It’s not quite caveat emptor but the idea is similar. Tourism is primarily—the primary?—source of…
The Eternal City 7: Trams and Buses and Subways, and Feet
One often feels in Rome like the city fella who, asking the Down-Easter (voiced by the late great Marshall Dodge) for directions to some locale, gets a convoluted reply ending with, “But you cahn’t get theah from heah.” The historic center of Rome center has, in fact,...
The Eternal City 6: Colline e Scale
The Seven Hills of Rome (well, eight if you include the Pincian and ten if you cross the Tiber for the Vatican Hill and the Gianicolo) feature in legend and history. Sensible ancient Romans, Princes of the Church and the one-percenters of the 16th and 17th centuries...
The Eternal City 5: Architecture of Visions
In 2005, Jake Morrissey published a book called The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini, and the Rivalry that Transformed Rome. Haven’t read it? Do. It’s brief, fascinating, dense with information about the birth of the Baroque in Rome, and it makes you care...
The Eternal City 4: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men”
The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96) was commiserating with a tiny rodent whose world has been discombobulated by human activity in his poem To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough (1785) and left posterity with this wonderful verse that has...