Rome

• 1. Introduction

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  Rome is the only city on earth that contains another sovereign nation entirely within its borders. Vatican City, the smallest country in the world, sits inside Rome's boundaries, an independent state with its own government, its own diplomats, and the worldwide headquarters of the Catholic Church. That single fact captures something essential about Rome: it has always been more than one thing at once. A city, an empire, a church, a republic, a fascist showcase, a film set, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. History here does not sit in a museum. It sits under the road you are walking on. Archaeological evidence places human occupation of the Rome area at approximately 14,000 years ago, making the ground itself a kind of deep archive. Yet for most listeners, Rome begins with a myth involving twin brothers, a she-wolf, and a murder. So the question worth sitting with is this: how does a pastoral settlement on a set of hills above a river bend become the city that reshaped language, religion, law, and architecture for the entire Western world?

• 2. A Name Without A Certain Origin

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  Romulus, according to Roman founding legend, gave the city its name after killing his twin brother Remus in an argument over where to build. But linguists and historians have long suspected the story runs the other direction: that Romulus was named after Rome rather than Rome after Romulus. By the 4th century, writers were already proposing alternatives. One theory traces the name to Rumon or Rumen, an archaic name for the Tiber river, connected to the Greek verb meaning to flow or stream. Another links it to an Etruscan word whose root means teat, with possible reference either to the she-wolf of legend or to the shapes of the Palatine and Aventine Hills. A third derives it from the Greek word rhome, meaning strength. None of these has prevailed decisively. In 192 AD, Emperor Commodus briefly renamed the city after himself, calling it Colonia Lucia Annia Commodiana. The name reverted to Rome after his assassination at the end of that same year. Other titles have stuck longer: Urbs Aeterna, the Eternal City, was first given to Rome by the poet Tibullus in the 1st century BC. Caput Mundi, Capital of the World, was another name used during the Republican period and carried forward through centuries. The initialism SPQR, standing for Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and People of Rome, remains the symbol of the city's constituted republican government and is still in use today.

• 3. Seven Hills, One City

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  Rome grew by absorption rather than by plan. Current archaeological and historical consensus holds that the city developed through the gradual aggregation of several villages around the largest one, which stood above the Palatine Hill. This process, known as synoecism, was made possible by agricultural productivity rising above subsistence level, which freed up labor for trade and other activities. Those activities included commerce with Greek colonies in southern Italy, particularly Ischia and Cumae. Evidence for this urban birth places it in the mid-eighth century BC. The seven hills of the ancient city were the Aventine, the Caelian, the Capitoline, the Esquiline, the Palatine, the Quirinal, and the Viminal. By 550 BC, Rome was already the second largest city in Italy, with an estimated population of 35,000, second only to Taras on the Salento Peninsula. When the Republic was founded in 509 BC, the census recorded 130,000 people. The city crossed 300,000 by 150 BC. At the height of the Empire, estimates of Rome's population range from 450,000 to 1.2 million, depending on the historian and the method used to calculate it. One approach used the distribution of pork to poorer Romans in five winter months: Novel 36 of Emperor Valentinian III records 3.629 million pounds of pork distributed at five pounds per person per month, sufficient for 145,000 recipients. Scholars used that figure to project a total population of just under 500,000. The geography that shaped those early settlements still shapes the modern city. The Tiber flows through the center. The territory extends to the Tyrrhenian Sea in the southwest, where the district of Ostia sits. The altitude of the central city ranges from 13 meters above sea level at the base of the Pantheon to 139 meters at the peak of Monte Mario.

• 4. From Kingdom to Empire

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  Seven kings ruled Rome for 244 years after Romulus, according to tradition: Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. The last of them was expelled in 509 BC and replaced by an oligarchic republic with two annually elected consuls. The republic spent the next centuries fighting its way to dominance: first over Latium, then over the rest of the Italian peninsula, then across the Mediterranean through the three Punic Wars against Carthage and the Macedonian Wars against Macedonia. By the 3rd and 4th centuries BC, Rome held Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Hispania, Macedonia, Achaea, and Africa as provinces. The structural tensions that brought down the republic were economic as well as political. The bankruptcy of small farmers and the rise of large slave estates pushed masses of people into the city. Professional armies became more loyal to their generals than to the state. After failed social reforms, civil wars, and a slave revolt under Spartacus, the first Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus emerged. Caesar's conquest of Gaul made him powerful enough to force a civil war. His assassination in 44 BC set off another round of conflict that ended with his grandnephew Octavian defeating Mark Antony. In 27 BC, Octavian was named Augustus and princeps, founding a system that split authority between the emperor and the senate. The Flavian dynasty built the Colosseum. The Antonine age, stretching the empire from the Atlantic to the Euphrates and from Britain to Egypt, is considered the zenith. Under Emperor Trajan in the second century, the empire reached its greatest geographic expansion. Then came the Crisis of the Third Century: from AD 235 onward, for fifty years, rival generals fought for power while the Plague of Cyprian swept the Mediterranean and inflation gutted the currency. Diocletian ended the civil wars in 285 and divided the empire administratively, eventually ruling from Nicomedia while his co-emperor Maximian ruled from Mediolanum. Constantine the Great reunified the empire in 324, issued the so-called Edict of Milan in 313 granting freedom of worship to all including Christians, and in 330 transformed Byzantium into Constantinople as his new capital. Christianity became the official religion of the empire in 380 via the Edict of Thessalonica, issued in the names of Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius I. After Theodosius died in 395, his sons divided the empire between them for the last time.

• 5. The Long Decline and the Church

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  The Western Roman Empire's fall is often marked at the 4th of September 476, when the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, was deposed. Rome's population had been shrinking long before that date. From more than a million people around AD 210, the count fell to 500,000 by AD 273, then down to 450,000-500,000 by AD 450. The sack of 410 by the Visigoths under Alaric I did relatively little physical damage, but the sack by Genseric's Vandals in 455 found a city whose population had already fallen to between 450,000 and 500,000. Grain shipments from North Africa were lost after 440. After the Gothic Wars of 535-554, the population may have dropped as low as 30,000. During the pontificate of Gregory I, from 590 to 604, it may have recovered to around 90,000, supplemented by refugees. The Catholic Church stepped into the political void. The Bishop of Rome, the Pope, held authority that derived from the city's association with the martyrdom of both the apostles Peter and Paul. In 729, the Lombard king Liutprand donated the town of Sutri to the Church, beginning its temporal power. In 756, Pepin the Short gave the Pope jurisdiction over the Duchy of Rome and the Exarchate of Ravenna, creating the Papal States. On Christmas night of 800, Charlemagne was crowned Emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III, marking the start of the Carolingian Empire. Muslim Arabs unsuccessfully attacked the city walls in 846 but managed to loot St. Peter's and St. Paul's basilicas, both of which stood outside the walls. Feudal chaos followed the Carolingian collapse: noble families including the Annibaldi, Caetani, Colonna, Orsini, and Conti fought each other from fortresses built on top of ancient Roman ruins. Pope Boniface VIII, born Caetani, called the first Jubilee of Christianity in 1300, drawing millions of pilgrims. But his power was crushed by the French king Philip the Fair, who took him prisoner at Anagni. The papacy relocated briefly to Avignon from 1309 to 1377 before Gregory XI restored it to Rome. The resulting Western Schism lasted until 1418, when the Council of Constance elected a Roman pope, Martin V, and a century of internal peace began.

• 6. Renaissance, Sack, and Baroque

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  Nicholas V, who became pope in 1447, founded the Vatican Library and set the template for what followed: almost every pope for the next four centuries pursued a coherent programme to make Rome the artistic and cultural capital of the world. The roster of artists who worked in Rome during the Renaissance reads like a catalogue of the period's greatest names. Michelangelo began the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and carved the Moses for the tomb of Julius II. Raphael created frescoes in the Villa Farnesina and the Raphael's Rooms; he also promoted, for the first time, the preservation of ancient ruins. Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Bramante, and Luca Signorelli all contributed. The banker Agostino Chigi, a friend of Raphael and patron of the arts, brought Tuscan money into the city's economy. The old St. Peter's Basilica, built by Constantine and dilapidated by the Renaissance, was demolished and replaced with the new one. Ponte Sisto, the first bridge built across the Tiber since antiquity, was constructed on Roman foundations. Rome's highest point of Renaissance splendour came under Pope Julius II, who reigned from 1503 to 1513, and his successors Leo X and Clement VII, both Medici. That period ended abruptly in 1527 when the Landsknechts of Emperor Charles V sacked the city in the War of the League of Cognac, the first plunder in more than five hundred years. Beginning with the Council of Trent in 1545, the Church launched the Counter-Reformation. New aristocratic families, the Barberini, Pamphili, Chigi, Rospigliosi, Altieri, and Odescalchi, each protected by their respective popes, built baroque buildings across the city. Bernini, Caravaggio, Carracci, Borromini, Diego Velazquez, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Pietro Paolo Rubens all worked here during that period. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV was forced by secular powers to suppress the Jesuit order, a sign that the Church's authority was not absolute even within its own capital.

• 7. Capital of a Modern Nation

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  Napoleon annexed Rome twice: first as the Departement du Tibre from 1809 to 1810, then as the Departement Rome from 1810 to 1814. After his fall, the Congress of Vienna in 1814 restored the Papal States. In 1849, Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi fought for a short-lived second Roman Republic. When the Kingdom of Italy unified in 1861 with its temporary capital in Florence, Rome was declared the capital even though it remained under papal control. Italian troops entered the city through a breach near Porta Pia in 1870 after French troops protecting the papacy were withdrawn due to the Franco-Prussian War. In 1871, the capital moved from Florence to Rome. The city's population at that point was 212,000. By 1920 it had reached 660,000. Benito Mussolini's march on the city in late 1922 inaugurated Italian Fascism. He dismantled democracy by 1926, declared a new Italian Empire, and allied with Nazi Germany in 1938. Mussolini demolished large sections of the historic city centre to build avenues and squares meant to celebrate the fascist regime. By the early 1930s, the population surpassed one million. During World War II, the presence of art treasures and the Vatican spared Rome from the destruction that leveled other European cities. But on the 19th of July 1943, the San Lorenzo district suffered Allied bombing raids that killed about 3,000 people and injured 11,000, of whom another 1,500 later died. Mussolini was arrested on the 25th of July 1943. German forces occupied the city on the 8th of September 1943. Rome was liberated on the 4th of June 1944. Post-war reconstruction fed a period Italians called the economic miracle. Films including Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, Roman Holiday, and La Dolce Vita were shot at Cinecittà Studios. The population peaked at more than 2.8 million in the mid-1980s before a gradual suburban migration began. Rome hosted the 1957 signing of the Treaty of Rome, which established the European Economic Community, and in July 2004 hosted the signing of the proposed European Constitution. The city's 2025 airport, Leonardo Da Vinci Intercontinental Airport at Fiumicino, handled over 50 million passengers, making it the busiest in Italy.

• 8. Living City, Layered Ground

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  Rome today holds about 2.7 million residents within the city proper, while the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital counts approximately 4.2 million. According to 2019 figures, it was the 14th most visited city in the world, drawing 8.6 million tourists, and the most visited in Italy. The Colosseum draws around 4 million visitors a year; the Vatican Museums around 4.2 million. Beneath the visitors, the economy runs on services, high technology, banking, aerospace, and tourism, with a noted absence of heavy industry. Headquarters of Enel, Eni, and Telecom Italia are in the city, as is the luxury fashion house Fendi, located in the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in the EUR business district. Rome hosts three specialized United Nations agencies: the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Food Programme, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. Around 900 churches stand within the city boundaries. Rome's own cathedral is not St. Peter's Basilica but the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in the south-east of the city centre. The Esquilino neighbourhood near Termini station has become the most diverse district: of roughly 1,300 commercial premises operating there, about 800 are Chinese-owned, around 300 run by immigrants from other countries, and 200 by Italians. Approximately 9.5% of Rome's population, according to 2011 figures, consists of non-Italian residents. The Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill has served as a town hall since AD 1144, making it the oldest town hall in the world. And at the base of the Pantheon, the ground sits at 13 meters above sea level, the lowest point of a city that has been continuously occupied and continuously reinventing itself for over three millennia.