ROME (in town)

Rome, the honey-coloured city of fountains and cupolas, the city of DOLCE VITA built on seven hills with its hundreds of piazzas, palaces and churches, is one of the most beautiful and exciting capitals in the western world. In the ancient city, built within the “Servian Ramparts”, old, narrow winding streets suddenly open - as per magic - upon some unexpected small “piazza” with an old church, a palace, a cloister or a group of cafés. Small as it nowadays appears to us, the Old City contains more than 200 palaces, 30 churches, the Residence of the President of the Republic, the House of Parliament, offices of the City and National Government, and innumerable, great historical monuments and architectural masterpieces. The old walled city of Rome embraces 4% of the modern Municipality, and, 6 miles out from the centre, a belt highway describes a huge circle around the capital, and ties together the ancient roads that led from everywhere to Rome. The Roman architects succeeded in harmonising the new architecture, the simply old and the antique, with a talent and a sense of aesthetics which Italians have demonstrated since the most ancient times.

To try to list all the places and monuments the visitor should see in Rome is a very hard task, and it would take a book to contain them all. To try to see them all, would definitely take much more time than any visitor normally has at his disposal. However, among some of the most important places not to be missed are : The “Fori Imperiali”; the Coliseum; the Pantheon; Capitol Hill (Campidolio) with its museums and libraries; the Vatican city and Museums; the Sistine Chapel; the innumerable fountains (one of the most famous being the Trevi Fountain) that simply materialise before the visitor as he walks down the streets of the old roman quarters, today very fashionable among artists and VIPs; the many, many piazzas, some of which are masterpieces of artists of the calibre of Borromini, Bernini and Michelangelo; “Porta del Popolo”, the gateway in the City Walls and rebuilt by Bernini for the grand entrance of queen Christine, offers its beauty to the eye of travellers. Furthermore, Rome has four of the most important Italian basilicas: St. Peter at the Vatican, St. Paul outside the Walls, St. John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore.

The testimonies of Rome’s glorious past are endless, and, along the centuries, the city accumulated a priceless patrimony of history and culture: Masterpieces of paintings, sculptures, palaces, churches and fountains, of immense artistic and architectural value. They represent one of the major attractions of the capital and emanate the fascination of the unexpectedly great.