| Expectations of Rome |
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“At last-for the first time- I live! Rome beats everything. It makes Venice-Florence-Oxford-London seem like cities of pasteboard. For the first time I know what the picturesque is” Henry James (1869). You probably expect a lot of Rome: Seat of Empire, mother of civilization, caput mundi, the head of the world. It is the city of the Caesars, of romance, the city of the dolce vita, languorous sunny days, the city of endless galleries of art, of curches and museums, of fountain-spashed piazzas and majestic monuments to its golden of empire. Well, you have everything of these, but, beware Stendhal’s Syndrome: There is a passage in Stendhal’s Journal where he alludes to the symptoms of excessive consumption of culture: “if the foreigner who enters St. Peter’s tries to see everything, he will develop a furious headache, and presently satiety and pain will render him incapable of any pleasure” Apart from being a golden city, Rome is also the city of uncontrollable traffic, the city of frenetic noice and confusion, the city of wanton crowds, obstinate bureaucracy and groaning inefficiency, I would say this is the modern reality. Like many urban dwellers, Rome’s inhabitants have to battle to survive. The prospect of work continually draws people from the surrounding area, southern Italy and from developing countries to the city, and its resources have become severely overstretched |
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