Rome · Europe

Overview

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Rome is a heady blend of artistic and architectural masterpieces, classical ruins, and extravagant baroque churches and piazzas. The city's 2,700 years of history are on display everywhere you look. The ancient rubs shoulders with the medieval, the modern runs into the Renaissance, and the result is like nothing so much as an open-air museum. Julius Caesar and Nero, the Vandals and the Borgias, Raphael and Caravaggio, Napoléon and Mussolini -- they and countless other political, cultural, and spiritual luminaries have left their mark on the city.

More than Florence, more than Venice, Rome is Italy's treasure trove, packed with masterpieces from more than two millennia of artistic achievement. This is where a metropolis once bustled around the carved marble monuments of the Roman Forum, where centuries later Michelangelo Buonarotti painted Christian history in the Sistine Chapel, where Gian Lorenzo Bernini's nymphs and naiads dance in their fountains, and where an empire of gold was worked into the crowns of centuries of rulers.

Today Rome's formidable legacy is upheld by its people, their history knit into the fabric of their everyday lives. Students walk dogs in the park that was once the mausoleum of the family of the emperor Augustus; Raphaelesque madonnas line up for buses on busy corners; priests in flowing robes walk through medieval piazzas talking on cell phones. Modern Rome has one foot in the past, one in the present -- a delightful stance that allows you to have an espresso in a square designed by Bernini, then take the metro back to your hotel room in a renovated Renaissance palace. "When you first come here you assume that you must burrow about in ruinsand prowl in museums to get back to the days of Numa Pompilius or Mark Antony," Maud Howe observes in her book Roma Beata. "It is not necessary; you only have to live, and the common happenings of daily life -- yes, even the trolley car and your bicycle -- carry you back in turn to the Dark Ages, to the early Christians, even to prehistoric Rome."