Rome

Rome
/rohm/, n.
1. Harold (Jacob), born 1908, U.S. lyricist and composer.
2. Italian, Roma. a city in and the capital of Italy, in the central part, on the Tiber: ancient capital of the Roman Empire; site of Vatican City, seat of authority of the Roman Catholic Church. 2,600,000.
3. a city in central New York, E of Oneida Lake. 43,826.
4. a city in NW Georgia. 29,654.
5. the ancient Italian kingdom, republic, and empire whose capital was the city of Rome.
6. the Roman Catholic Church.

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I

City (pop., 2001 prelim: 2,459,776), capital of Italy.

It is situated on the Tiber River in the central part of the country. The historical site of Rome on its seven hills was occupied as early as the Bronze Age (с 1500 BC), and the city was politically unified by the early 6th century BC. It became the capital of the Roman Empire (see Roman Republic and Empire). The Romans gradually conquered the Italian peninsula (see Etruscan), extended their dominion over the entire Mediterranean basin (see Punic Wars), and expanded their empire into continental Europe. Under Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar, Rome's influence was extended over Syria, Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Gaul. After the Battle of Actium, all Roman lands were controlled by Octavian (Augustus), the first Roman emperor. As the imperial capital, Rome became the site of magnificent public buildings, including palaces, temples, public baths, theatres, and stadiums. It reached the peak of its grandeur and ancient population during the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD. It remained the capital of the Roman Empire until Emperor Constantine the Great dedicated Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 330. By the end of the 6th century the protection of the city was in the hands of the Roman Catholic church (see Holy Roman Empire), which achieved absolute rule only in the 15th century. The city flourished during the Renaissance and was the seat of the papacy and the Papal States. In 1870 it became the capital of a united Italy. It was transformed into a modern capital in the 1920s and '30s and is Italy's administrative, cultural, and transportation centre. See also Vatican City.
II
(as used in expressions)
Grand Prix de Rome
Rome March on
Rome Treaties of

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      city, seat (1834) of Floyd county, northwestern Georgia, U.S. It lies about 65 miles (105 km) northwest of Atlanta in a valley where the Etowah and Oostanaula rivers form the Coosa River, and it is built on seven hills (hence the name). Rome was founded in 1834 on the site of a Cherokee village and was incorporated as a city in 1847. It became a clearinghouse for cotton and farm produce between Georgia and Tennessee. During the American Civil War the city was captured and occupied for several months in 1864 by Union forces, who destroyed its industrial facilities as they departed. It was rebuilt after a disastrous flood (1886), and textile milling became important.

      Rome now has a diversified economy based on manufacturing (textiles, paper, baked goods, and metal products), lumbering, and agriculture; tourism is also important. Shorter College (1873) and Floyd College (1970) are in Rome, and Berry College (1902) is at nearby Mount Berry. The 104-foot (32-metre) clock tower, built atop one of Rome's hills, is a notable landmark. The Capitoline Wolf, a bronze replica of the Etruscan statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf that was given to the city by Italy in 1929, stands in front of City Hall. The western segment of Chattahoochee National Forest lies 10 miles (16 km) north of Rome, and James H. “Sloppy” Floyd State Park is about 25 miles (40 km) northwest. Pop. (1990) 30,326; (2000) 34,980.

Italy
Introduction

      historic city and capital of Roma provincia, of Lazio regione, and of Italy.

      A capital of kingdoms and of republics and of an empire the armies and polity of which defined the Western world in antiquity and left seemingly indelible imprints thereafter, a city called eternal, as the spiritual and physical centre of the Roman Catholic Church, and a city whose name evokes major pinnacles of artistic and intellectual achievement, Rome has retained all of these attributes: the capital of Italy, a font of religious authority, and a memorial to the creative imagination of the past. Probably more than any other city in the West, possibly more than any other in the world, it is a city whose history continues to shape nearly every aspect of its being but, at the same time, whose contemporary consciousness of that history projects it into the very core of modern life.

      For well over a millennium, Rome controlled the destiny of all civilization known to Europe, then fell into dissolution and 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—at times tragic, ridiculous, or shameful—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.

Physical and human geography

The landscape
Location and layout
      Rome is located in central Italy on the Tiber (Tevere) River, 15 miles (24 kilometres) inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Roman countryside, the Campagna, was one of the last areas of central Italy to be settled in antiquity. The city was built on a defensible hill dominating the last downstream, high-banked river crossing where traverse was facilitated by a midstream island.

      The city of the seven hills, of treasures and tourists, and of fountains and cupolas lies mostly within the old city walls. The so-called Servian Wall, built almost certainly 12 years after the Gauls' destruction of Rome in 390 BC, enclosed most of the Esquiline and Caelian hills and all the other five. It was built into ramparts that dated from the early republic or even the late kingdom. Although Rome grew beyond the Servian defenses, no new wall was constructed until Aurelian began building in brick-faced concrete in AD 270. Almost 12 miles long and girdling about four square miles (10 square kilometres), this is the wall that Italian troops had to breach to claim their capital in 1870, and it is still largely intact.

      The ancient walled city of Rome embraces only 4 percent of the modern municipality's 582 square miles (1,507 square kilometres) and is the smallest of the city's 12 administrative zones. The walled centre 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 absorbed officially into the municipality after 1911. Within the city limits on the western and northwestern fringes are six large suburbi (“suburbs”), while beyond the municipal boundaries the commune of Rome about doubles the area of the city itself.

      About six miles out from the centre of Rome, a belt highway describes a huge circle around the capital, tying together the antique roads that led from everywhere to Rome: the Via Flaminia, Via Aurelia, Via Appia. Masses of modern apartment buildings rise in the districts outside the centre, in which the small amount of contemporary construction is inconspicuous. Street frontages and show windows are often rebuilt to keep pace with the times, and the Romans succeed in harmonizing the new, the simply old, and the antique with a talent that they have demonstrated since the first extensions of the republican Forum were made under the emperors.

      Small as it is, the old city contains some 300 hotels and 300 pensioni, more than 200 palaces, 20 churches, eight of the city's major parks, the residence of the Italian president, the houses of Parliament, offices of city and national government, and the great historical monuments, in addition to thousands of offices, workshops, restaurants, and bars. It is there that the millions of tourists seem to descend annually.

      Rome's hot, dry summer days, with 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 15 miles away. The city receives about 33 inches (840 millimetres) of precipitation annually; spring and autumn are the rainiest seasons. Frosts and occasional light snowfalls punctuate the otherwise mild winters, when temperatures average about 45° F (7° C). The tramontana, a stormy wind from the north, frequents the city in the winter.

The main streets and their monuments
      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 horseraces (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. It begins spectacularly with the Vittoriano, the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, first king of united Italy. The nation's unknown soldier was interred there after World War I. A Neo-Baroque marble mountain, it is the whitest, biggest, tallest, newest (1911), and possibly the most pompous of Rome's major monuments. Useful as well as ornamental, it contains a museum of the 19th-century cultural revival.

      Along the Corso among the smart shops are five churches, eight palaces (and one palazzetto), and the column of Marcus Aurelius. The first church is S. Marco, the first of Rome's parish churches to be built (c. AD 336) on the plan of a classical basilica. 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 built the Palazzo and the Palazzetto Venezia around the church in 1445, when he was cardinal, enlarging the residence when he became pope. Thereafter, the basilica's priest was always a Venetian cardinal, sharing the palace with the Venetian embassy. Mussolini had his headquarters there 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 a Renaissance 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, Madame Letizia 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, owned in the 19th by Louis Bonaparte. The Palazzo Doria is a late 15th-century building behind a 1734 facade. Four mornings a week the public is admitted—through a side door—to the state rooms and the art gallery, in which there are many Titians, Bruegels, and Caravaggios, a Bronzino, a Memling, and a Velázquez portrait and Bernini bust of the family pope, Innocent X. Behind S. 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 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 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, which now houses a daily newspaper, is not without its plundered antique columns.

      The Corso emerges onto the splendid oval Piazza del Popolo, which is monumental without being intimidating, a sort of toy theatre stage set magically magnified. 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 BC–19th century AD), 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 (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo) for the grand entrance of Queen Christina, who had abandoned the Protestant throne of Sweden for the Catholic hospitality of Rome. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V punctuated the plaza centre with an obelisk (13th century BC) brought by Augustus from Heliopolis to the Circus Maximus.

      The church next to the gate, Sta. 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 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 “Conversion of St. Paul” and his “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.

      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. Sta. Maria in Montesanto, on the east, has an oval plan and dome, while Sta. Maria dei Miracoli, on the narrower plot toward the Tiber on the west, has a round dome. Carlo Rainaldi (Rainaldi, Carlo), 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 (1585–90) to try to repopulate parts of Rome deserted after the Gothic wars.

      Since lack of water had driven residents off the high ground, he restored the aqueduct of Alexander Severus, the Aqua Alexandrina, and gave it his own first name, Aqua Felice. 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 S. Giovanni in Laterano (St. John Lateran), refurbishing the squares in front of the last two, and built a new square at Sta. Maria Maggiore. He reerected four obelisks found among the ruins and restored a great number of fountains, dearly beloved of the Romans.

      An obelisk in the Piazza di Spagna is not his work but was discovered in the piazza in Campo Marzio in 1778 and erected in 1857 to commemorate the 1854 promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The fountain is fed by the Aqua Vergine, Agrippa's aqueduct of 19 BC, 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 (Bernini, Pietro), though some have attributed the work to his son, Gian Lorenzo (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo)), there was insufficient water pressure for spouting jets, so the Barcaccia (Scow) was conceived, an ancient marble boat foundering endearingly in its marble bath.

      The most striking architectural element in the piazza—indeed, one of the most striking in all 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, for while 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.

      Charles Dickens described the steps as thronged with unengaged “artist's models” in regional costume. They are still crowded with loiterers in distinctive dress, students from all over the world. Artists were among the first to move into the area, and some few who have not been shouldered out by galleries and ultra-modish shops retain their studios among the walled gardens of the Via Margutta. Since the end of the 16th century, the Piazza di Spagna, with its innkeepers who followed the artists, has been a stopping place for tourists. 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 room on the piazza in which John Keats died in 1821 has been made into a museum. The surrounding streets at both the top and the bottom of the steps are among the smartest shopping streets in Rome.

The people
      The knowledge that Rome is eternal, that nothing lasts but nothing changes, gives rise to the local watchword, pazienza (“patience”). In this overcrowded, understaffed city, pazienza is demonstrated everywhere, every day. Except for brief, lowering, summer-lightning flashes of an underlying volatility, the Roman is apt to be cheery and courteous, a little less operatic in his reactions than many other Italians.

      In Rome, as in the rest of Italy, all children are godsends and are demonstrably, publicly loved, patted, petted, cuddled, and kissed. Unmonied families make sacrifices to provide the biggest possible dolls and the flashiest possible tricycles. This continues far into life, with the man playing the role of adored but respectful princeling to his queen mother and imperious but indulgent king to his wife and children. In society outside the family the important thing is bella figura, or keeping face. Thus the dottore (the only degree the university of Rome gives is the doctorate) salutes the street sweeper as capo (“chief”), a gesture of respect called for by the uniform.

      For 1,000 years, to be a citizen of Rome was to hold the keys to the world, to live in safety, pride, and relative comfort. Today there is still considerable pride in being a Romano di Roma, a Roman Roman. Among such 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.

      Both Romans and visitors alike continue to congregate at the café tables ranged on the plane-tree-shaded sidewalks of the Via Vittorio Veneto, a street of grand hotels, airline offices, and government buildings. Laid out in 1887 from the Villa Borghese gardens to the Piazza Barberini, it runs downhill in a dogleg. During the 15 or so years of peak prosperity in Italian filmmaking, about 1950–65, international film celebrities abounded, and clouds of beautiful career hopefuls drifted among the tables, making the Via Veneto one of the most intriguing—in both senses of the word—streets in the world. The street remains a fashionable thoroughfare, gaily and expensively animated until long after midnight.

      At the same hour, less glittering Romans can be found in the Piazza Navona, on the flat plain in the bend of the Tiber that was the Campus Martius of classical times. The piazza retains the shape and some of the remains of Domitian's circus (AD 81–89), which remained intact until at least 1450. This is far more typical of central Rome than the Via Veneto, a mere centenarian and therefore a new street. Mussolini's regime cut some new routes through the city, mainly to render historic sites more accessible, but modern streets are rare in the historic centre.

      The inhabitants who consider themselves the most nobly Roman of them all are the people of Trastevere (Across the Tiber). They have been in their neighbourhood for a very long time, although they are of neither pure nor primordial stock. Trastevere was the quarter for sailors and foreigners, whereas the founding fathers eastward across the river were soldiers and farmers. In the Middle Ages a number of palaces were the homes of powerful families, and palaces continued to be built during the Renaissance (the Palazzo Farnesina) and even in the 18th century (the Palazzo Corsini). Some authorities—not all from Trastevere—claim Sta. Maria in Trastevere as the oldest church in Rome, pointing out that under the empire the district was the home of Orientals with alien religions, among them a goodly number of Jews proselytized by SS. Peter and Paul. It is said that Alexander Severus (reigned 222–235) permitted Christians to foregather at this site under the leadership of Pope St. Calixtus I, and it is recorded that 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.

      Over the millennia the area has lost little of its vigour. The people have maintained the earthiest of Roman accents, and their taverns have remained generally faithful to simple fare, robust wine, and the unison bawling of irreverent songs. One of Rome's few secular statues—a top-hatted marble effigy of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, a 19th-century satirical dialect poet—stands near the Ponte (Bridge) Garibaldi.

      Most of the streets are still narrow and without sidewalks, appearing only on the most detailed maps and baffling taxi drivers who do not live there. Every 100 paces or so the haphazard cobbled lanes open upon some surprising, small plaza with a church, a palace, a cloister, or a group of cafés.

The economy
      Rome cannot be called an industrial city, although it has a substantial amount of medium and light industries. Factories are located mostly in the northwestern part of the city. The chief industries include engineering, electronics, chemicals, printing, clothing, and food processing. The major employers are the building, tourism, and motion-picture industries, the latter centred at Cinecittà (Cinema City), a few miles outside of Rome, and the government.

      Traffic becomes a typical Roman dilemma because much of the municipal revenue is derived from the more than 1,000,000 automobiles and motor scooters that help render city life difficult. The average noise during waking hours is at or above the level that gradually induces deafness, whereas the speed of motor traffic, in spite of the audacity and acuity of the drivers, is four miles per hour.

      In 45 BC Julius Caesar forbade any wagon to be led or driven during the daytime within the continuous built-up area of Rome. Unfortunately, the police force required for enforcement was seriously under strength so that generally during the daytime almost no traffic police were on duty. “Where can you find lodgings that give you a chance of sleep?” a celebrated writer demanded. “The roar of the wheeled traffic in the City's narrow, winding streets and the shouts of abuse . . . ,” thus wrote Juvenal, who lived in Rome in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries AD. Beginning in 1973, both to reduce congestion and noise and air pollution, private vehicles were banned from parts of the city's ancient section.

      Deterioration of the city's monuments has been accelerated by traffic fumes and vibration, yet the monuments themselves have impeded the one undertaking that could reduce road traffic: subway construction. Mussolini decreed the building of a subway from Rome's central railway station, the Stazione Termini, and by 1955 it was in operation along a seven-mile southwestern route via the Colosseum and the Porta S. Paolo to the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR), the exhibition grounds outside the city. (This line, called Line B, now extends to Ostia.)

      In 1959 a comprehensive metropolitan subway system was approved. After five years of tunnelling through the bureaucracy, the first line of the system began tunnelling a route some 14 miles long under the streets. It was diverted to protect monuments, halted when it unearthed archaeological remains, and, at long last, resumed again. The second line (Line A) of the system, which was completed in 1980, runs from the district just north of St. Peter's via the Termini to Cinecittà, southeast of the city. Additional lines and extensions are to be constructed.

      Rome is served by two international airports, the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, on the coast 15 miles southwest of the city, and the Ciampino Airport, about seven miles southeast.

Administrative and social conditions
      Rome is governed by an elected council of 80 members. A mayor and an executive council of 14 members (with four reserves) are selected from among the council members. The council is responsible for such amenities as police protection, health services, transportation, and certain aspects of public assistance.

Public services
      Rome is one of the most beautiful and exciting capitals in the Western world. According to local authorities, it is also the filthiest, noisiest, and most heavily indebted city in Italy.

      The city that invented both concrete and the apartment house (insula) suffers a perennial housing shortage. The housing shortage persists because of the incessant arrival of job-seeking migrants from all over Italy but mostly from the impoverished south. All the plans, powers, agencies, and even state building funds are available, but three things impede construction: first, land cannot be built upon until the municipality supplies public services and schools (the city is so short of school space that schools sometimes operate classes in three successive shifts for 12 straight hours a day); second, Roman politics are more Byzantine—more labyrinthine and convoluted—than a 5th-century mosaic; third, the notorious glacier-slow Roman bureaucracy can, by paper shuffling alone, delay an approved project up to five years. Life in Rome remains an endless paper chase through the obscure corridors of petty authority.

      The city's main institution of higher education is the University of Rome (Rome, University of) (founded 1303), whose buildings, the Città Universitaria, are located east of the Stazione Termini.

Monuments of the city
      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, while 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 in 390 BC and subsequently by the Visigoths in AD 410, the Vandals in 445, the Normans in 1084, and Spanish troops in 1527. Muslims laid it under siege in 846. The Great Fire of Rome—Nero's fire—occurred in AD 64, 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, and it is so ubiquitous that its highlights must be comprehended in terms both of geography and of type.

The Seven Hills (Seven Hills of Rome)
The Palatine (Palatine Hill)
      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, Romulus being obliged to execute Remus for disobeying one of the city's first laws. The Etruscan bronze statue of the maternally ferocious wolf (late 6th or early 5th century BC; Capitoline Museum) is one of the greatest works among the thousands of masterpieces in Rome. The nursing infants were sculpted and placed under the Etruscan statue in 1509.

      The wolf cave, the Lupercal, was maintained as a shrine at least until the fall of the empire but is now lost. On the same side of the Palatine, “Romulus' House,” a timber-framed circular hut covered in clay-plastered wickerwork, was kept in constant repair. Modern excavations have revealed the emplacement of just such Iron Age huts from the period (8th–7th century BC) given in the fable for the founding of Rome.

      On this hill the columns of lost palaces rise in uncompromised beauty from fields of wildflowers and the dust of history. Ilex and pine and bay frame views of Rome. 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.

      The Palatine was a superior residential district by the 3rd century BC. Augustus was born there in 63 BC and continued to live there after he became emperor. His private dwelling, built about 50 BC and never seriously modified, still stands. Known as the House of Livia, for his widow, it 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 three crests of the hill were flattened in the course of building. The palace was begun by Tiberius, to whose work Nero, Caligula, Trajan, Hadrian, and Septimius Severus made their own additions.

      The biggest and richest structure of all was created for Domitian (reigned AD 81–96), 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.

      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' 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 seat of Roman government, the Capitoline is little changed from Michelangelo's design and represents one of the earliest examples of modern town planning. The centrepiece of this piazza of three palaces is a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which stood unmolested for ages by the barracks of the imperial guard (later the Palazzo del Laterano) because it was believed to be a statue of Constantine, the first Christian emperor.

      The Palazzo Senatorio incorporates remains of the facade of the Tabularium, a state-records office constructed in 78 BC 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, 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 was called the Palazzo Senatorio (Senate Palace).

      The palace of the municipal councillors, the conservatori, is on the south side of the square opposite the Palazzo del Museo Capitolino (Capitoline Palace), which, as a papal collection of Classical works offered back to the citizens of Rome by Sixtus IV in 1471, became the first public museum of sculpture in the Western world. Now occupying both the Capitoline Palace and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, as well as a later private palace, the museum contains only objects found in Rome, including the famed Romulus and Remus wolf, the “Capitoline Venus,” the “Dying Gaul,” and the “Boy with Thorn,” as well as the host of portrait busts that can, in imagination, repeople the Forum just below.

      The hill was the fortress and asylum of Romulus' 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 Victor Emmanuel monument and the church of Sta. Maria d'Aracoeli. The southern crest, sacred to Jupiter, became, in 509 BC, 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 Clivus Capitolinus, the antique pavings of which can be walked today, was lined with 40 elephants bearing torches to light the way for Caesar coming in triumph from Gaul. In this centre of divine guidance, the Roman Senate held its first meeting every year. When Petrarch was crowned with laurel among the ruins of the capitol in 1341, it was a harbinger of the Renaissance.

      The church of Sta. Maria d'Aracoeli, built before the 6th century, remade in its present form in the 13th, is lined with columns rifled from Classical buildings. It is the home of “Il Bambino,” a much loved miracle-performing wooden Christ child who is called to save desperately ill children. At Christmas, adorned in jewels given by the grateful, he can be seen in the church's celebrated manger scene, where he is serenaded by shepherd pipers.

The Aventine
      Though considerably built over with modern houses and travelled 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 republican buildings, and the Temple of Diana remains only as a street name. Under the 4th-century church of Sta. Prisca is one of the best preserved and maintained Mithraic basilicas in the city. The basilica of Sta. 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, designed in the late 1700s by Giambattista Piranesi (Piranesi, Giovanni Battista), 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 Knight's Priory, residence of the grand master of the Knights of Malta (Hospitallers). In 1113 the newly founded order, the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, was in the Holy Land, whence it was driven to Rhodes, which it held until 1522, thence to Malta until 1789, when the order repaired to its stronghold in a Roman side street. The sovereign military order continues its long history of international medical work.

The Caelian
      Almost half parkland, the Caelian includes the public park of Villa Celimontana, once the garden of the Mattei family, who had another on the Palatine, a clutch of palaces in the Campus Martius, and another in the Trastevere quarter. The six churches on the hill date from the 4th to the 9th century.

      In the medieval confines of the only fortified abbey left in Rome stands SS. Quattro Coronati, today sheltering nuns and their charges, deaf-mute children. The basilica of SS. 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, partly dismantled by Nero, completely by Vespasian. The round church of S. Stefano Rotondo (460–483) may have been modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

      The Hospital of St. John was founded in the Middle Ages as a dependence of S. 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 the original Cosmate of the Cosmati school of carvers and decorators and by his father Jacobus. Nearby stands the Arch of Dolabella (AD 10), 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 Esquiline
      Between the Esquiline and the Caelian, the end of the Forum valley is filled by the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, with the Palatine edging down from the north. After the fire of AD 64 had destroyed so much of the city, Nero undertook to rebuild the end of it—200 acres (81 hectares)—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 of Nero), the Golden House. 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 AD 104. In 131 Hadrian erected his Temple of Venus and Rome where the vestibule had stood at this end of the Forum; the church and former convent buildings of Sta. Maria Nova were built on the western corner of the temple platform in the 10th century. Less than 70 years after the Golden House had been started, nothing was left of it but a 150-foot gilded statue of Nero. Popular tradition has it that the face was changed with each succeeding emperor, but it was destroyed by one of the early popes.

      The removal was so complete that later Romans could not remember where the Golden House had stood. When the domestic wing was discovered under Trajan's Baths in the 15th century, the rooms painted in the Pompeiian style were thought to be decorated grottoes. Some years later, when Raphael and his friends were let down on ropes to look, the style they imitated in decorating the Vatican loggias was called grottesche.

      The Colosseum that replaced Nero's lake is more correctly called the Flavian Amphitheatre. It was begun by Vespasian and inaugurated by Titus in AD 80. The oval stadium measures one-third of a mile around, with external dimensions of 615 by 415 feet. The 160-foot facade has three superimposed series of 80 arches and an attic story. The attached columns follow the order applied on the Theatre of Marcellus (Marcellus, Theatre of) (13 BC): 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.

      The nearby Arch of Constantine (Constantine, Arch of) was erected hastily in 315 to celebrate a victory two years earlier. 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.

      Not all the rooms of the Golden House on the Oppio have been excavated. Above them spread the remains of Trajan's Baths, theatrical decorations for the public garden, Parco di Traiano. They served as models for the baths of Caracalla (c. 212–217) and Diocletian (298–305/306), which, in turn, served as a pattern for the Basilica of 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.

      Caracalla's baths (Caracalla, Baths of) on the river flats behind the Caelian Hill covered more than six acres, part of which is occupied today by the modern glass-fronted buildings of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. Among the towering remains set in a large park, the caldarium (steamroom) is now used for summer opera performances. Much of the famed Farnese collection of marbles was stripped from these baths.

      The Baths of Diocletian are over the brow of the Viminal, and some idea of their size (130,000 square yards, or 110,000 square metres, for the main bath block) can be gained from the fact that the church of S. Bernardo was built into one of the chambers some 500 feet west of the central hall of the 92-foot-high frigidarium (“cold room”), into which Michelangelo built the cloister church of Sta. Maria degli Angeli in 1561.

      The first seven halls of the Museo Nazionale Romano (National Roman Museum), also called the Museo delle Terme, are rooms of the frigidarium block. This matchless collection of antiquities includes wall paintings from villas, mosaics, sarcophagi, and sculptures, including the famous Ludovisi throne (Greek, 5th century BC), the Niobid from the Gardens of Sallust where the Via Veneto wends today, and the bronze “Pugilist” (2nd century BC), discovered in 1884 in a building site on the Quirinal.

      The Basilica of Maxentius (Maxentius, Basilica of) (also named after Constantine, who completed it after dispatching Maxentius) was started about 311. This massive hall of justice and commerce was an oblong 265 feet long and 120 feet high, covered by three groin vaults with three deeply coffered tunnel-vaulted bays on either side. Probably ruined by the earthquake of 847, it was also mined for its materials. One of the great Corinthian columns stands obelisk-like before Sta. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline. The head of Constantine's 40-foot-high statue reposes in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

The Viminal and Quirinal
      Like much of the Esquiline, the Viminal and Quirinal 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 weighty department that directs the state's police forces. The Quirinal, pierced by a modern traffic tunnel, has been a distinguished address since Pomponius Atticus, recipient of Cicero's letters, was a resident. 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 Corso, is an art gallery open to the public; and its gardens, climbing the slope to the Piazza Quirinale, contain remnants of Caracalla's Temple of Sarapis. The piazza has been graced since antiquity with two large statues of men with rearing horses, “The Horsetamers” or “Castor and Pollux.” Closed on three sides by palaces, the piazza opens on the fourth to a splendid view over the Tiber. The Quirinal Palace, built by Pope Gregory VIII 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 was made the presidential palace. Both monarchs and presidents, however, have preferred to inhabit the homier palazetto at the far end.

      The handsome buildings opposite are the stables (1730–40), built on the site of the Crescentii 10th-century stronghold. The Palazzo della Consulta (1734) was erected for part of the papal administration. The Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, built by a Borghese cardinal in 1603, is still a private house. The Palazzo Barberini farther up the hill, constructed 1629–33 on the site of the old Palazzo Sforza, was occupied by the family until 1949. Part of the collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica is housed here, the rest across the river in the Palazzo Corsini in Trastevere. The 1,700 pictures, most of them works by celebrated masters, were contributed by distinguished families, including the Barberinis. Architecturally, the palace 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 previously 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, made the plans, which were carried out after his death by Bernini, assisted by Borromini (Borromini, Francesco). 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 an impossibly tiny site at the crossroads of the Quattro Fontane (Four Fountains, one of which is built into a niche in the church wall), but S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane) was a triumph. To his revolutionary solutions of 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. Walls that flow and sway created a sensation, and the idea was seized upon by Baroque artists, especially from other nations.

      Bernini's S. 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.

Other hills
      Behind the river plain of Trastevere is the Gianicolo (Janiculum), and behind the Piazza del Popolo across the river is the Pincio. Both are now parkland, with villas, gardens, and churches discreetly disposed. The Janiculum crest was made into a park in 1870 to honour Garibaldi for his heroic but unsuccessful defense of the Roman Republic in 1849. 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. By day, nannies wheel their charges through the greenery, and toward sunset Romans arrive to carry on the tradition of the before-dining Pincio promenade. Down the road toward Trinità dei Monti is the 1544 Villa Medici (Medici, Villa), 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 and the Villa Borghese are also on the hill, both housing art collections of world importance. 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, Museo Nazionale di), which has a collection of Etruscan art and artifacts of singular beauty and historical value. The Borghese (Borghese Gallery) collection is small but choice, with a roomful of Caravaggios and, in addition, Titian's “Sacred and Profane Love.” Canova's Neoclassical nude statue of Pauline Bonaparte, for a time a Borghese princess, as Venus retains its capacity to scandalize. The Italian government bought the grounds, house, and contents in 1902. The Zoological Garden (established in 1911) on the grounds of the Villa Borghese, is the largest of its kind in Italy and is landscaped to reproduce the natural habitats of the animals. To the west is the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, founded in 1883, with an important collection of 19th- and 20th-century Italian art.

The Forum (Roman Forum)
 The Forum was the religious, civic, and commercial centre of pastoral, royal, and republican Rome. After 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 next to 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.

      Fires, earthquakes, and invasions repeatedly levelled the buildings, and new ones were erected on their remains until the valley was covered by 50 feet 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.

      The little stream cutting diagonally across the valley floor was, according to tradition, canalized as the Cloaca Maxima in the 6th century. Stratigraphic excavations again support the folktales and date the sewer construction at about 575 BC. Although later buildings perpetuated the name and roughly the position of the first halls and temples, they do not necessarily stand where earlier buildings stood, and many details of the earlier Forum are still the subject of scholarly speculation.

      Janus and Saturn, both of whom have temples there, were among the gods of early Rome, and the Temple of Vesta, even in its last marble version (AD 191), 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 monarchy's priestly duties. The Temple of Castor and Pollux was built at the establishment of the republic.

      The oldest formally consecrated monument was the open space of the social Forum. A roughly trapezoidal stretch of ground about 125 by 70 feet, 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 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. Between the two clearings lay the orators' platform, the Rostra, decorated in 338 BC with the iron rams (rostra) taken as trophies from the warships of Antium.

      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 BC, the first of the basilicas), Julius Caesar (Caesar, Julius) 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, though, across the wide end of the Forum. He supplanted the Basilica Sempronia (170 BC) on the western side of the Forum with his own Basilica Julia (54 BC), installing new shops in place of the old Tabernae Veteres. On the other side of the Forum already stood the shop-fronted Basilica Aemilia (179 BC), named for the censor who constructed the Tiber bridge now called the Ponte Rotto.

      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 BC) was followed by the Theatre of Marcellus (13 BC). 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.

      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.

      The Forum is now a confusing boneyard of history. Of the thousands of columns, not many more than 50 stand erect. Amid the ruins are Christian churches, thickets of trees and bushes, and hundreds upon hundreds of free-living cats.

The riverlands
      Along a 1 1/2-mile stretch of the Tiber, around a big kangaroo-nosed bend, lie all the historic quarters of the river plain. On the left (east) bank are the Campus Martius, Circus Flaminius, Forum Boarium, and Forum Holitorium; on the right, the Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice, built 1889–1910), the Castel Sant'Angelo, or Hadrian's Tomb, the entrance to Vatican City, and Trastevere. At the bottom of the bend is Tiber Island.

Castel Sant'Angelo and the bridges
      Four of the 11 bridges along this part of the Tiber are of special interest. The Ponte Sant'Angelo, to which Bernini was asked to add angels, is in the main the Pons Aelius built in AD 134. A year later Hadrian began his tomb, just off the end of the bridge. A towering cylinder 20 metres high on a square base, it was in size and form a typical imperial mausoleum. In 271 it was built into the Aurelian Wall and became a key fortress in the defense of Rome. In 587 Gregory the Great, 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 kilograms) of grain, a centrally heated bathroom, a prison that incarcerated 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.

      At Tiber Island are two bridges. The Ponte Cestio, often rebuilt since the 1st century BC, leads to Trastevere, while the Ponte Fabricio (62 BC), the oldest in Rome, runs from the shore below the Capitoline. The island, 1,100 feet long and less than 330 feet wide at its widest, has been a place of healing since the Temple of Aesculapius was erected after the plague of 291 BC; the largest building there is the Fatebenefratelli Hospital (also called the Hospital of S. Giovanni di Dio). Facing the hospital is another of Rome's towered medieval family fortresses, this one built by the Pierleone. The traffic howls along both banks, noisier and more voracious than the wolves of the Pierleone's anarchic Rome, but on the island peace prevails. Just downstream are the remains of the Ponte Rotto (Broken Bridge) of 179 BC and two bridges farther along. The modern Ponte Sublicio is named for the wooden bridge defended by Horatius and his comrades on this part of the river.

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), girt with temples, of which two remain: the elegant, circular Pentellic marble structure of the 1st century BC 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 Sta. 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 dread 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 (Marcellus, Theatre of), begun by Caesar and completed in 13 BC by Augustus, who named it for a short-lived 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 Orsinis in the 16th century, it remains private property. The classical orders of the facade, adopted for the Colosseum, became the model for Renaissance architects.

      From there northward to the tomb of Augustus and as far inland as the Via Flaminia (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. Today, three major imperial monuments survive: the Pantheon, the reconstructed Ara Pacis Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace), and Hadrian's Column. Interspersed among the 40 palaces and 100 churches are remnants of what the emperors built.

      The portion closest to Tiber Island was once a major republican racing and sports ground, the Circus Flaminius (220 BC), which in the 16th century became the Jewish ghetto. Jews (Jew) were not persecuted in Rome until Pope Paul IV (1555–59) herded them into a ghetto under curfew. Although Paul was so loathed that the Romans decapitated his statue when he died, other popes carried on his anti-Jewish program. Except for brief respites under Napoleon and the momentary Roman Republic of 1848, Jews until 1870 were debarred from all the professions, government service, and landownership. For many years the neighbourhood retained a Jewish flavour, with some 3,000 Jews living there in the 1960s, but only a few remain, as the ghetto, like Trastevere, became ripe for conversion to luxurious flats. Nearby, the Largo Argentina, excavated 1926–29, contains four small temples of the 1st and 2nd centuries BC.

      The crescent of buildings between the Piazza del Biscione and the Piazza dei Satiri take their 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 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 BC, when Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times and fell at the foot of Pompey's statue. For almost 400 years a piece of 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 Orsinis in the 12th century and later converted into the Palazzo Righetti, or Pio.

      The rest of the river bend northward was known as the Campus Martius. Marshy in places, with a few temples and public buildings, it was made into one of the grandeurs of Rome by Agrippa (died 12 BC), a landscape of lawns, baths, temples, and parks. The swamp became a lake, the Stagnum Agrippae, where—according to Tacitus—Nero led one of his more elaborate orgies from a sumptuous raft.

      Of all this splendour almost nothing remained after the fire of AD 80. Hadrian undertook to restore some of it. Among his works was the new Pantheon, one of the West's great buildings, extraordinary as architecture, 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 pope: the bronze roof beams of the grandiose pedimental porch of 18 sixty-ton columns of Egyptian granite were stripped by Urban VIII, the Barberini pope, who took them as raw material for the baldachin in St. Peter's, provoking the celebrated anonymous comment, Quod non fecerunt barberi, fecerunt Barberini, “What was not done by the barbarians was done by the Barberinis.”

      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, 141 feet in diameter, exactly 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. Roman concrete was essentially a hydraulic cement, deriving its unique strength from the properties of the dark volcanic ash (pozzolana) of the Roman subsoil that was substituted for sand. There is some brick ribbing in the lowest part of the dome and thrust-containing brick outer facing, but, in general, brick was not used by the Romans as a building material in itself. Brick and tile were used to help hold the concrete until it dried, making for a less brutal exterior. The stamped trademarks on the bricks from the big yards behind Vatican Hill and up the Tiber Valley help in determining chronology. The Pantheon, for example, bears the original dedicatory inscription of Agrippa, modestly replaced by Hadrian. The latter's name does not appear, but the stampings on the bricks show that construction does indeed date from Hadrian's reign. 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, and the Rome stock exchange gains considerable dignity from the incorporation of some of the Temple of Hadrian.

      The shattered drum of Augustus' (Augustus) tomb marks the spot where he was buried AD 14. The mausoleum became a 12th-century Colonna fortress, 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 Augustae (Altar of Augustan Peace, designed 13 BC, dedicated 9 BC). 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 the whole was reassembled to stand four streets away from its original location.

      In the Campus Martius Italy's Chamber of Deputies sits in the Bernini-designed Palazzo di Montecitorio, its Senate in Palazzo Madama (17th century), and its Council of State in Palazzo Spada (c. 1540), the picture gallery of which is open to the public. The Museo di Roma, which illustrates the life of the city through the ages, is in Palazzo Braschi (18th century). The Brazilian embassy is in the Palazzo Pamphili, which has a gallery designed by Borromini and painted by Pietro da Cortona. 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. 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).

The palaces
      The three architecturally celebrated palaces in this palace-studded quarter are the Cancelleria, the Farnese (Farnese, Palazzo), and the Massimo alle Colonne. Because all the pertinent documents were destroyed in the Spanish sack of Rome in 1527, the architect of the 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 the Medici Pope Leo X (1513–21), it has housed some portion of the Vatican chancellery ever since, except for 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—its artists drawn from north and south but not from Rome.

      The Farnese, the most monumental of Rome's Renaissance palaces, was designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who was succeeded after his death by Michelangelo, 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 Farnesina by a bridge over the river was actually begun. It can be seen from the surviving arch over the Via Giulia, one of the city's most charming streets.

      Mannerist architecture is typified by Baldassare Perruzi's (Peruzzi, Baldassarre) Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne (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 Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who produced Rome's first printed book in their house in 1467.

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 SS. Giovanni e Paolo, are still preserved underneath the present church buildings. Since the 4th century the tituli priests have been cardinals who, over the centuries, have rebuilt, enlarged, and embellished their churches.

      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 Campagna, 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 (basilica) fell almost to ruin and the location of some catacombs was forgotten.

The great basilicas
      Among the basilicas, seven are designated as great (maggiore): St. Peter's, S. Paolo Fuori le Mura (St. Paul's Outside the Walls), and S. Giovanni in Laterano, all built by Constantine; and those of S. Lorenzo Fuori le Mura (St. Lawrence Outside the Walls), Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme (Holy Cross in Jerusalem), S. Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains), and Sta. Maria Maggiore. Under the 1929 concordat with Vatican City, the Italian government grants them extraterritorial privileges.

      The basilicas established the model for Western ecclesiastical architecture for centuries to come. Basilica, a Greek word meaning royal, was used by the pre-Christian Romans to designate a public hall, but no surviving example of a Roman basilica anywhere in the empire is the architectural predecessor of the Christian basilica.

      The basilical church has a nave higher than the 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. The basilicas in Rome that are closest to the early Christian structures are the churches of competing cults, as strikingly exemplified by the Neo-Pythagorean-sect basilica of the Porta Maggiore, unearthed by the railroad viaduct in 1926.

      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 Sta. Costanza (c. AD 320), 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.

St. Peter's (Saint Peter's Basilica)
      Protected by the fortified Castel Sant'Angelo, St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Palace gained precedence over the cathedral church and Lateran Palace during the papacy's troubled centuries. St. Peter's was built over the traditional burial place of the Apostle from whom all popes claim succession. The spot was marked by a three-niched monument (aedicula) of AD 166–170. 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 (died 337) 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.

      In spite of fires, depredations by invaders, and additions by various popes, the original basilica stood for 1,000 years much as it had been built, but in 1506 Julius II ordered it razed and a new St. Peter's built. His architect was Donato Bramante (Bramante, Donato), a Florentine who in 1502 had completed the first great masterpiece of the High Renaissance, the Tempietto in the courtyard of S. Pietro in Montorio, a mile away on the Janiculum Hill. Built to mark the spot where, according to tradition, St. Peter had been crucified, the Tempietto is round, domed, and unadorned. Its outer face is a colonnade of bare Tuscan Doric, the earliest modern use of this order. Because of its proportions, the tiny temple has the majesty of a great monument.

      Bramante's ground plan for St. Peter's was central: a Greek cross, all of 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, died in 1546, and the 71-year-old Michelangelo was solicited to complete Sangallo's projects, which included St. Peter's, the Palazzo Farnese, and the Capitol. 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 Fontana, who executed the dome, altered the shape, making it taller and steeper than the original design.

      The east end remained unfinished, and it was there that Carlo Maderna (Maderno, Carlo) was ordered to construct a nave, the clergy having won its century-long battle to have a longitudinal church for liturgical reasons. Thus, St. Peter's orientation reverses the normal. Maderna added a Baroque facade in 1626. He was followed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who worked on the building from 1633 to 1677, both inside and outside. His pontifical crowd-funnelling 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. Before the lamentable assault in 1972, which damaged the sculptural masterpiece, one could enter the church and, in the first chapel at the right, see the “Pieta” (1499) of Michelangelo in the original splendour.

      All the planning, plotting, labour, and faith of all the popes, priests, artists, and artisans produced a vast, gorgeous ceremonial chamber. Amid the gleam and glitter of gold and bronze and precious stones eddy throngs of awed, dwarfed humanity.

S. Giovanni in Laterano
      When Borromini redid the interior of S. 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. The Emperor had built a five-aisled basilica over the remains of the barracks of the imperial guard, the Equites Singulares. The bronze doors come from the Curia (the Senate chamber in the Forum); the silver reliquaries containing the heads of SS. Peter and Paul are copies of the twice-stolen originals.

      The octagonal 5th-century baptistery replaced that of the 4th, which had been built into the baths of the House of Fausta, Constantine's second wife. (Later, in another palace, she was strangled in the hot room of the bath, a conventional Roman device for suggesting accidental suffocation of an awkward relative.) Its chapels are decorated with mosaics of the period. The cloisters contain some of the finest examples of early 13th-century carved and inlaid decoration called Cosmatesque after the Cosmati, one of several families of traditional craftsmen. (The cloisters of S. Cosimato, S. Paolo Fuori le Mura, and SS. Quattro Coronati are notable examples of this work, which often was accomplished with porphyries and marbles robbed from classical buildings.)

      On the exterior a 1732 facade is topped with 15 giant statues that were visible across the city. The piazza around which the Lateran buildings are grouped is decorated with another obelisk, the oldest and tallest in Rome (15th century BC), one of those erected by Sixtus V late in the 16th century. At the same time, he demolished the old patriarchate, from which the Sancta Sanctorum (the papal chapel) and the Scala Santa (Holy Stairs) were preserved. The Scala 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 Pilate's palace and thus the stair climbed by the Saviour. The steps are protected by a wooden cover, and believers mount on their knees. The Scala Santa is not mentioned, however, in ecclesiastic, imperial, or personal writings from the 4th, 5th, or 6th century.

Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme
      There is similar lack of record regarding St. Helena's acquisition of the True Cross, which is at Sta. Croce in Gerusalemme. This basilica was built into the palace in which St. Helena lived (317–322). At 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. The alleged relics of the cross, found in 1492 walled into a niche, are now in 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 around 180–211.

S. Lorenzo Fuori le Mura
      Now in the midst of the Campo Verano cemetery, Rome's Catholic burying ground since 1830, S. 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.

S. Paolo Fuori le Mura
      A basilica built by Constantine over the Apostle's grave, S. Paolo Fuori le Mura (St. Paul's Outside the Walls) was replaced starting in 386 by a structure mammoth for its time, 328 by 170 feet. 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 rampage around the walls in 846, the approach to the basilica was a mile-long colonnade down the Ostian Way from the Porta S. Paolo. Today, after leaving the tomb of Gaius Cestius (died 12 BC), a 120-foot pyramid that has inspired many monument builders since, one-third of the route is fenced by gasworks on one side and warehouses on the other.

Sta. Maria Maggiore
      Located on the Esquiline, Sta. Maria Maggiore was founded in 432, just after the Council of Ephesus, which raised the Virgin above all created things; 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 date from the time it was built, lining the walls and bursting with blue and gold around the altar. 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, five pieces of wood connected by bits of metal. Another pope, St. Liberius (352–366), built another church on the Esquiline in response to a vision of the Virgin, who told him to erect a church where snow fell on the night of August 5. In remembrance, it “snows” white flower petals from the roof of the Pope Paul V chapel in Sta. Maria Maggiore every August 5.

Other major churches

      The mother church of the Jesuit order, Gesù, was built 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 Vignola (Vignola, Giacomo da) (1507–73), 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.

S. Pietro in Vincoli
      Originally the Basilica Eudoxiana, S. Pietro in Vincoli (St. Peter in Chains) was built in 432–440 with money from the empress Eudoxia for the veneration of the chains of St. Peter's Jerusalem imprisonment. Later, his Roman chains were added. The chains became famous after they were mentioned at the Council of Ephesus (431). Michelangelo's thunderous Moses is on the tomb of Julius II. Behind the main altar is a 4th-century sarcophagus with seven compartments, brought to Rome from Antioch during the 6th century in the belief that it contained relics of the seven Maccabees.

Sta. Maria della Vittoria
      Built 1605–26, Sta. Maria della Vittoria harbours an unfailing crowd pleaser, Bernini's “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” (1645–52). It is a chapel 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 saint, who is—and the illusion is nigh to perfect—borne into the air at the moment of her ecstatic mystical union with Christ. Extraordinarily convincing and utterly voluptuous, it has been both praised as a masterwork of consummate spirituality and condemned as an impious, pornographic peepshow.

S. Agostino
      Of the scores of churches in the Campus Martius of historical, architectural, and artistic interest, S. Agostino (1479–83) is the most Roman, the church to which would-be mothers come and in which they have offered ex-votos when their prayers have been answered. The “Madonna and Child” (1521) by Jacopo Sansovino (Sansovino, Jacopo), obviously derived from a pagan Juno, is covered with gold and jewels given by the gratified. The church was constructed entirely of travertine looted from the Colosseum. Caravaggio painted the “Madonna with Pilgrims”; Raphael did the fresco of Isaiah. This was these artists' favourite church, and some of the more celebrated among them managed to be interred in it.

The fountains (fountain)
      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 Queen Christina, having watched the fountains in St. Peter's Square, gave her permission for them to be turned off only to learn that they flowed all the time.

      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. Restored after 1,000 years of silence by Pope Nicholas V in 1485, the fountain was renewed in the 17th century and then transformed from a handy source of household water into a scenic wonder. The huge fountain bulges into most of a tiny square and takes up the entire end of an abutting palace. Niccolò Salvi (Salvi, Nicola) won a 1732 competition by designing a late Baroque marble mass of rocks and rills, rush and gush, beards and buttocks, all very allegorical and damp. It took 30 years to complete. Its water, from Acqua Vergine, was considered 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.

      Out of the Bernini–Borromini (Bernini, Gian Lorenzo) rivalry that so enriched the Roman cityscape arose a legend, still believed and recounted today. This explains that, on Bernini's allegorical Piazza Navona fountain, the statue of the Nile River, whose source was then unknown, hides its head to avoid seeing the Borromini facade on the church opposite, and that of the Río de la Plata 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 S. Agnese was begun, two years before Borromini was called in, and 15 years before the facade was completed. The church is owned and maintained by the Doria-Pamphili family.

      The oldest of the city's fountains is really a spring, the Lacus Juturnae in the Forum, restored in 1952 to the appearance it had in Augustan times. The newest 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 Pius IX 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 S. Bernardo, commissioned by Sixtus V. The figure is a pallid Moses, apparently in imitation of Michelangelo's, and its sculptor, Prospero Bresciano, is said to have been so hurt by the public's jeers that he died of a broken heart.

Blake Ehrlich Ed.

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 century BC, separate villages of various iron-using Indo-European peoples appeared, first on the Palatine and the Aventine hills and soon thereafter on the Esquiline and Quirinal ridges. The artifacts and 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 the settlement of the valleys between the Palatine, Esquiline, and Caelian hills in the 7th century, the independent villages began to merge. Before the end of this century, the Forum valley, 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. 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 its 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 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.

      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 again 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; Livy described Rome as looking more like a squatters' community than a planned community. 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; but, before the end of the 4th century, through a series of judicious compromises, the plebeians had won access to all of the offices of the state, and the actions of the plebeian assembly (plebiscites) 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.

The city of world power
      The remarkable though largely unplanned territorial expansion of Rome between 375 and 275 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 middle of the 3rd century helped to solve the pressure of Rome's land-hungry population; nevertheless, by c. 250 the city's population had grown to almost 100,000. The booty from conquests also helped to 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.

      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; but 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 (Punic War, Second) (218–201) large areas of the peninsula were devastated by invading troops from Carthage, led by the famous general Hannibal; (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 late republic
      During the 2nd century, the rapid growth of the urban population and the extension of Roman citizenship led to the effective 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 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 jerrybuilt apartment houses (insulae) and with only minimum 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 largess of the rich before the end of the 2nd century. Rome had, moreover, neither police nor fire protection.

      The Gracchi—Tiberius (Gracchus, Tiberius Sempronius) and later Gaius—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 (Gracchus, Gaius Sempronius) 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 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 Sulla and Pompey. 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
      Julius Caesar (Caesar, Julius), 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 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. 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. Agrippa (Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius), a friend and supporter of Augustus, used his own immense wealth to further enhance the city's beauty and improve its water supply.

      Augustus' 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 of urban prefect, which Augustus revived c. 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, placing a number of public slaves under the command of aediles (aedile), 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 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 of 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.

       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.

      Other emperors in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries added to the glory of the imperial house and the amenities of Roman life—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.

      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 1,000,000 persons but was probably less. It 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 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 through 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.

      By the time Diocletian reformed the imperial government and ushered 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 merely confirmed Rome's loss of political primacy. Constantine, 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 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, and even the pope would have allowed them to be performed in secret. In 410 Alaric seized Rome and allowed his troops to pillage the city for three days; much booty was taken, and many Romans fled.

      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 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. By the mid-5th century, the population had dropped to fewer than 250,000.

The city of the Popes
Decay of imperial authority
      Within a decade of Theodoric's death in 526, Justinian began his attempt to restore Roman imperial rule in the West. His ultimate success was disastrous for 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 (Donation of Pippin)” of Pippin—who owed his new title as king of the Franks in part to the Pope—and that of his son Charlemagne were the theoretical foundations of the temporal power of the papacy. In 774 Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom, 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 Carolingian authority in Italy led to the renewal of family and factional struggles. After the Muslims plundered St. Peter's and the outlying areas of Rome in 846, Pope Leo IV (Leo IV, Saint) 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.

      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. Much rebuilding was necessary after the Norman sack of 1084. Generally, the reformed papacy, begun under Leo IX (1049–54), was supported and financed by new Roman families such as the Frangipane and the Pierleone, whose wealth came from commerce and banking rather than landholdings. By the late 11th century 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
      The Roman revolution in 1143 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 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. Gregory IX and the Roman commune clashed over Rome's expansionist policies and its claims to the right to tax the clergy and church property. Bitter struggles with the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II as well as the varied interests of Rome's leading families—the Orsini, the Savelli, the Annibaldi, and, above all, the Colonna—complicated the situation. 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 1290s, Rome was torn by the bitter rivalries among the Colonna, the Orsini, and the Annibaldi families, a discord encouraged by Pope Boniface VIII. In 1309 Clement V moved the papal residence to Avignon in France; Rome was left to its factional strife and its economic impoverishment.

      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 fortress towers on the palaces of its leading families symbolized Rome's ecclesiastical character; but, with a population of 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 and in the low-lying areas of the Campus Martius and Trastevere; large sections of the city within the old Aurelian walls were pastures, gardens, vineyards, and wastelands.

      The popes in Avignon were able to maintain a tenuous rule over the city, especially Benedict XII (1334–42). The brief popular revolution (1347) of Cola di Rienzo—who, styling himself tribune of Rome, 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. Around 1400, Rome was described as a city filled with huts, thieves, and vermin, and in the neighbourhood of St. Peter's wolves could be seen at night.

The city of 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 papal states increasingly came under the firm control of papal officials.

      From the pontificates of Nicholas V (1447–55) and, especially, Sixtus IV (1471–84), 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. The popes attracted scholars and artists from across Italy, and, by the end of the 15th century, Rome was the principal centre of Renaissance culture. The high point was reached under Leo X (1513–21), with his plans for a new St. Peter's and his patronage of such artists as Michelangelo and Raphael. 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. Although Rome once again had become a great consumer of imported luxuries, 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 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. New streets and squares were laid out, obelisks raised, the Lateran and Vatican palaces rebuilt, and aqueducts repaired. Fortunately, his project to convert the Colosseum into a wool factory to provide employment for Rome's prostitutes came to nothing.

      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 foreigners, however, for the wealth and power of the Roman nobility was based on land and ecclesiastical officeholding.

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 manoeuvring 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 no road signs nor public lighting and little sanitation. To foreign 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 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 repression and reaction, 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 (1846–78) granted Rome a constitution in 1848; but, after the Revolution of 1848–49, 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 Kingdom of Italy, proclaimed in 1861, but Rome was excluded. Attempts by Garibaldi to capture the city in 1862 and 1867 were unsuccessful, but the withdrawal of the French garrison supporting Pius allowed Italian troops to enter Rome on September 20, 1870. After a plebiscite in October, Rome became the capital of a united Italy. Pius refused to accept the government's offer of settlement, choosing to style himself a prisoner in the Vatican. The situation was not resolved until 1929, when the Lateran Treaty between Pius XI and Mussolini recognized the pope's sovereignty within Vatican City.

      Rome's population grew 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 also expanded for the first time well beyond the old walls of the ancient city. During the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini (Mussolini, Benito) in the 1920s and 1930s, Rome was transformed into a modern capital, with grandiose new avenues and pompous buildings. Mussolini's encouragement of archaeological excavation contributed to the revelation and preservation of many of the monuments of classical Rome. Throughout the 20th century, Rome has been a great administrative and tourist centre, though it still lacks the large-scale commerce or industry characteristic of most modern urban development.

Richard R. Ring

Additional Reading

General works
Georgina Masson, The Companion Guide to Rome, 6th ed. (1980); and Alec Randall, Discovering Rome (1960), two good modern introductions and guides; Murray Jaffe (ed.), The Romans' Guide to Rome (1965), practical information supplied by 34 residents of Rome; Alta Macadam, Rome and Environs, 3rd ed. (1985), a good illustrated guide; S.B. Platner and Thomas Ashby, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), detailed information on every monument of the ancient city; Richard R. and Barbara G. Mertz, Two Thousand Years in Rome (1968), a popular outline, including suggestions for walks and other tourist information.

History
Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, 13 vol. (1894–1902, reissued 1976; originally published in German, 1859–72), a massive, indispensable reference work; Raymond Bloch, The Origins of Rome (1960; originally published in French, 1946), a well-written survey, archaeologically oriented, with illustrations; Max Cary, A History of Rome Down to the Reign of Constantine, 2nd ed. (1954), one of the best of the textbook surveys; Pio Paschini, Roma nel Rinascimento (1940); Diego Angeli, Storia romana di trent'anni 1770–1800 (1931); Glorney Bolton, Roman Century: 1870–1970 (1970), on life in Rome and the struggle between the “black” and the “white” aristocracy for ascendancy; H. and A. Geller, Jewish Rome (1970), a pictorial history of the Jews in Rome from 161 BC, text with plates and bibliography; Barry Baldwin, The Roman Emperors (1980), a study based on a variety of primary sources; Ramsey MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (1981), a study in social history; Chester G. Starr, The Roman Empire: 27 B.C.–A.D. 476 (1982), an informative analysis of administration and local government; Tim Cornell and John Matthews, Atlas of the Roman World (1982), a comprehensive overview of geographical and cultural setting; John F. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome (1983), an exploration of Roman intellectual life.

Antiquities
Rodolfo Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries (1888, reprinted 1975), a fascinating account by one of the best of the old-school archaeologists; Ernest Nash, A Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Rome, 2nd rev. ed., 2 vol. (1968), for the archaeologist, art historian, and interested nonspecialist; Donald Reynolds Dudley (ed. and trans.), Urbs Roma (1967), classical texts on the city and its monuments, relating the literature of the period to its art and architecture—perhaps the best single book on the ancient city for the general reader. Later sources include C. Wade Meade, Ruins of Rome: A Guide to the Classical Antiquities (1980); James Phillips, Early Christian Architecture in the City of Rome, 2 vol. (1982); D.P.S. Peacock, Pottery in the Roman World: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach (1982).

Art
Ronald Bottrall, Art Centers of the World: Rome (1968), a detailed guide to the principal museums, galleries, and free-standing monuments; Émile Mâle, The Early Churches of Rome (1960; originally published in French, 1942), churches to the 13th century related to the history of their times; Mariano Armellini, Le chiese di Roma dal secolo IV al XIX, rev. ed. by Carlo Cecchelli, 2 vol. (1942); Robert Payne, The Horizon Book of Ancient Rome (1966). See also Anthony Blunt, Guide to Baroque Rome (1982); Judith Rice Millon, St. Paul's Within the Walls, Rome: A Building History and Guide, 1870–1980 (1982); Roloff Beny and Peter Gunn, The Churches of Rome (1981); and Richard Krautheimer, Rome, Profile of a City: 312–1308 (1980).

Daily life in ancient Rome
Ugo Enrico Paoli, Rome: Its People, Life and Customs (1963, reprinted 1975; originally published in Italian, 1940); Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1940, reissued 1973; originally published in French, 1939); and J.P.V.D. Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (1969, reissued 1974); three outstanding works on the subject. Later works include H.H. Scullard, Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic (1981); Sabine MacCormack, Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity (1981); Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (1982); Barbara K. Gold (ed.), Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome (1982); and John H. D'Arms, Commerce and Social Standing in Ancient Rome (1981).

Special topics
Bernard Wall, A City and a World (1962), Rome seen in its religious setting and significance; S.G.A. Luff, The Christian's Guide to Rome (1967); Gabriel Faure, Gardens of Rome (1960; originally published in French, 1959); H.V. Morton, The Waters of Rome (1966; reissued as The Fountains of Rome, 1970), an account of the aqueducts of Rome and their principal fountains. See also Oliver Knox, From Rome to San Marino: A Walk in the Steps of Garibaldi (1982); and Raleigh Trevelyan, Rome '44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1982).

Personal views
William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma, 8th ed., 2 vol. (1887); Stendhal, A Roman Journal (1957; originally published in French, 1829); Augustus Hare, Walks in Rome (1871; 22nd ed., 1925); Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa (1952, reissued 1982), a personal account of living in Rome and its suburbs and countryside; H.V. Morton, Traveller in Rome (1957); Elizabeth Bowen, A Time in Rome (1960); Aubrey Menen, Rome Revealed (1960); Maurice Rowdon, A Roman Street (1964); Paul Hofmann, Rome: The Sweet, Tempestuous Life (1982).

Rome in photographs
Martin Hürlimann, Rome (1954); William Klein, Rome: The City and Its People (1960); R.S. Magowan, Rome (1960).Richard R. Ring Blake Ehrlich Ed.

      city, Oneida county, east-central New York, U.S. It is situated 15 miles (24 km) northwest of Utica.

      The site, at the ancient Native American portage between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek, was fortified by the British as early as 1725. Fort Stanwix (1758), which replaced two previous forts there, was where two important treaties (Fort Stanwix, Treaties of) (1768, 1784) were negotiated between Native Americans and colonialists; the fort has been reconstructed as a national monument. The Battle of Oriskany (August 6, 1777) which stopped the British advance during the American Revolution, took place 6 miles (10 km) east of present-day Rome. Mapped in 1786 by Dominick Lynch and named Lynchville, the community was influenced in its early growth by the completion (1797) of a canal that connected the Mohawk River with Wood Creek. The construction of the Erie Canal (1817–25) was begun at Lynchville, and the settlement served as an embarkation point for pioneers moving west. The restored Erie Canal Village, 2.5 miles (4 km) west, commemorates these events. Lynchville was incorporated as a village in 1819 and was renamed Rome for the “heroic defense of the Republic made there”—i.e., at Oriskany. Rome was incorporated as a city in 1870.

      The community achieved industrial recognition as the “Copper City” through its manufacture of brass, wire, cable, and other products. Machinery industries (road graders, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, radiators) developed later in Rome. Today's industries produce medical and surgical equipment, copper roofing materials, and electrical wire. Truck and fruit farms, state developmental centres for the retarded and deaf, and a nearby industrial park, located at the former Griffiss Air Force Base, are additional economic factors. Mohawk Valley Community College, part of the State University of New York (New York, State University of (SUNY)) system, has a campus in Rome. The rock-music festival Woodstock '99 took place near the city in 1999, evoking the famous event held 30 years earlier downstate near the town of Woodstock. Inc. city, 1870. Pop. (1990) city, 44,350; Utica-Rome MSA, 316,633; (2000) city, 34,950; Utica-Rome MSA, 299,896.

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