Rome: The Eternal City

It is an ordinary morning in Rome. Workers are digging for the new metro line, beneath a street full of traffic. And suddenly, the machine stops. About ten meters below the asphalt, something has appeared: rooms with frescoes, floors with mosaics — a whole Roman barracks, buried there for nineteen hundred years. The works freeze. The archaeologists climb down.

In Rome, this is not news — it is routine. Every time the city tries to expand its metro, it trips over itself. Why? Because Rome is not one city. It is many cities, built one on top of the other, like layers. And in the next few minutes, we are going to peel them back, one by one — so that when you walk there, every stone around you speaks to you.

First layer: a hill above the river Tiber, and a cave. Inside, a she-wolf is nursing two twin babies — Romulus and Remus, sons of the god of war. They had been thrown into the river to drown, but they survived: the wolf raised them, and a shepherd. Once grown, they decided to build a city — they argued about where, and Romulus killed his brother. And so, as the myth goes, Rome was born: through fratricide. The traditional date? April twenty-first, seven hundred fifty-three BC.

A myth, of course. But the Romans believed it literally — they celebrated the city's birthday every year, and the city still does: every April twenty-first, people dressed as legionaries march past the Colosseum. And the she-wolf? Her statue, the famous Capitoline Wolf that nurses the twins, is still the symbol of the city today. You will see it everywhere.

Rome was built on seven hills: the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Aventine, the Caelian, the Esquiline, the Viminal, the Quirinal. The most important is the first one. There, tradition says, Romulus built the first hut; centuries later, the emperors' palaces rose on the very same hill — so distinctive that the word "palace" in every language comes from its name: Palatium. Today you walk among their ruins, at the exact spot of the myth.

Second layer: the kings — seven, tradition says, and the last ones were not even Romans: they were Etruscans, a mysterious people from the north, who taught the Romans the arch and built them their first sewer system, the Cloaca Maxima — parts of it still work today. The last king, Tarquinius the Proud, was so tyrannical that in five hundred nine BC the Romans drove him out and swore something sacred: never again a king. Hold onto that oath. It will kill a man, five hundred years later.

And so the Republic is born — along with its symbol: SPQR, "the Senate and the People of Rome". Four letters you will still see stamped on the city's manhole covers and fountains — the same logo for two and a half thousand years. The institutions were built so that no one would ever again become all-powerful: two consuls instead of a king, elected for a single year, each able to cancel the other; and the Senate, the council of elders, as the memory and the brake of the state. A system of checks and balances — at least, that was the design.

That town on the hills would, within a few centuries, rule the entire Mediterranean. But first it had to survive its greatest nightmare. Carthage, the naval superpower of the age, collided with Rome in three wars — from two hundred sixty-four to one hundred forty-six BC. In the second, her general, Hannibal, did the impossible: he crossed the Alps with an army and elephants, and came down into Italy. At the Battle of Cannae he annihilated an entire Roman army — perhaps fifty thousand dead in a single day. For fifteen years he roamed Italy unopposed; Roman mothers scared their children by saying: "Hannibal is at the gates." And yet Rome refused to surrender — it lost armies, and built new ones. In the end it won; Carthage was razed to the ground, and Rome became mistress of the Mediterranean.

But victory had its price: wealth accumulated in a few hands, small farmers vanished, and armies grew more loyal to their generals than to the state. The Republic was splitting from within. And then Julius Caesar appears — conqueror of Gaul, adored by his soldiers. In forty-nine BC, he crosses the river Rubicon with his army, breaking the law. He knows there is no going back: "the die is cast" — a phrase that, according to Plutarch, he actually spoke in Greek, borrowed from the playwright Menander. Civil war follows, victory, and Caesar becomes dictator — for life.

And here the old wound returns: many whisper that he wants to become king — the word Romans hated above all others. March, forty-four BC. A soothsayer has warned him: beware the Ides of March — the fifteenth of the month. That morning, his wife Calpurnia wakes from nightmares and begs him not to leave. He hesitates — but a conspirator mocks him: will you change the plans of Rome over a dream? He goes. On the way, he meets the soothsayer and says, smiling: "the Ides have come." And he answers: "yes — but they have not passed."

A few minutes later, inside the complex of Pompey's Theatre, the senators surround him with drawn daggers. Twenty-three stab wounds. Tradition says that when he saw Brutus among them — the man he loved like a son — he stopped resisting. "Even you, my child?" — words that Suetonius, too, records as spoken in Greek. He collapsed at the foot of Pompey's statue: the man he had once defeated.

They killed him to save the Republic. And what they got was an Empire: within a few years, fresh civil war brought Caesar's adopted son to the top. And the site of the murder? It is not in the Roman Forum, as most people assume — it is in the square called Largo di Torre Argentina, where among the ruins, right above the very spot of the killing, a colony of cats now lives. The place where the Republic died is, today, a cat sanctuary.

Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, was just nineteen years old when he inherited the name and the ambition. Gradually he outplayed or crushed every rival, and in twenty-seven BC the Senate granted him the title "Augustus". The first emperor. And here is the irony: the trauma of the king was solved simply by not calling him king. The institutions remained, but power now belonged to one man.

With Augustus begins the Pax Romana: roughly two hundred years of comparative peace, something the Mediterranean had never seen. Rome reaches one million inhabitants — a size no European city would reach again until the London of the industrial age. Augustus boasted: "I found a city of brick, and I leave one of marble."

Those marbles you will see with your own eyes. First, the Roman Forum — the Forum Romanum. This valley between the hills was the heart of the world: temples, courts, elections, triumphs, funerals. Walking today among its columns, you follow the Via Sacra — the Sacred Way, the main street of the city, where the emperors paraded.

Beside it, the Colosseum. Construction began around seventy AD, under the emperor Vespasian, and it was inaugurated in eighty AD by his son Titus. Fifty thousand seats. Here gladiators fought to the death and wild beasts were hunted on the sand — and the crowd entered for free. Why? Because the emperors knew the rule set down by the poet Juvenal: the people want only two things — "bread and circuses". The games were not just entertainment. They were politics.

And a little further on, perhaps the most astonishing of all: the Pantheon. The temple "of all gods", rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian around one hundred twenty-six AD. Its dome, forty-three meters in diameter, remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. At its crown opens a round eye, nine meters wide: the only source of light. And when it rains? It rains inside the temple — and the floor, secretly sloped, drains the water. It survived intact because it became a church. And inside it, Raphael is buried. Yes, the painter.

The gallery of emperors has everything: builders, sages — and legends of madness, like Caligula, who, they said, wanted to make his horse a consul. And Nero: in sixty-four AD, a huge fire consumed a large part of the city. For the disaster he blamed a new, unknown sect: the Christians. Remember them.

For two hundred and fifty years, Christians are hunted and die in the arenas. And then the wheel turns: in three hundred thirteen AD, the emperor Constantine legalizes their religion with an edict. Within a century, the sect of the persecuted becomes the official religion of the empire. Rome gains its second identity: capital of the Church.

And then, the darkness. Four hundred seventy-six AD — the conventional date of the fall: a Germanic general deposes the last emperor of the West. And his name, by a strange symmetry of history? Romulus. The city that began with a Romulus, fell with a Romulus.

What followed is hard to imagine. The city of one million shrank to a few tens of thousands of inhabitants. The aqueducts were cut, the baths fell empty, and the Roman Forum — the heart of the world — became a meadow. They called it Campo Vaccino: "cow pasture". Cows grazed where the consuls had made their speeches. How does the center of the world become a field?

And yet Rome did not die — because something kept it alive: the Church. Above the tomb that tradition calls Saint Peter's — the fisherman who was martyred in Nero's games — rose the Vatican basilica. And the bishop of Rome, the Pope, gradually became more than a spiritual leader: a monarch, with lands of his own — the Papal States. For more than a thousand years, Rome is ruled by priests.

And then came the great comeback. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, the popes make a decision: Rome will once again become the most splendid city in the world — a stage of faith and power. And they summon here the greatest artists on earth.

In fifteen hundred eight, Pope Julius the Second orders a young Florentine to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The young man protests: "I am a sculptor, not a painter." He even suspects that rivals set the trap, to watch him fail. His name is Michelangelo. Four years on scaffolding, standing, head tilted back, paint dripping onto his face — in a poem he wrote then, he describes his life as a martyrdom. The result? The Creation of Adam: God and man, fingers almost touching. Perhaps the most famous image ever painted by a human hand.

In his old age, the same man takes on the dome of the new basilica of Saint Peter — without pay, "for the salvation of his soul", as he said. He died at eighty-eight, before he could see it finished. Today, that dome remains the tallest in the world — and inside the basilica rests his first great work: the Pietà, which he carved at just twenty-four.

The seventeenth century belongs to another: Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who turned Rome into a theater. Two colossal colonnades embrace Saint Peter's Square — "the motherly arms of the Church", as he himself described them. The city's fountains are his too: the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, the Triton. The Baroque does not speak to you softly: it grabs you by the collar. And this is why Rome is full of masterpieces on every corner — for two centuries, the finest artists in the world competed here for a papal commission. Every church hides a Caravaggio. Every palazzo, a Raphael.

We reach eighteen seventy. Italy has united into one state — but it is missing its capital. On September the twentieth, Italian troops breach the walls at Porta Pia and enter Rome. A few months later, the city becomes the capital of Italy. And the Pope? Furious, he locks himself in the Vatican and calls himself a "prisoner". For almost sixty years, no pope sets foot outside its walls.

The solution came in nineteen twenty-nine, with the Lateran Treaty: the Vatican City is born — forty-four hectares, the smallest independent state on the planet, inside the capital of another state. You will walk from one country to another without even noticing: Saint Peter's Square is, quite literally, foreign soil.

The man who signed that treaty was Benito Mussolini — in power since nineteen twenty-two. He dreamed of a "third Rome", after that of the emperors and that of the popes. For his parades, he cut the city in two with wide boulevards — the Via dei Fori Imperiali passes right over the imperial forums, burying part of them under the asphalt. And to the south he built the EUR district, with its famous "Square Colosseum". They still stand there today.

The war left its marks: bombings, German occupation, liberation in June of nineteen forty-four. Two years later, a referendum abolishes the monarchy — Italy becomes a republic. And then begins the most glamorous season of the city: the Dolce Vita.

Via Veneto, paparazzi — the very word was born here, from a Fellini film — Anita Ekberg diving into the Trevi Fountain. The Cinecittà studios become "Hollywood on the Tiber". And in nineteen sixty, the Rome Olympics show the world a face reborn.

Then came the dark years — the Anni di Piombo, the "Years of Lead": terrorism of left and right. In nineteen seventy-eight, the Red Brigades kidnap former prime minister Aldo Moro in broad daylight. Fifty-four days later, his body was found in the trunk of a car, in the heart of the city. Rome has seen everything — even this.

And today? Close to three million inhabitants, the capital of Italy — and at the same time the seat of a second state. Two heads of state live in this city: the president of Italy resides in the Quirinal Palace, on one of the seven hills, in a building that was once a papal palace. The city lives off tourism, administration, cinema — but above all it lives off something unique: its past, which never went away.

For more than two thousand years, they have called it the Eternal City. And there is a tradition that explains why: at the Trevi Fountain, turn your back to the water and toss a coin over your shoulder. The legend says that this guarantees you will return to Rome. Every year, more than a million euros in coins are collected — and they go to charity. But perhaps the legend says something deeper: the city that has been a kingdom, a republic, an empire, a church, and a capital knows how to make you come back.

It has been doing it, after all, for twenty-seven centuries.

And somewhere up there, above the Tiber, the she-wolf still nurses the twins. A legend, of course. But in Rome, legends have a strange way of turning into stone.