, which
houses Italy’s Chamber of Deputies; the Palazzo Madama (17th
century), home of the Senate; and the Palazzo Spada (c. 1540), which
houses the Council of State. The Museo di Roma, a museum that
illustrates the life of the city through the ages, is in the Palazzo Braschi
(18th century). The Brazilian Embassy is in the Palazzo Pamphili. The
early 16th-century Palazzo di Firenze was the Florentine Embassy
until the union of Italy; it is now occupied by the Società Dante
Alighieri, a society devoted to the teaching of Italian. The Palazzo della
Sapienza, located near the Senate, is now the National Archives, but
from 1431 to 1935 it was the seat of the University of Rome (founded
1303).

Renaissance palaces

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Three architecturally celebrated buildings in the palace-studded river
region are the Cancelleria, the Farnese, and the Massimo alle
Colonne palaces. Because all the pertinent documents were destroyed
in the sack of Rome in 1527, the architect of the Palazzo della
Cancelleria remains unknown. Dated 1486–98, it was built by
Cardinal Raffaelo Riario out of a night’s winnings at the gaming table.
Seized by Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–21), it has housed some portion of
the Vatican chancellery ever since, except during Napoleonic and
revolutionary interruptions. A square building with a rusticated
ground floor, its upper stories are plain and rhythmically pilastered,
while the columned inner court is noble and deeply harmonious. The
city’s first High Renaissance building, it could be said to symbolize
Rome’s displacement of Florence as art capital of the world.

Sangallo, Antonio da, the Younger: Palazzo FarnesePalazzo Farnese, Rome;

designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Michelangelo, among
others.© Baloncici/Shutterstock.com

The Palazzo Farnese, the most monumental of Rome’s Renaissance

palaces and now the site of the French Embassy, was designed
by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (a member of the Sangallo

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family of architects), who was succeeded after his death
by Michelangelo, Giacomo da Vignola, and Giacomo della Porta.
Sangallo followed the Renaissance precepts regarding the
architectural orders on the lower floors, but Michelangelo’s top story
uses the traditional elements in a willful way, capping it all with an
overpowering cornice—a personal expression that
foreshadowed Mannerism, a leaching of Renaissance ideals, and the
subsequent theatrical self-expression of Baroque. Michelangelo’s
project to join this palace to the Villa Farnesina, across the Tiber, by a
bridge was begun but never completed. A portion of the proposed
bridge can be seen in the surviving arch over the Via Giulia, one of the
city’s most charming streets.

Venus and Anchises, detail from the frescoes in the Galleria of the Palazzo
Farnese, Rome, by Annibale Carracci, 1597–1603/04SCALA/Art Resource, New
York

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Mannerist architecture is typified by Baldassarre Peruzzi’s Palazzo
Massimo alle Colonne (c. 1535), the name of which comes from a
colonnaded palace on the site destroyed in the 1527 sack. It disregards
all Renaissance canons, with its brooding entry and heavy cornice
below a slightly bowed and airy facade punched with small windows.
The Massimo family gave shelter to the German printers Konrad
Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who produced Rome’s first printed
book in their house in 1467.

Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Rome, designed by Baldassarre Peruzzi,

completed c. 1535.Jensens

The churches

Some 25 of the original parish churches, or tituli, the first legal

churches in Rome, still function. Most had been private houses in
which the Christians illegally congregated, and some of these houses,
as at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, are still preserved underneath the
present church buildings. Since the 4th century the tituli priests have

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been cardinals who, over the centuries, have rebuilt, enlarged, and
embellished their churches.

RomeCourtyard of the chapel of Sant'Ivo della Sapienza, Rome, by Francesco

Borromini, 1642–60.© scaliger/iStock.com

Some early Christian churches were centrally rather than

longitudinally organized, a plan dictated by the circular form of the
imperial mausoleums into which they were built. A good example is
Santa Costanza (c. 320 CE), which also has a superb series of 4th-
century vault mosaics in pagan designs. Although churches of this type
were few, they had a strong influence on the development of the
centrally planned house of worship.

However, it was the rectangular Roman basilica (a word used to

designate a public hall in pre-Christian Rome and, later, an important
church), with its open hall extending from end to end, that established
the model for Western ecclesiastical architecture for centuries to

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come. The basilical church has a nave higher than the side aisles, from
which it is separated by a colonnade on each side. It has either a
cloistered court (atrium) or anteroom (narthex) or both at the west
end and a semicircular projection (apse) at the east. In the 4th
century CE Constantine I added the transept, a lateral aisle crossing
the nave just before the apse, to the standard basilican plan, thus
making the basilica a cross-shaped structure.

In the 4th century, basilicas were built to mark the burial places
of martyrs. Most martyrs had been interred beyond the city walls in
the catacombs, underground galleries with recesses used as tombs.
When later sieges of Rome laid waste the countryside, saintly relics
were removed to the safety of city churches. During the Middle Ages,
when the prevalence of malaria and of tomb robbers—there was a
brisk commerce in religious relics—made ventures beyond the walls
risky, some of the oratories and basilicas fell almost to ruin, and the
location of some catacombs was forgotten.

The great basilicas

Among Rome’s basilicas, four are designated as major (maggiore), or

papal: St. Peter’s (technically in Vatican City), San Giovanni in
Laterano, San Paolo Fuori le Mura, and Santa Maria Maggiore. The
first three were all originally built under Constantine I. Under
the Lateran Treaty with Vatican City (effective 1929–85), the Italian
government granted the Holy See extraterritorial authority over major
basilicas and other sites within Rome.

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 St. Peter's BasilicaSt. Peter's Basilica on St. Peter's Square, Vatican
City.Colour Library International
St. Peter’s

Protected by the fortified Castel Sant’Angelo, St. Peter’s Basilica was

built over the traditional burial place of the apostle Peter, from whom
all popes claim succession. The spot was marked by a three-niched
monument (aedicula) of 166–170 CE. (Excavations in 1940–49
revealed well-preserved catacombs, with both pagan and Christian
graves dating from the period of St. Peter’s burial.) Constantine
enclosed the aedicula within a shrine, and during the last 15 years of
his life (c. 322–337) he built his basilica around it. The shrine was
sheltered by a curved open canopy supported by four serpentine
pillars that he brought from the Middle East. The design, enormously
magnified, was followed in making the baldachin (1623–33) over
today’s papal altar.

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 Vatican City: St. Peter's BasilicaSt. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City.AdstockRF

In spite of fires, depredations by invaders, and additions by various

popes, the original basilica stood for more than a millennium much as
it had been built, but in 1506 Pope Julius II ordered it razed and a new
St. Peter’s built. His architect was Donato Bramante, who in 1502 had
completed the first great masterpiece of the High Renaissance,
the Tempietto chapel in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio.
Bramante’s ground plan for St. Peter’s was central: a Greek cross, all
the arms of which are equal, around a central dome. Both he and
the pope died before much could be built. Successive architects,
including Raphael, drew fresh plans. The last of them, Antonio da
Sangallo the Younger, died in 1546, and the 71-year-
old Michelangelo was solicited to complete Sangallo’s projects. He
accepted but refused payment for his work on the basilica.
Michelangelo adapted Bramante’s original plan, the effect being more
emotional and mighty, less classically serene. Of the exterior, only the
back of the church, visible from the Vatican Gardens, and the dome
are Michelangelo’s. After his death Giacomo della Porta and Domenico

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Fontana, who executed the dome, altered the shape, making it taller
and steeper than the original design.

Bramante, Donato: TempiettoTempietto, designed by Donato Bramante,

1502; in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio, Rome.© marpet/Fotolia
The east end remained unfinished, and it was there that Carlo
Maderno was ordered to construct a nave, the clergy having won its
century-long battle to have a longitudinal church (one in the shape of a
Latin cross, rather than a Greek cross) for liturgical reasons. Maderno
added a Baroque facade in 1626. He was followed by Gian Lorenzo
Bernini, who worked on both the inside and the outside. His pontifical
crowd-funneling colonnade in the shape of a keyhole around the
piazza, a fountain for the piazza, the breathtaking baldachin, his
several major pieces of sculpture, his interior arrangements for the
church, and his dazzling Scala Regia (“Royal Stair”) to the Vatican
exhibit his legendary technical brilliance and his masterful showman’s
flair. In the end, all the planning, labour, and faith of numerous popes,
priests, artists, and artisans produced a vast, gorgeous ceremonial

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chamber. Today, amid the gleam and glitter of gold and bronze
and precious stones, eddy throngs of awed, dwarfed humanity.

San Giovanni in Laterano

When Francesco Borromini redid the interior of San Giovanni in

Laterano (St. John Lateran) in 1646–50, little of the original
Constantinian fabric remained after destruction by the Vandals (5th
century), damage by earthquake (9th), two devastating fires (14th),
and four consequent rebuildings. Constantine had built a five-aisled
basilica over the remains of the barracks of the imperial guard, the
Equites Singulares. The octagonal 5th-century baptistery had replaced
that of the 4th century, which had been built into the baths of the
House of Fausta, named for Constantine’s second wife. The bronze
doors of the basilica came from the Curia (the Senate chamber in the
Forum). The cloisters contain some of the finest examples of early
13th-century carved and inlaid decoration of the Cosmatesque
(Cosmati) style. On the exterior a 1732 facade is topped with 15 giant
statues.

The basilica’s piazza is decorated with an Egyptian obelisk (15th

century BCE), the oldest and tallest in Rome, one of those that had
been taken to the city in ancient times and that was reerected by
Pope Sixtus V late in the 16th century. At the same time, Sixtus
demolished the nearby old Lateran Palace, from which the Sancta
Sanctorum (the papal chapel) and the Scala Santa (“Holy Stairs”) were
preserved. The Scala Santa had been the principal ceremonial stairway
of the palace, but about the 8th or 9th century it began to be identified
popularly as having been brought from Jerusalem by St. Helena,
Constantine’s mother, reportedly from Pontius Pilate’s palace and thus
as the stair climbed by Jesus. The steps are protected by a wooden
cover, and believers mount on their knees.

San Paolo Fuori le Mura

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Rome: San Paolo Fuori le MuraOverview of San Paolo Fuori le Mura (St. Paul
Outside the Walls), Rome.Contunico © ZDF Enterprises GmbH, MainzSee all videos
for this article
San Paolo Fuori le Mura (St. Paul Outside the Walls), a basilica built
by Constantine over the grave of St. Paul, the Apostle, was replaced
starting in 386 by a structure mammoth for its time. It was faithfully
restored after a fire in 1823 and thus remains an outstanding example
of early basilical architecture. It has a single eastern apse, a lofty
transept, and five majestic nave aisles. Before the Muslim siege of
Rome in 846, the approach to the basilica was a mile-long colonnade
from the Porta San Paolo (“St. Paul’s Gate”).

Santa Maria Maggiore

Located on the Esquiline Hill, Santa Maria Maggiore was founded in

432, just after the Council of Ephesus in 431, which upheld the belief
that Mary truly was the mother of God; it was thus the first great
church of Mary in Rome. Behind its Neoclassic facade (1741–43), the
original basilica has resisted change. Most of the mosaics, lining the
walls and bursting with blue and gold around the altar, date from the

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time it was built. When a new apse was added in the 13th century, it
was also decorated with mosaics. Although the ceiling is Renaissance,
the slabs of fine marble and the Classical columns are pieces of
original plunder from other buildings. The great treasure of the church
is the Crib of Christ relic, five pieces of wood connected by bits of
metal. According to tradition, Pope Liberius (reigned 352–366) had a
vision of Mary, who told him to erect a church where snow would fall,
miraculously, on the night of August 5. In remembrance, it “snows”
white flower petals from the roof of the Pope Paul V chapel in Santa
Maria Maggiore every August 5. In 1993 the basilica suffered some
damage from a bomb.

Clement VIIIClement VIII, statue from his tomb in the Paolina (Borghese)
Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.Marie-Lan Nguyen

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Other important churches

San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura

Now in the midst of the Campo Verano cemetery, Rome’s Catholic

burying ground from 1830, San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura (St. Lawrence
Outside the Walls) dates from the 4th century. The nave is a 13th-
century basilica built by Pope Honorius III, and the chancel is another
basilica built by Pope Pelagius II in the late 6th century as a
replacement for the 4th-century original. On the inner part of
the triumphal arch between the two is a 6th-century mosaic, and along
the walls are giant Corinthian columns of rare marble taken from a
non-Christian building. The church was seriously damaged during an
air raid carried out by U.S. forces in July 1943, during World War II,
but it was later restored.

Santa Croce in Gerusalemme

The Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem) minor

basilica was built into the palace in which St. Helena lived (317–322).
About this time a hall of the palace was converted into a church, and
two adjoining small rooms were converted into chapels. The rest of the
palace continued to be lived in for centuries. Alleged relics of the True
Cross, reputedly the wood of the cross on which Jesus was crucified,
were found in 1492 walled into a niche and later were moved to a
modern chapel. The facade and narthex of the church are 1743 Rococo,
the interior an earlier Baroque with a 12th-century Cosmatesque
pavement, some antique columns, a few Renaissance details, and,
somewhere within it all, part of a palace built about 180–211.

San Pietro in Vincoli

Originally the Basilica Eudoxiana, San Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in

Chains) minor basilica was built in 432–440 with money from the
empress Eudoxia for the veneration of the chains of the
apostle Peter’s Jerusalem imprisonment. Later his Roman chains were

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added. The chains became famous after they were mentioned at the
Council of Ephesus in 431. Michelangelo’s thunderous Moses is on the
tomb of Pope Julius II. Behind the main altar is a 4th-century
sarcophagus with seven compartments, brought to Rome from
Antioch (now in Turkey) during the 6th century in the belief that it
contained relics of the seven Maccabees.

Gesù

Gesù, the mother church of the Jesuit order, was built during 1568–
84. Over the following four centuries it supplied one of the most
pervasively influential designs for church building. Michelangelo
offered the new order plans for their first church but died before his
plans could be acted upon. Building began under Giacomo da Vignola,
very possibly following Michelangelo’s ideas. The Jesuits, shock troops
of the Counter-Reformation, proselytizers rather than liturgists,
needed a new kind of church for their new approach. Vignola
combined the central plan (for preaching) with the longitudinal plan
(for ritual) by transforming the aisles into a series of chapels opening
into the nave. The facade carried the Classical orders upward, though
only across the width of the tall nave, and the space above the lower
aisles to either side was filled with a scroll. The ideas were not new in
the history of architecture, but they were new to Rome and new to the
age, and they spread with rapidity.

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Il Gesù, Rome, ItalyFacade of the Il Gesù, designed by Giacomo della Porta,
in Rome.Alessio Damato
Santa Maria della Vittoria

Built during 1605–26, Santa Maria della Vittoria harbours an unfailing

crowd-pleaser, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St.
Teresa (1645–52). It is conceived entirely in theatrical terms, even to
having the Cornaro family (in marble) seated in opera boxes at the
sides of the chapel. Their eyes are directed at the central group in a
niche framed in columns, exactly like a proscenium arch, the back wall
concealed by gilded metal beams of glory, the scene lighted from above
and behind by a hidden yellow-paned window. Amid this setting the
angel hovers above the swooning St. Teresa of Ávila, who is—and
the illusion is nigh to perfect—borne into the air at the moment of her

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ecstatic mystical union with Christ. Extraordinarily convincing and
utterly voluptuous, it has been both praised as a masterwork
of consummate spirituality and condemned as impious and prurient.

The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, marble and gilded bronze niche sculpture by Gian
Lorenzo Bernini, 1645–52; in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria,
Rome.Scala/Art Resource, New York
Sant’Agostino

Of the scores of churches in the Campus Martius of historical,

architectural, and artistic interest, Sant’Agostino (1479–83) is perhaps
the most Roman. The church, constructed entirely of travertine looted
from the Colosseum, was a favourite of many artists of the

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Renaissance period and beyond. Caravaggio painted the Madonna
with Pilgrims; Raphael did the fresco of Isaiah. Many expectant
mothers and women wishing to conceive have prayed at the foot of
the Madonna del Parto (“Madonna of Childbirth”; c. 1519), sculpted
by Jacopo Sansovino.

The fountains

Rome is as much a city of fountains as it is of churches or palaces,

antiquities or urban problems. The more than 300 monumental
fountains are an essential part of Rome’s seductive powers. Part of the
everyday yet part of the daily surprise, they are points of personal,
often sentimental attachment to the city. The Roman composer
Ottorino Resphigi found in them inspiration for his orchestral tone
poem Fontane di Roma (1917). In their ceaseless pouring forth, they
also provide a sense of luxury: on her arrival in 1655,
Queen Christina of Sweden, having watched the fountains in St.
Peter’s Square, reportedly gave her permission for them to be turned
off, only to learn that they flowed all the time.

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 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo: Fountain of the Four RiversFountain of the Four
Rivers, marble fountain by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1648–51; in Piazza Navona,
Rome, Italy.© iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Every fountain has its history, and many have legends, the best known
of which guarantees a return to Rome to those who toss coins into
the Trevi Fountain. An earlier fountain on this site, refurbished under
Pope Nicholas V in the 15th century, was demolished in the 17th
century, when plans were made for a new fountain. The present
version was not completed until the 18th century. A scenic wonder, the
huge fountain bulges into most of a tiny square and takes up the entire
end of an abutting palace. Nicola Salvi won a 1732 competition by
designing a late Baroque marble mass of allegorical figures and
natural rock formations. It took 30 years to complete. Its water, from
the ancient aqueduct called Acqua Vergine, long was considered

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 Rome’s softest and best tasting; for centuries, barrels of it were taken
every week to the Vatican and carried off by the jugful by expatriate
English tea brewers. Declared nonpotable in 1961, the waters are now
recycled by electric pumps.

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 •

Trevi Fountain, RomeTrevi Fountain, Rome.© rilindh/iStock.com

Trevi Fountain, Rome; designed by Nicola Salvi, 18th century.Pixland/Jupiterimages

Out of the rivalry between Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco

Borromini that so enriched the Roman cityscape arose a legend, still
believed and recounted today. It explains that on Bernini’s allegorical
Fountain of the Four Rivers, in Piazza Navona, the statue representing
the Nile River hides its head to avoid seeing the Borromini facade on
the church opposite, and the Río de la Plata figure raises its arm in
alarm to prevent the building from falling. The fountain was in fact
unveiled in 1651, a year before the church of Sant’Agnese was begun,
two years before Borromini was called in, and 15 years before the
facade was completed.

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 Fountain of the Four RiversFountain of the Four Rivers, marble fountain by
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1648-51; Piazza Navona, Rome.Sourav Niyogi

The oldest of the city’s fountains is really a spring, the ancient Lacus
Juturnae (“Pool of Juturna”) in the Forum, restored in 1952 to the
appearance it had in the time of the emperor Augustus. A much newer
fountain in the old city is one of the most admired. Inaugurated as
simple jets of water in the Piazza Esedra (now the Piazza della
Repubblica) by Pope Pius IX in 1870, just 10 days before the troops of
united Italy broke into the city, it was probably the last public work
dedicated by a pope in his role of temporal magistrate of the city. In
1901 the nymphs frolicking with sea beasts were added.

The least-liked fountain figure in Rome, unpopular since it was

installed in 1587, is on the triumphal arch fountain in the Piazza San
Bernardo, commissioned by Pope Sixtus V. The figure is a
pallid Moses, apparently in imitation of the work by Michelangelo that
adorns the tomb of Pope Julius II. Its sculptor, Prospero Bresciano, is
said to have been so hurt by the public’s jeers that he died of a broken
heart.

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People
Since ancient times, to be a citizen of Rome has been a source of pride.
Today there is still considerable prestige in being a Romano di Roma,
or “Roman” Roman. Among such Romans are the “black nobility,”
families with papal titles who form a society within high society,
shunning publicity and not given to great intimacy with the “white
nobility,” whose titles were conferred by mere temporal rulers. The
inhabitants who consider themselves the most nobly Roman of them
all are the people of the Trastevere (“Across the Tiber”) district. In
ancient times, Trastevere was the quarter for sailors and foreigners,
whereas the founding fathers eastward across the river were soldiers
and farmers. From the Middle Ages a number of palaces there were
the homes of powerful families.

Although the great majority of Romans are Catholics, the city also is
home to a variety of other religious groups. Jewish people, for
example, have lived in the city for thousands of years. Jews generally
were not persecuted in Rome until the 16th-century pope Paul
IV forced them into a ghetto (near Piazza Navona). Later popes carried
on his anti-Jewish program. Except for brief respites under Napoleon
I and the momentary Roman Republic of 1849, Jews were debarred
from all the professions, government service, and landownership until
1870, when Rome was integrated into united Italy and religious
persecution outlawed. Later redevelopment destroyed much of the
ghetto, although some streets remain, and the position of some of the
gates can still be seen.

During the 1930s and following World War II, Italians from all over
the south and from rural Lazio arrived seeking work in the capital city.
The population of Rome rose particularly rapidly in the 1950s and
’60s, from just over 1,960,000 in 1951 to more than 2,610,000 in 1967.
Population growth then slowed, as many Romans moved out of the
city proper and into other parts of Roma province.

Since the 1970s Rome has attracted a large number

of immigrants from outside Italy. In the early 21st century foreign

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residents included many relatively affluent people from other member
countries of the European Union (EU), particularly France, and from
the United States. However, a significant proportion of the city’s
immigrants worked in relatively low-paying jobs in the service sector;
domestic work and retail trade were common occupations. Most of
these immigrants had arrived from the Philippines, Romania, Poland,
Peru, Egypt, China, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. Others had origins in
Morocco, Senegal, Albania, or Ecuador, among other countries. In the
main, this immigration has taken place without too much friction, but
the late 20th and early 21st centuries did see a rise in racism and
violence directed against immigrants. Much of the tension centred on
the world of football (soccer), but a sense of unease about immigration
was widespread.

Economy
Manufacturing and services
Rome cannot be called an industrial city, although it has a fair amount
of medium and light industries. Among these have been the
engineering, electronics, and chemical industries, as well as printing,
clothing manufacture, and food processing. Factories have been
located mostly in the northwestern part of the city, but many closed or
relocated during the 1980s and ’90s. The construction industry
remains important.

The city’s sizeable publishing industry produces several influential

dailies—La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, Il Tempo, and L’Unità—as well
as a number of magazines. The motion-picture industry is centred
at Cinecittà Studios (constructed in 1937), outside Rome.

Most of the major employers in the city are part of the services sector.
Rome is a major market centre for central and southern Italy,
although financial exchange remains concentrated in Milan.
Government, with its many agencies and ministries, is a particularly
large employer. Tourism, however, is the outstanding contributor to

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the economy of the city. Rome is a major cultural, shopping, and
entertainment centre, attracting tens of millions of Italians and
foreigners each year. The capital is also a frequent host to conferences
and trade fairs. Many visitors, whether bona fide pilgrims or simply
tourists interested in the main religious sites, have ties to the Roman
Catholic Church. Indeed, the church itself—with its communications
and souvenir businesses, as well as its direct employment of thousands
of priests, nuns, and church workers—plays a significant role in
Rome’s economy as well.

Spectator sports contribute notably to the economy. Rome has two

main football (soccer) teams, AS Roma and Lazio. The former is
traditionally seen as the “city” team, while the latter attracts more
support from the peripheries and rural Lazio. Both teams play at the
Olympic stadium. Their matches are among the fiercest in world
football.

Transportation
Traffic is a typical Roman dilemma because much of the municipal
revenue is derived from the more than a million automobiles and
motor scooters that render city life difficult. The average noise during
waking hours is at or above the level that gradually induces deafness,
whereas the average speed of motor traffic, in spite of
the audacity and acuity of the drivers, is utterly slow. Beginning in
1973, both to reduce congestion and noise and air pollution, private
vehicles were banned from parts of the city’s ancient section. Other
attempts have been made to improve the traffic situation, particularly
after the election of an environmentally minded mayor, Francesco
Rutelli, in 1993. Nevertheless, the basic problems of traffic and
parking remain central ones for the city and its province.

Deterioration of the city’s monuments has been accelerated by traffic

fumes and vibration, yet the monuments themselves long impeded an
undertaking that could reduce road traffic: subway construction. In
the first half of the 20th century Mussolini decreed the building of a
subway from Rome’s central railway station, the Stazione Termini, and

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by 1955 it was in operation along a southwestern route. In 1959
a comprehensive metropolitan subway system was approved. After
five years of bureaucratic delays, construction of the first line of the
system began. The route was diverted to protect monuments, and
work on the line temporarily was halted when archaeological remains
were unearthed. The second line of the system was completed in 1980.
In the 1990s Mayor Rutelli extended the subway system and oversaw
the construction of tramlines around the city. Additional lines and
extensions have been planned, though the rich archaeological heritage
of Rome remains an obstacle.

Rome is served by two international airports. The larger

one, Leonardo da Vinci (Fiumicino) Airport, lies on the coast about 15
miles (24 km) southwest of the city. The smaller Ciampino Airport is
about 7 miles (11 km) to the southeast.

Administration And Society

Government
The city, or comune (commune), of Rome is governed by a popularly
elected communal council, a communal committee (an executive
body), and a mayor. The mayor is elected directly through a two-round
system. The council is responsible for such amenities as police
protection, health services, transportation, and certain aspects of
public assistance. The areas around the city, in Roma province, are
governed by an elected provincial council, a provincial committee, and
a committee president. Similarly, the government of
the Lazio region comprises an elected regional council, a regional
committee, and a committee president. The regional council passes
laws and issues administrative regulations—subject to
certain constitutional limitations—for the whole Lazio region.

Housing and education

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The city that built some of the first apartment houses in the world
(the insulae of ancient Rome) now suffers a perennial housing
shortage. At the time of Italian unification in 1870, the population of
the city was very low (about 226,000 inhabitants), and the landscape
was marked by vast open spaces within the city walls. However,
Rome’s status as the capital of a united Italy soon led to rapid
expansion, and the 1880s were marked by a so-called “building fever.”
Shantytowns occupied by poorer Romans soon sprang up in the rural-
urban fringe known as the borgate romane. The exodus of lower-class
Romans to the periphery was further encouraged by Mussolini, whose
creation of grand boulevards in the city centre destroyed entire
neighbourhoods there. Many of the numerous rural Italians who
moved to Rome in the mid-20th century also crowded into
the borgate. Some decent new housing was constructed on the
outskirts—for example, the attractive working-class housing at
Tiburtino, built in the early 1950s, and that in the vast EUR
(Esposizione Universale di Roma; “Universal Exhibition of Rome”)
complex, completed in the 1960s—but much of it was hastily built and
substandard. The 1960s and ’70s saw the construction of a number of
huge suburban public housing estates, such as Spinaceto and Corviale,
but they suffered from relative isolation, and many viewed them as
depressing eyesores. Meanwhile, a lack of administrative oversight
meant that a significant proportion of houses within Rome were
illegally built. More recent immigration from outside Italy has put
further pressure on the inadequate housing stock.

The city’s preeminent institution of higher education is the University

of Rome, founded in 1303 and known as La Sapienza. Its main
buildings, the Città Universitaria, are located east of the Stazione
Termini. A decentralization process begun in 1999 resulted in the
creation of several “confederate” universities, which form part of the
larger University of Rome but operate autonomously. Tens of
thousands of students are enrolled in dozens of faculties and
departments within the institution.

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 University of RomeThe University of Rome was founded in 1303.© Mirek
Hejnicki/Shutterstock.com
Blake EhrlichJohn Foot

History
Rome of antiquity

Founding and the kingdom

Although the site of Rome was occupied as early as the Bronze

Age (c. 1500 BC) and perhaps earlier, continuous settlement did not
take place until the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. By the 8th–7th
century BC, separate villages of various iron-using Indo-European
peoples had appeared, first on the Palatine and Aventine hills and
soon thereafter on the Esquiline and Quirinal ridges. The artifacts and

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especially the funerary customs of these communities indicate that,
from the beginning, diverse culture groups—including Latins, Sabines,
and perhaps others—played important roles in the formation of the
future city.

With settlement of the valleys between the Palatine, Esquiline, and

Caelian hills in the 7th century, independent villages began to merge.
Before the end of the century, the valley of the future Forum, originally
used as a cemetery, was partially drained and occupied by wattle-and-
daub huts. The mixed agricultural and pastoral economies of the
earliest settlements were slowly exposed to commercial contacts with
both Etruscan and Greek traders. Although the ancient Romans dated
the founding of their kingdom to 753 BC, the formation of a politically
unified city probably occurred in the early 6th century BC, under the
influence of the Etruscan city-states to the north. Under the rule of
kings, traditionally seven in number (the last three probably
Etruscans), Rome became a powerful force in central Italy.

During the regal period, social and economic differences began to

shape the two classes, patrician and plebeian, whose struggles for
political power dominated the early republic. The tribal organization
of the populace was replaced by one based on military units,
whose composition in the late regal period depended on property
qualifications.

The early Roman Republic

The overthrow of the last Roman king and the establishment of

the Roman Republic, either in 509 BC or a generation or two later,
coincided with the decline of Etruscan power in central Italy. The new
government under the leadership of two patrician consuls was at first
a mixed blessing. Although Etruscan techniques and symbols survived
in republican Rome, commercial ties with the Etruscans and with the
Greek colonies in southern Italy gradually withered. During the
ensuing economic crisis, grain shortages occurred, a problem that was
to plague the city intermittently for a millennium and more; the
government was forced to make purchases from as far away as Sicily.

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Political upheaval followed economic depression. The first major
confrontation between the patricians and plebeians in the mid-5th
century led to the writing down of the customary laws in the Law of
the Twelve Tables (451–450) and to the formation of a plebeian
political organization whose leaders, the tribunes, acted to protect the
plebeians from arbitrary patrician actions. In the last half of the 5th
century, Rome began to expand its control over neighbouring
territories and peoples, a process that culminated in the conquest of
the Etruscan city of Veii in 396.

In 390 Rome suffered a disastrous check when a Gallic army laid siege
to the city. After seven months, during which only the Capitoline
remained in Roman hands, the Gauls were bought off but left Rome in
ruins. The Romans set about reconstructing their city almost
immediately, surrounding it with a continuous wall of huge tufa
blocks. Later writers attributed Rome’s haphazard appearance to the
rapid rebuilding during this period; the historian Livy described Rome
as looking more like a squatters’ community than a planned one. For
eight centuries, however, no foreign invader was to breach Rome’s
walls.

The economic dislocation caused by the Gallic attack helped renew the
conflict between the patricians and the plebeians; nevertheless, before
the end of the 3rd century BC, through a series of judicious
compromises, the plebeians had won access to all the offices of the
state, and the actions (plebiscita) of the plebeian assembly had been
made legally binding on all Romans. Economic legislation dealing with
debt and land distribution was directed toward relieving the distress of
the lower classes.

City of world power

The remarkable though largely unplanned territorial expansion of

Rome between 375 and 275 BC brought lasting economic gains. With
control of all of peninsular Italy, Rome established colonies on some of
the conquered territories and elsewhere assigned lands to individual
Roman citizens. The nearly 60,000 holdings distributed before the

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middle of the 3rd century helped solve the pressure of Rome’s land-
hungry population. Nevertheless, by about 250 the city’s population
had grown to almost 100,000. The booty from conquests also helped
defray the costs of such public works as the building of temples
and roads and the improvement of the city’s water supply. By the early
3rd century two aqueducts carried fresh water into the city.

Roman expansion in Italy from 298 to 201 BC.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In 264 Rome was drawn into a war with Carthage, the
great Phoenician emporium in North Africa. After more than a century
of conflict, Rome emerged as the strongest power in the
Mediterranean. However, the acquisition of an empire, which for the
most part had not been the conscious desire of the Roman people,
brought new social and economic problems to the city itself. During
the Second Punic War (218–201) large areas of the peninsula were

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devastated by invading troops from Carthage, led by the famous
general Hannibal; much land was abandoned and many peasants
sought refuge in Rome. The growing requirements of a standing army
depopulated the countryside and concentrated veterans in the city.
The Roman nobility, prohibited by law and by custom from investing
in commerce or industry, profited from the economic distress of the
peasantry by buying up large tracts of land in central and southern
Italy. Slaves, whom Rome’s wars in the Mediterranean made available
in large numbers, were introduced into Italy as farm labourers and
herdsmen, causing further dislocation among the free peasantry. In
general, the Roman economy lagged well behind the political
development of both city and empire.

The western Mediterranean during the Punic Wars.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The late republic

During the 2nd century BC the rapid growth of the urban population
and the extension of Roman citizenship led to the effective

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disenfranchisement of the urban vote. The Senate, now the chief
policy-making body of the Roman state, was preoccupied with the
problems of the empire and too often ignored the needs of the city.
With no separate municipal government, public works and the
management of food and water supplies were left to
private initiative or to amateur public officials. Nevertheless, some
progress did occur. Some of the main streets were paved; drains were
covered; and several large basilicas and a new row of shops were built
in the Forum. The first stone bridge across the Tiber, the Pons
Aemilius (its ruins now known as the Ponte Rotto), was completed in
142, and the first high-level aqueduct was erected in 144, allowing
settlement on the higher ground of the city’s eastern ridges. From the
early 2nd century the river port at the base of the Aventine acquired
new warehouses and docking facilities.

These and other projects, however, were inadequate to deal with the
growing urban proletariat increasingly swollen with slaves and
freedmen. Crowded into shoddy apartment houses (insulae) and with
only minimal employment opportunities in what was an essentially
nonindustrial city, the lower classes were surviving on the sporadic
public works projects of the state and the largesse of the rich before
the end of the 2nd century. Rome had, moreover, neither police nor
fire protection.

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 insulaExample of insulae built in ancient Rome.Lalupa

The tribunes known as the Gracchi—Tiberius Sempronius

Gracchus and later Gaius Sempronius Gracchus—attempted to deal
with the problems of urban unemployment and rising food prices, first
by advocating the reestablishment of a small farmer class in Italy, then
through the subsidization of the grain supply for the poor. Gaius
Gracchus also encouraged public expenditure on roads and buildings.
Coupled with currency reforms and heavy government spending, these
measures partially restored prosperity to Rome in the late 2nd
century, but the basic structural faults in the city’s economy and
political life remained.

During the civil strife that occupied most of the first half of the 1st
century BC, both population and problems multiplied in Rome. The
creation of private armies attached to the Roman nobility offered

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employment to some of the urban lower classes but contributed
greatly to the political violence that eventually spelled the end of
the republic. Securing an adequate supply of cheap grain offered
possibilities for the political manipulation of the urban masses. By the
middle of the century, perhaps as many as 500,000 persons were
receiving free grain. The upper classes became more interested in
luxurious living, and their tastes were matched in the public sphere by
the building programs of the leaders Lucius Cornelius
Sulla and Pompey the Great. Public buildings and theatres paid for
with tribute and booty enhanced Rome’s beauty but did not make a
more livable city. In addition, heavy migration to Rome, especially
from the Hellenistic east, added to the burdens of the already
overcrowded city.

Municipal reforms of Augustus

The dictator Julius Caesar, the first to try to deal with the problems of
Rome in a systematic way, did not live long enough to carry out his
plans, which included canalizing the Tiber and building up
the Campus Martius. His adopted son and successor, Augustus,
attempted to transform Rome into a worthy capital for the new Roman
Empire. Although his claim that he found the city brick and left it
marble is exaggerated, Augustus and his colleagues did provide it with
many fine public buildings, baths, theatres, temples, and
warehouses. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a friend and supporter of
Augustus, used his own immense wealth to enhance the city’s beauty
and improve its water supply. Such construction projects, together
with the restoration of old buildings, provided employment for the
urban masses, but the lack of any overall city planning left them to live
in the unsafe and unsanitary tenements amid the narrow winding
streets and alleys of old Rome.

Nonetheless, Augustus’s reorganization of the administration of the

city and his institution of certain public services were a significant
break with the republican past. In 7 BC he divided Rome into
14 regiones (wards) and these into vici (precincts), each with officials
who performed both administrative and religious functions. The office

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of urban prefect, which Augustus revived about 26 BC, did not become
permanent until later, but in the late empire the post became the most
important in Rome.

In response to an obvious need, Augustus organized a fire brigade in

21 BC: a number of public slaves were placed under the command
of aediles, officials in charge of streets and markets. After a bad fire
in AD 6, he established a corps of professional firemen
(vigiles), comprising seven squads, or cohorts, of 1,000 freedmen
apiece. The vigiles also had minor police duties, especially at night. He
sought to impose order in the often violent streets by creating three
cohorts under the command of the urban prefect; their main duty was
to keep order in the city, and they could call on the
emperor’s Praetorian Guard for help if necessary. Altogether,
Augustus saw to it that the amateur system of Roman municipal
administration was replaced by a more professional and permanent
set of institutions—a work that probably contributed more to making
Rome a great city than all his marble monuments.

Contributions of later emperors

For the most part, the successors to Augustus continued his

administrative policies and building program, though with
less innovation and more ostentation. Claudius began a great port
near Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber, to facilitate grain shipments
directly to Rome. Commerce remained largely in private hands, with
public officials acting to ensure a regular supply and to prevent
speculation.

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 Roman EmpireThe extent of the Roman Empire in 117 CE.Encyclopædia
Britannica, Inc.

Nero can be credited with introducing the most up-to-date ideas on

town planning, though at a terrible price. The great fire of AD 64
destroyed large sections of the city. In the devastated areas, Nero built
new streets and colonnades as well as his fabulous Golden House, and
he encouraged private citizens to build more spacious and more
fireproof houses and apartment buildings with better access to the
public water supply. Although Nero made Rome a more pleasant city
in which to live, his measures did not prevent other devastating fires,
such as the one in 191 that gave Septimius Severus the opportunity to
rebuild the city.

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 Golden House of NeroStatue in the Golden House of Nero, Rome.Howard
Hudson

Other emperors in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD added to the
glory of the imperial house and the amenities of Roman life with their
own grandiose imperial forums, temples, arches, baths, and
stadiums. Trajan’s Forum, with its complex of buildings and
courtyards, and his market, with its tiers of shops and its great market
hall, represent in the judgment of many historians the supreme
achievement of city planning in Rome. Trajan’s Column, which
narrates his victories beyond the Danube, was recognized as without
peer even in the Christian Middle Ages. Hadrian left two enduring
structures in Rome: the great domed Pantheon and his mausoleum,
which in AD 590 was renamed Castel Sant’Angelo.

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Trajan's ColumnTrajan's Column, Rome, memorial with marble reliefs, designed by Apollodorus of Damascus.© Jeff
Banke/Shutterstock.com
Trajan's ColumnDetail of Trajan's Column, Rome, depicting the Roman emperor's victories beyond the Danube
River.© Tiziano Casalta/Dreamstime.com

In the late 1st and early 2nd centuries Rome was at the peak of its
grandeur and population, which has been estimated at more than one
million persons but was probably less. The population was kept at a
high level by a steady stream of immigrants, both slave and free, from
the provinces and beyond—although life expectancy in the city was
probably lower than elsewhere in the empire. Rome’s famous paved
streets, water supply, and sewage system, however, should not be
overestimated; even after the reforms of Nero, large numbers of the
urban inhabitants continued to live in expensive, poorly built,
overcrowded, and unheated slums without water or cooking facilities.
The arena and the public bath relieved some pressures of high density

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and physical squalor, but Rome’s refined technology was applied
haphazardly to the problems of urban social organization. Garbage
was usually dumped into the Tiber or pits on the city’s outskirts.

Rome was a city of consumers, both rich and poor, and never a great
industrial or commercial centre. The small shop was the basic unit of
production and distribution throughout the imperial period, and the
numerous trade associations served social and religious functions
until they were enveloped in the economic regimentation of the late
empire. Although Rome far surpassed any other ancient city in size
and monumental splendour, its minimal economic and social
achievement augured ill for the future.

Slow decline of the late empire

Rome’s population probably began to decline in the late 2nd century.

At the height of an outbreak of the plague in the reign of Marcus
Aurelius, 2,000 persons a day are thought to have died. The economic
and political disasters of the 3rd century did little good for Rome. In
the 270s the walls built by Aurelian were more a symbol of the danger
of barbarian attack than a restoration of Rome’s grandeur.

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 Aurelian Wall, near the Porta San Paolo, RomeThe Mansell Collection/Art
Resource, New York

By the time Diocletian reformed the imperial government in the late

3rd century, ushering in the period of relative prosperity symbolized in
his great baths, Rome was no longer the administrative capital of the
empire. The founding of Constantinople (now Istanbul) merely
confirmed Rome’s loss of political primacy. Constantine I, however,
did much to restore the buildings and monuments of imperial Rome.
In addition, his patronage of Rome’s small Christian community laid
the foundations of the Christian and papal Rome of the medieval and
modern periods. Rome in the 4th century remained nonetheless a
distinctly conservative and pagan city dominated by proud senatorial
families. When the Visigothic army of Alaric first threatened the city in
408, the Senate and the prefect proposed pagan sacrifices to ward off
the enemy.

In 410 Alaric seized Rome and allowed his troops to pillage the city for
three days; much booty was taken, and many Romans fled. By the
mid-5th century the population had dropped to fewer than 250,000. It
is unlikely, however, that the monuments of Rome suffered extensive
damage. Its churches, for the most part, were spared. Even the longer,
14-day sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455 did less damage than the
Romans did themselves. In the 4th and 5th centuries the emperors
repeatedly legislated against those who were stripping buildings and
monuments for their materials, especially the marble.

City of the popes

Decay of imperial authority

In 476 Odoacer, the first barbarian king of Italy, took power—

symbolizing the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire. In the
6th century Justinian I, the emperor of the surviving eastern half
(the Byzantine Empire), began his attempt to restore Roman imperial
rule in the West. His ultimate success, however, was disastrous for

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Italy and for Rome. Three times Rome was under siege; its aqueducts
were cut, and once it was abandoned by its inhabitants. By the end of
the century, with the urban population fewer than 50,000, civil
authority and the responsibility for protecting the city were in the
hands of the church. Pope Gregory I tried to provide an adequate
urban administration, and for nearly two centuries his successors
played a similar role.

In the middle of the 8th century, when the Byzantines were no longer
able or willing to supply Rome with adequate military aid, the papacy
turned to the Franks. The Donation of Pippin III—who owed his new
title as king of the Franks in part to the pope—granted the pope rights
over large territories in central Italy. This act was the theoretical
foundation of the temporal power of the papacy. In
774 Pippin’s son Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom in
Italy, and in 800 he was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III and
acclaimed by the people of Rome. The period of the late 8th and early
9th centuries was one of vigorous building and restoration of churches
in Rome.

Factional struggles: papacy and nobility

The decline of Frankish authority in Italy led to the renewal of family

and factional struggles. After Muslims plundered areas of Rome in
846, Pope Leo IV built a wall around the area of the Vatican, thus
enclosing the suburb that came to be known as the Leonine City. From
the late 9th through the mid-11th century, Rome and the papacy were
controlled by various families from Rome’s landed nobility, with brief
interludes of intervention from the German emperors that were the
successors of Charlemagne.

After decades of dispute between the Roman nobility and the papacy,
the latter was able to establish an uneasy peace in Rome by the end of
the 11th century. The papacy, as reformed under Leo IX (1049–54),
generally was supported and financed by new Roman families such as
the Frangipani and the Pierleoni, whose wealth came from commerce
and banking rather than landholdings. Meanwhile, much rebuilding

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was necessary after the Norman sack of 1084. By this time, the seat of
the church had begun to draw many pilgrims and prelates to Rome,
and their gifts and expenditures on food and housing stimulated a
considerable flow of money. Although Rome had a population of fewer
than 30,000 (occupying less than one-quarter of the lands within the
old walls), it was becoming once again a city of consumers dependent
on the presence of a governmental bureaucracy.

Emergence of the Roman commune

A revolution in 1143 resulted in Rome’s establishment as a commune,

or self-governing city. The uprising had fundamentally the same goals
as other contemporaneous communal movements in northern Italy:
freedom from episcopal (in Rome’s case, papal) authority and control
of the surrounding countryside. The revival of the Roman Senate and
other echoes of the Classical past perhaps owed something to the
preaching of Arnold of Brescia, a priest and monk who said strong
things against ecclesiastical property and church interference in
temporal affairs. Rome’s new republican constitution survived both
papal and imperial attack alike, and in 1188 Pope Clement
III recognized the communal government. In theory, the senators
were to become papal vassals, but, in fact, the pope had to make large
cash payments to the senators and other communal officials. In the
1190s a single senator was able to exercise wide authority in the
territories surrounding Rome.

Pope Innocent III made it his first order of business to secure a firm
papal position in Rome and in the Vatican. Only moderately
successful, he found it expedient to support the Roman commune’s
expansionist policies. Territorial rivalry between Innocent’s family and
the Orsini family led to rioting and finally open warfare in the streets
of Rome in 1204, during which siege machines destroyed many
ancient buildings. After a settlement, Innocent’s many charitable
projects won him Roman support.

Pope Gregory IX and the Roman commune clashed over Rome’s

expansionist policies and its claims to the right to tax the clergy and

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church property. The situation was complicated by bitter struggles
with the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II (ruler of the Holy Roman
Empire, the descendant of Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, in western
and central Europe), as well as the varied interests of Rome’s leading
families—the Orsini, the Savelli, the Annibaldi, and, above all,
the Colonna. After Frederick’s death, an antipapal regime promoted a
rising middle class and a resurgence of the commune.

Period of the Avignon papacy

Few popes in the second half of the 13th century were able to reside in
Rome. In the 1280s and ’90s Rome was torn by the bitter rivalries
between the Colonna, Orsini, and Annibaldi families,
a discord encouraged by Pope Boniface VIII, and in 1309 Clement
V moved the papal residence to Avignon in France. Rome was left to
its factional strife and its economic impoverishment. (See
also Avignon papacy.)

Yet, in spite of sharp rivalries, Roman and papal interests had often
coincided throughout the 13th century. Since Rome was never an
important industrial or commercial city, its citizens, from the small
shopkeepers and innkeepers to the great banking families, had
depended economically on the presence of the papal Curia and the
large numbers of pilgrims, prelates, and litigants it brought to Rome.
The many brick campaniles of its Romanesque churches and
the analogous fortress towers on the palaces of its leading families
symbolized Rome’s singular, ecclesiastical character. Nevertheless,
with a population never more than 30,000 in the 13th century, it
retained a village air for all its urbanity and Classical aspirations. Most
of the populace was concentrated around St. Peter’s Basilica and in the
low-lying areas of the Campus Martius and Trastevere; large sections
of the city within the old Aurelian Wall were pastures, gardens,
vineyards, and wastelands.

The popes in Avignon, especially Benedict XII (1334–42), were able to

maintain a tenuous rule over the city. The brief popular revolution
(1347) of Cola di Rienzo—who, styling himself tribune of Rome,

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combined apocalyptic visions with ideas of a renewal of Rome’s
ancient glories—had more dramatic than political impact. The terrible
mortality of the Black Death reduced Rome’s population to less than
20,000, and the city staggered through the last half of the 14th century
still racked by factional strife. The return of the papacy from Avignon
in 1377 did not help. About 1400, Rome was described as a city filled
with huts, thieves, and vermin, and wolves could be seen at night in
the neighbourhood of St. Peter’s.

The city in the Renaissance

The entry of Pope Martin V (a member of the Colonna family) into

Rome in 1420 marked the beginning of the Renaissance city and of the
absolute papal rule that lasted until 1870. Although Martin was
neither a builder nor a patron of the arts, he laid the foundations of
government that made Rome the capital of a Renaissance state. From
this period the apostolic vice chamberlain, as governor of Rome,
controlled municipal offices, communal finances, and the statutes of
the city. The Roman commune was transformed into a unit
of authoritarian papal rule, and the surrounding Papal States (the
various territories of the pope in central Italy) increasingly came under
the firm control of papal officials.

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 Martin V, detail from a bronze monument by Simone di Giovanni Ghini; in
the basilica of St. John Lateran, RomeAlinari—Anderson/Art Resource, New York

During the 15th-century pontificates of Nicholas V and,

especially, Sixtus IV, the squalid narrow streets of medieval Rome
were widened and paved, and new Renaissance buildings replaced
crumbling structures. At the same time, the monuments of ancient
Rome suffered further damage as they were torn apart for their
building materials, and their marble went too often into the lime kilns
rather than into new structures. However, the popes attracted scholars
and artists from across Italy, and by the end of the 15th century Rome
had become the principal centre of Renaissance culture. The high
point was reached under Leo X (reigned 1513–21), with his plans for
the new St. Peter’s and his patronage of such artists
as Michelangelo and Raphael.

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Rome flourished economically under the Renaissance popes. Banking
and the exploitation of alum deposits near Civitavecchia by the popes
(with the help of the Medici family of Florence) stimulated a flow of
capital into the city. Rome once again had become a great consumer of
imported luxuries, yet it still had little large-scale industry or
commerce.

Evolution of the modern city

Rebuilding and repopulation

The sack of Rome in 1527 by the armies of the Holy Roman

emperor Charles V ended the city’s preeminence as
a Renaissance centre. In eight days, thousands of churches, palaces,
and houses were pillaged and destroyed. But, even under the
repressive rule of the Counter-Reformation papacy, Rome recovered; a
new era of construction was begun, culminating in a vast program
of city planning by Sixtus V (1585–90) and his architect Domenico
Fontana. Since lack of water had driven residents off the high ground,
Sixtus restored the aqueduct of the ancient emperor Severus
Alexander, the Aqua Alexandrina, which the pope renamed the Aqua
Felice (his original name being Felice Peretti). He laid out new roads,
the basis for the modern street plan of Rome. He also built the Vatican
Library; saw to the completion of St. Peter’s dome; rebuilt the papal
palaces of the Vatican, the Quirinal, and San Giovanni in Laterano (St.
John Lateran), refurbishing the squares in front of the last two; and
built a new square at Santa Maria Maggiore. He reerected several
ancient Egyptian obelisks found among the ruins and restored a great
number of fountains, dearly beloved of the Romans. Fortunately, his
project to convert the Colosseum into a wool factory came to nothing.

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 Rome: Lateran PalaceThe Lateran Palace, Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano,
Rome, by Domenico Fontana, 1586–88.Anderson—Alinari/Art Resource, New York
By 1600 Rome was again a prosperous cosmopolitan city. A great
influx of new inhabitants attracted by employment opportunities in
the papal bureaucracy and related service industries increased Rome’s
population to more than 100,000. Much of the big business of the city
remained in the hands of outsiders, however, for the wealth and power
of the Roman nobility was based on land and ecclesiastical office
holding.

Decline and fall of the papal empire

In the 17th and 18th centuries Rome’s noble families built fine palaces
and patronized the arts while maneuvering to win high positions in the
church hierarchy. The highest prize of all, the papal crown, brought
wealth and status to the wearer’s family. But as corruption and bribery
within these circles became a way of life, the influence of the papacy
and of Rome declined throughout Europe and even throughout
the Papal States. Although Sixtus V had created one of the best
planned cities in Europe, by the 18th century Rome was still a
backward town, with poorly paved streets on which there were neither
road signs nor public lighting and little sanitation. To foreign

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observers, the Romans, from the most aristocratic families to the
poorest classes, seemed to lead lives of provincial vacuity unconcerned
with anything outside Rome. The population reached 165,000 by
1790, but as many as one-quarter of the inhabitants were employed in
the petty bureaucracy that overran the city.

The armies of Napoleon occupied Rome for the first time in 1798, and
a short-lived Roman Republic was declared; but in 1809 Rome and the
Papal States were annexed into the French Empire. The return of the
pope to Rome in 1814 led to a long period of repressive and
reactionary papal rule, though Popes Leo XII and Gregory
XVI promoted educational improvements and new public baths and
hospitals. With the liberal attitude that characterized the early part of
his reign, Pope Pius IX granted Rome a constitution in 1848, but after
the revolution of 1848–49, when another brief Roman Republic was
established, he became an archconservative, attempting with French
support to save the temporal power of the papacy and to stave off the
modern world.

Capital of a united Italy

Most of the Papal States were included in the united Kingdom of Italy,
proclaimed in 1861, but Rome was excluded. Attempts by the military
leader Giuseppe Garibaldi to capture the city in 1862 and 1867 were
unsuccessful, but the withdrawal of the French garrison supporting
Pope Pius IX allowed Italian troops to enter Rome on September 20,
1870. In all, 49 Italian soldiers and 19 papal troops were killed in the
so-called “breach of Porta Pia” (Porta Pia being one of the city’s old
gates). The pope’s temporal power was lost.

After a plebiscite in October 1870, Rome became the capital of a

united Italy. Pius refused to accept the Italian government’s offer of
settlement and styled himself a prisoner in the Vatican. The pope
ordered Catholics to withhold their support from the new Italian state;
he also excommunicated united Italy’s first king, Victor Emmanuel II.
Undeterred, the Italian government filled Rome with huge ministerial
buildings and barracks. The strong anticlerical feeling in the city was

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symbolized by the erection of a monument to
the Renaissance philosopher and condemned heretic Giordano
Bruno in 1889, amid strong protests from the Vatican.
The ambiguous relationship between the Italian state and the pope
was not resolved until the Lateran Treaty came into effect in 1929; in
this agreement, the papacy recognized the state of Italy, with Rome as
its capital, and Italy recognized the pope’s sovereignty within Vatican
City.

Meanwhile, in 1871 King Victor Emmanuel took up residence in

Rome’s Palazzo del Quirinale, formerly a papal palace. From there he
presided over important parliamentary and civic events. After his
death in 1878, his body was laid to rest not in Turin, with other
members of the Savoy family, but in the Pantheon in Rome. Successive
Italian monarchs lived at the Quirinal Palace until 1943.

After World War I (1914–18) Rome was the site of numerous

demonstrations and strikes in support of the
growing socialist movement. At the same time, it was a centre for
early fascist activity, especially among the city’s students. In October
1922 the leader of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini,
organized the March on Rome, in which thousands of uniformed and
often armed supporters of fascism converged on the capital. For a
time, it appeared as if civil war were inevitable; however, King Victor
Emmanuel III gave in to Mussolini’s demands and pronounced
him prime minister. Mussolini set up court in Rome, where he
remained for over 20 years.

In June 1924 Giacomo Matteotti, a representative of the Italian

Socialist Party, was kidnapped in Rome after having made a speech
denouncing the Fascist Party. His battered body was found several
weeks later. Convinced that the Fascists were responsible for the
crime, the political opposition left the parliament in protest. Yet
instead of bringing down the Fascist Party, the crisis ended with
Mussolini’s daring his critics to prosecute him for the murder.

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 Benito MussoliniItalian dictator Benito Mussolini (center, on horseback)
salutes Fascist Party supporters in 1927.AP Images

As Mussolini fashioned himself the absolute dictator of Italy, Rome

became the Fascist city par excellence. His regime cut some new
routes through the city, often in an attempt to create more “historic”
and grand boulevards as well as entrances to certain areas, such as
Piazza San Pietro. He also filled the city with modern architectural
works and monuments. From a balcony in Piazza Venezia, Mussolini
gave many speeches before swelling crowds,
largely comprising members of Rome’s middle class. (Working-class
Romans generally were not supporters of the Fascist Party.) Mussolini
announced Italy’s entry into World War II in June 1940 from the same
balcony.

In July 1943 Rome saw the overthrow and arrest of Mussolini, and
statues of the dictator were torn down all over the city. An armistice

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with the Allied armies was declared that September, but, with the
Germans advancing, the king fled south. As Germans took over the
city, a resistance movement coalesced, and many soldiers and
ordinary Romans fought to defend Rome. In March 1944 a resistance
group killed 33 German troops in a daring daylight bomb attack. In
retaliation, however, the Nazis rounded up 335 people and shot them
in caves—the Fosse Ardeatine—outside the city. As in the rest of
German-occupied Italy, the Nazis also targeted Jews, many of whom
were sent to prisons or concentration camps. In October 1943 more
than 1,000 Jews were rounded up in Rome’s ghetto and sent to death
camps; only about a dozen survived. Meanwhile, despite the pope’s
declaration that Rome was to be an “open city,” without military
conflict, the German occupation elicited massive bombing by the
Allies, who finally liberated the city in June 1944.

After the war, living conditions in the city were desperate. Rome’s
population had grown rapidly after 1870, passing the 500,000 mark
before World War I and reaching more than 1,000,000 by 1930. Its
area of settlement had expanded well beyond the old walls of the
ancient city, and many citizens ended up in the squalid shantytowns of
the immediate countryside. In 1952 more than 90,000 people were
estimated to be living in huts, caves, cellars, and other types of
substandard housing, mainly on the urban periphery. Slowly, however,
the city was rebuilt and returned to normality.

Richard R. RingJohn Foot

The first deputies in Italy’s new Constituent Assembly were elected in

1946; in the same year, the king was forced to leave Rome after a
referendum declared Italy a republic. A new constitution came into
force in 1948. Rome remained the centre of Italy’s political life, and
the offices of all the main political parties and trade unions were
located there. The city was run, in the main, by the Christian
Democratic Party (see Italian Popular Party) after 1945.

Many of the city’s Christian Democratic administrations were not

afraid to indulge in the corrupt practices common to the city councils
of southern Italy. Moreover, rampant building speculation in the

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 1950s and ’60s led to construction without real planning or an eye
toward conserving the unique nature of the city. A number of scandals
were exposed in the 1960s by a series of journalistic campaigns under
the slogan “Capital corrupted, nation infected.”

Nevertheless, Rome maintained a sense of prestige as it hosted two

significant international events in the postwar era. In 1957 the Treaties
of Rome were signed in the city by representatives of
Italy, Belgium, France, West Germany, Luxembourg, and the
Netherlands. These agreements established important institutions
that later evolved into the European Union. In the summer of 1960
Rome was the site of the Olympic Games. The government used the
sporting event, broadcast live on television, to promote an image of a
united and modern Italy. It also showcased the successful building
projects linked to the Olympics, especially the Olympic Village.

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 •

Treaty of RomeSigning of the Treaty of Rome, March 25, 1957.AP Images

Wilma Rudolph winning the 200-metre race at the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome.AP

In the cultural realm, Rome became a centre for filmmaking after

World War II. Directors of the Neorealist movement used Rome as the
backdrop for their polemics on Italian society and the failures of
postwar reconstruction. Roberto Rossellini’s Roma città
aperta (1945; Open City) and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di
biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief) were prominent examples of
Neorealism. Federico Fellini made most of his films in the city—
notably, La dolce vita (1960; “The Sweet Life”)
and Roma (1971; Fellini’s Roma). Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted
the peripheral society of the capital in Accattone (1961) and Mamma
Roma (1962). Meanwhile, lighter fare, particularly the American
film Roman Holiday (1953), heightened international affinity for the
city. That and many other American movies, such as Ben-Hur (1959)
and Cleopatra (1963), were made at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios—which
became known as “Hollywood on the Tiber.” (See also history of the
motion picture: The war years and post-World War II trends.)

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•

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 •

Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La dolce vitaMarcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg in La dolce
vita (1960), directed by Federico Fellini.Riama Film and Pathé Consortium Cinéma; photograph from a private collection
Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman HolidayAudrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953),
directed by William Wyler.© 1953 Paramount Pictures Corporation; photograph from a private collection

Beginning in the late 1960s, a massive student movement in the city

radicalized urban politics, especially in the wake of the 1968 Valle
Giulia riot at the University of Rome, in which thousands of students—
many of them demanding a liberalization of the educational system—
clashed with police. The university also became host to frequent
battles between left- and right-wing students. During the same period,
a number of abortive coup attempts, in which plotters attempted to
take over the government, took place. Rome subsequently switched
political allegiances and elected a centre-left administration in the
1970s. Centre-left mayors, who ran the city for some years into the
1980s, accomplished little beyond changes in cultural policy.

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In the 1970s the movement that grew out of the student protests
became more extreme. Many young people were attracted by the
violent rhetoric of the ultraleftist “autonomist” groups or by the
neofascist movement, which had long had a following in the capital.
Some, on both the left and the right, even took the road of terrorism.
On March 16, 1978, Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped at
gunpoint in the centre of Rome by members of the militant left-
wing Red Brigades and was held captive for 54 days. After a series of
fruitless negotiations, Moro was murdered. Although the threat of
terrorism abated in the early 1980s, the attempted assassination of
Pope John Paul II, who was shot by a Turkish gunman in Piazza San
Pietro in 1981, shocked the city and the world. The precise reason for
the attack was never determined.

In the 1980s Rome was governed by a series of centre-right coalitions,

many of which became embroiled in corrupt practices, often involving
the awarding of public works contracts. Angered by the corruption, as
well as by the concentration of power and money in the capital, some
regionalist parties began calling the capital Roma ladrona (“Rome the
thief”). In 1993, in the wake of further corruption scandals, a centre-
left politician, Francesco Rutelli, was elected mayor of Rome in a
runoff against right-wing candidate Gianfranco Fini. Rutelli proceeded
to transform the city: he cracked down on illegal construction, worked
toward ameliorating Rome’s traffic problems, and recommenced a
series of blocked improvement projects. Meanwhile, the city’s service
sector—especially financial, professional, housing, and insurance
services—grew dramatically throughout the 1990s. This boom
revolutionized Rome’s economy, which was no longer limited to the
traditional economic activities related to government and tourism.

Rutelli was reelected in 1997 by a huge majority. In 2000 a new city

plan, the first since 1962, was adopted. Also that year, despite dire
predictions, the city successfully hosted a vast and complicated series
of celebrations linked to the Catholic Jubilee. In 2001 Rutelli was
succeeded by another centre-left mayor, Walter Veltroni. Rutelli ran
again for mayor in 2008 but was defeated by the right-wing
candidate, Gianni Alemanno, known for his past ties to the neofascist
movement.

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Alemanno was one of dozens of officials arrested in connection with
the so-called Mafia Capitale scandal, which saw millions of euros in
public funds diverted to a pair of criminal ringleaders. City services,
including trash collection, public transit, and public housing, were
affected by the embezzlement and kickback scheme. Ignazio Marino of
the Democratic Party (Partito Democratico) was elected in 2013, and,
while he was not directly implicated in the Mafia Capitale
investigation, the shadow of corruption hung over his administration.
Basic municipal services were neglected, and a social media campaign
drew attention to private citizens who had taken it upon themselves to
clean Rome’s trash-filled streets. Marino resigned in October 2015
after becoming embroiled in an expenses scandal, and leadership of
the city passed to a special commissioner.

Just a month after Marino’s resignation, Pope Francis inaugurated an

extraordinary Year of Jubilee that would draw an estimated 20 million
pilgrims to Rome. That event focused international attention on some
of the city’s endemic problems, and Beppe Grillo’s populist Five Star
Movement experienced one of its highest-profile successes when Five
Star candidate Virginia Raggi was elected mayor of Rome in June
2016. The 37-year-old Raggi was Rome’s first female mayor as well as
its youngest, and she won a landslide victory on a pledge to end
corruption in the Eternal City. Within months of taking office,
however, Raggi became the target of a series of investigations for
abuse of power and cronyism, and Romans saw little improvement in
city services. By 2017 Rome’s waste management issues had grown
into a full-fledged public health crisis; the city’s rat population spiked,
and wild boars—drawn from the countryside by piles of uncollected
garbage—became an increasingly common hazard on Rome’s streets.

Rome today continues to be a contradictory city, its historic and

wealthy neighbourhoods coexisting with vast swathes of poverty in
its peripheries and among its immigrant populations. Moreover,
despite being the capital of Italy as well as the centre of Roman
Catholicism, Rome has never easily occupied the preeminent position
held by other national capitals, such as London or Paris. Other Italian
cities—notably, Milan (the “moral capital”), Turin (the “industrial
capital”), and Florence (a capital of Italian art)—have long challenged

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Rome’s status. At the beginning of the 21st century, as the idea of
decentralization—particularly the devolution of certain political
powers to the regions—remained a perennial political topic, the
Eternal City’s role within Italy lay in the balance.

John Foot
LEARN MORE in these related Britannica articles:

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HOMEPHILOSOPHY & RELIGIONRELIGIOUS PLACES

Sistine Chapel
chapel, Vatican City
WRITTEN BY
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they
have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by
working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
See Article History

Sistine Chapel, papal chapel in the Vatican Palace that was erected
in 1473–81 by the architect Giovanni dei Dolci for Pope Sixtus
IV (hence its name). It is famous for its Renaissance frescoes by
Michelangelo.

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Michelangelo: The Creation of AdamThe Creation of Adam, detail of
the ceiling fresco by Michelangelo, 1508–12; in the Sistine Chapel,
Vatican City.SuperStock

READ MORE ON THIS TOPIC

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 Michelangelo: The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

The Sistine Chapel had great symbolic meaning for the papacy as the chief

consecrated space in the Vatican, used for great...

The Sistine Chapel is a rectangular brick building with six arched

windows on each of the two main (or side) walls and a barrel-vaulted
ceiling. The chapel’s exterior is drab and unadorned, but its interior
walls and ceiling are decorated with frescoes by many Florentine
Renaissance masters. The frescoes on the side walls of the chapel were
painted from 1481 to 1483. On the north wall are six frescoes depicting
events from the life of Christ as painted
by Perugino, Pinturicchio, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio,
and Cosimo Rosselli. On the south wall are six other frescoes depicting
events from the life of Moses by Perugino, Pinturicchio,
Botticelli, Domenico and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, Rosselli, Luca
Signorelli, and Bartolomeo della Gatta. Above these works, smaller
frescoes between the windows depict various popes. For great
ceremonial occasions the lowest portions of the side walls were
covered with a series of tapestries depicting events from the Gospels
and the Acts of the Apostles. These were designed by Raphael and
woven in 1515–19 at Brussels.

The most important artworks in the chapel are the frescoes

by Michelangelo on the ceiling and on the west wall behind the altar.
The frescoes on the ceiling, collectively known as the Sistine Ceiling,
were commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1508 and were painted by
Michelangelo in the years from 1508 to 1512. They depict incidents
and personages from the Old Testament. The Last Judgment fresco on
the west wall was painted by Michelangelo for Pope Paul III in the
period from 1534 to 1541. These two gigantic frescoes are among the
greatest achievements of Western painting. A 10-year-long cleaning

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 and restoration of the Sistine Ceiling completed in 1989 removed
several centuries’ accumulation of dirt, smoke, and varnish. Cleaning
and restoration of the Last Judgment was completed in 1994.

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 •

Delphic Sibyl, detail of a fresco by Michelangelo, 1508–12; in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.Scala/Art
Resource, New York
Conservators working on Michelangelo's ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.© Vittoriano
Rastelli/Corbis

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As the pope’s own chapel, the Sistine Chapel is the site of the principal
papal ceremonies and is used by the Sacred College of Cardinals for
their election of a new pope when there is a vacancy.

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