For more than two thousand years, writers have been praising Rome for its glories, blaming it for its misdeeds, or struggling to find a middle ground between the two extremes.
Among those who (rhetorically) appear to have loved the Eternal City unconditionally is Publius Aelius Aristides, a Roman citizen of Greek origin, who wrote an artful Panegyric to Rome in 144 AD. In doing so, he cast both the achievements of the Roman Empire and the benefits of Roman citizenship in the best of all possible lights:
…You sought the expansion of your Roman citizenship as a worthy aim, and you have caused the word Rome to be the mark, not of membership in the city, but of some common nationality, and this not just one among all, but one balancing all the rest. For the categories into which you now divide the world are Romans and non-Romans…
Not all ancient writers found multicultural imperial Rome so very agreeable. By means of his satirical work, On the City of Rome, the late first century-early second century AD author Juvenal complained relentlessly (and humorously) about the endless adverse conditions faced by Rome’s residents. Rome - at its height during Juvenal’s life - supported a population of some 1,000,000 people. Amidst the teeming crowds, the eyes, nose, ears, stomach, and intellect of the satirist found offense, for there was too much noise, the city stunk, the food was bad, and the divide between rich and poor was oppressive. Even worse, the streets were rough, crowded with people and animals, and filled with dirt and filth, and those who dared to walk the cobblestones risked being hit on their heads by objects lobbed out of the windows of apartment buildings:
The sick die here because they can’t sleep,
Though most people complain about the food
Rotting undigested in their burning guts.
For when does sleep come in rented rooms?
It costs a lot merely to sleep in this city!
That’s why everyone’s sick: carts clattering
Through the winding streets, curses hurled
At some herd standing still in the middle of the road,
Could rob Claudius or a seal of their sleep!
When duty demands it, crowds fall back to allow
The wealthy to pass, who sail past the coast
In a mighty litter while on the way
They read or write or even take a nap,
For the litter and its shut windows bring on sleep.
Yet he still arrives first; while we are blocked
In our hurry by a wave before us, while the great crowd
Crushes our backs from behind us; an elbow or a stick
Hits you, a beam or a wine-jar smacks you on the head;
My leg is covered in crud, from every side
I’m trampled by shoes, and some soldier spears
My foot with his spiked shoes.
By the Middle Ages, the condition of Rome had changed but the variety of opinions about the city had not. Rome - which had once been the center of the western world - had been dealt an ignoble fate in the early fourth century AD when the Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome eastward to Constantinople. Security and basic services were compromised as Rome’s economic resources dwindled, provoking the population to leave to the urban center. By the tenth century AD, Rome had dwindled some ten thousand inhabitants, who gladly stripped the city’s most glorious ancient monuments of the columns, marbles, and metals in order to build homes and churches.
Yet, the drastic changes in Rome’s urban fabric did not lessen the admiration shown to her by at least one writer. In 1153, Benedict, a canon of St. Peter’s, composed the Mirabilia Urbis Romae or Marvels of Rome, a guidebook for the pilgrim and sightseer that documented the medieval sense of Rome’s ancient grandeur.
Benedict’s guidebook would remain the standard text for visitors to Rome until the Renaissance, when an increased interest in antiquity provoked visitors and residents to look upon the city with fresh eyes. Tourists in Rome were eager to see and to experience the splendor of the ancient capital of the Roman Empire, but they found themselves sorely disappointed. The Tiber River was polluted with dead bodies and (apparently) horrible sea monsters. Monuments were rapidly being ruined as they were stripped of recyclable building materials. The streets were as full of trash and debris as Juvenal claimed to have found them some 1300 years previous.
Even Pope Martin V (reign 1417-1431) was shocked at the general degradation he saw around him:
…it is so dilapidated and deserted that it bears hardly any resemblance to a city. Houses have fallen into ruins, churches have collapsed, whole quarters are abandoned; and the town is neglected and oppressed by famine and poverty…many inhabitants of Rome…have been throwing and illicitly hiding entrails, viscera, heads, feet, bones, blood, and skins, besides rotten meat and fish, refuse, excrement, and other fetid and rotting cadavers into the streets…and have dared boldly and sacrilegiously to usurp, ruin, and reduce to their own use streets, alleys, piazzas, public and private places both ecclesiastical and profane.
Equally disappointed with his experience of Rome was Alberto de’Alberti, who arrived in the Eternal City in 1444, fully expecting to find a city worthy of her former place at the head of the world. Instead, Alberto found the city’s state of upkeep and preservation to be abominable, and he was scandalized also by Rome’s fifteenth-century inhabitants, whom, he thought, were more worthy of keeping company with cattle than with men:
You must have heard of the condition of this city from others, so I will be brief. There are many splendid palaces, houses, tombs, and temples, and other edifices in infinite number, but all are in ruins. There is much porphyry and marble from ancient buildings, but every day these marbles are destroyed by being burnt for lime in scandalous fashion. What is modern is poor stuff, that is to say, the new buildings; the beauty of Rome lies in what is in ruins. The men of the present day, who call themselves Romans, are very different in bearing and in conduct from the ancient inhabitants. Breviter loquendo, they all look like cowherds.
Of course, Rome’s decrepitudes produced numerous city officials who tried with varying degrees of success to restore the city to its ancient glory (that, after all, is what the Renaissance in Rome is all about!) and who took no small pleasure in having themselves compared to antiquity’s greatest urban developers. Pope Sixtus IV, Pope from 1471-1484, tried to make good on the ancient title Pontifex Maximus which Christian Pontiffs had adopted from Roman high priests. Literally translated, the title means “bridge builder,” thus when undertaking urban projects meant to improve the general condition of Rome, one of those most important to Sixtus IV was the construction of the Ponte Sisto, a bridge crossing the volatile Tiber River. Of Sixtus and his efforts to improve the city, the faithful courtier, Raffaello Mattei, commented:
[Sixtus IV] made Rome from a city of bricks into a city of stone just as Augustus of old turned the stone city into marble.
The dialogue of praise and blame - directed both at the city itself and at its long parade of leaders - continued through the High Renaissance: Popes and noble patrons erected buildings meant to compete with the ruins of antiquity, while Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther compared the corruption of Rome to that of ancient Babylon. And, since the adage that “everything changes while everything stays the same” is more true in Rome than anywhere else in the world, no one should be surprised to hear that the same conversations are still being held today. Do Rome’s faults outweigh its glories? Do the inefficiencies and irregularities of the modern city diminish our ability to appreciate the layers of history so overtly on view in this city? Can Rome be ruined or is its demise an anthem sung by each generation as they see its ancient, medieval, renaissance, and baroque incarnations juxtaposed (often awkwardly) with all that is new and contemporary?
Nowhere are these questions more adroitly examined than in a recent article written by the indefatigable Ingrid Rowland for the New York Review of Books. Titled Rome: The Marvels and the Menace, the article presents itself as a review of new books about the Eternal City, but Rowland, displaying her usual literary stealth, manages to wend and weave her way through topics as varied as the discovery of Etruscan tombs, the state of Rome’s cobblestone streets, Italy’s immigration policies, the subsoils of the Eternal City, Papal shoes, and the effects of global warming on ancient monuments.
To write a review of Rowland’s review perhaps seems redundant, but her article is a shining example of the best English-language writing about Rome that the twenty-first century currently has on offer. No other writer brings to the city such a broad and deep cross section of knowledge as Rowland, whose expertise is found in topics as diverse as ancient numismatics, the Etruscan language, Renaissance pornography, and Walter Veltroni, the city’s current mayor. What Rowland makes clear is that one cannot understand the Rome of today without such depth of knowledge, for ancient habits are still common cultural currency in the city called Eternal.
