Territory: The region, with undulated hills, stretches from the western buttresses of the Apennines to the Tyrrhenian Sea. The landscape is varied and presents flatlands, on the coastline and in the hinterland, ridges and calcareous highlands. Latium has four very ancient volcanic distincts, where the craters of extinct volcanoes form the lakes of Bolsena, Vico, Bracciano, Albano and Nemi.
Cities: Rome, capital of Italy, as well of the region. Other important cities are Frosinone, Latina, Viterbo and Rieti.
Art: Latium is the cradle of Roman civilization and it is incredibly rich in outstanding relics of the different periods. The traces of the Etruscan civilization are remarkable and can be found at Veio, Vulci, Tarquinia and Cerveteri. The region has always been the center of an intensive artistic life, which, from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century, has had as cardinal point the presence of the Church (the Vatican City, seat of the papacy, is in the heart of Rome).
Museums: In Rome, the National Museum houses the most important archaeologic collections in the world, while the Capitoline Museum holds the oldest classic sculptures. In the Museum of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Greek and Roman sculptures. Etruscan vases, paleochristian sarcophagi can be admired. The Pinacoteca Capitolina houses remarkables pictorial works. In the Museum of Rome there are civic documents, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Tourists should not omit a visit to the Barracco Museum, with Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian and Etruscan relics arid to the National Museum of Castel SantAngelo. The Doria Pamphili Gallery houses a highly valuable private pictorial collection Moreover, there are: the National Gallery of Ancient Art; the Borghese Museum and Gallery; the National Museum of Villa Giulia. The imposing complex of the Vatican Museums contains numberless outstanding masterpieces.
To be visited: In the center of Rome, we can admire the Roman Forum, the imposing arid universally known Colosseum and the Cathedral of St. Peter. Visitors can admire the archaeologic excavations, visit the quaint quarter of Trastevere, go to Tivoli to see Villa Adriana.
Rome
Rome's early history
is caked with legend. Rea Silvia, a vestal virgin
and daughter of a local king, Numitor, had twin sons
the product, she alleged, of a rape by Mars. They
were supposed to be sacrificed to the god but the
ritual wasn't carried out, and the two boys were
abandoned and found by a wolf, who nursed them until
their adoption by a shepherd, who named them
Romulus and Remus. As they grew into manhood,
under the protection of the gods, they became
leaders in the small community, and later laid out
the boundaries of the city on the Palatine Hill.
However, it soon became apparent that there was only
room for one ruler, and, unable to agree on the
signs given to them by the gods, they quarrelled,
Romulus killing Remus and becoming in 753 BC the
city's first monarch, to be followed by six
further kings.
Whatever the truth of this story, there's no doubt that Rome was an obvious spot to build a city: the Palatine and Capitoline hills provided security, and there was, of course, the river Tiber, which could easily be crossed here by way of the Isola Tiberina, making this a key location on the trade routes between Etruria and Campania. Rome as a kingdom lasted until about 507 BC, when the people rose up against the tyrannical King Tarquinius and established a Republic, appointing the first two consuls and instituting a more democratic form of government. The city prospered under the Republic, growing greatly in size and subduing the various tribes of the surrounding areas the Etruscans to the north, the Sabines to the east, the Samnites to the south. By the time it had fought and won the third Punic War against its principal rival, Carthage, in 146 BC, it had become the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
The history of the Republic was, however, also one of internal strife, marked by factional fighting among the patrician ruling classes, as everyone tried to grab a slice of the riches that were pouring into the city from its plundering expeditions abroad and the ordinary people, or plebeians, enjoying little more justice than they had under the Roman monarchs. This all came to a head in 44 BC, when Julius Caesar, having proclaimed himself dictator, was murdered on 15 March, by conspirators concerned at the growing concentration of power into one man's hands. A brief period of turmoil ensued, giving way, in 27 BC, to the founding of the Empire under Augustus a triumph for the new democrats over the old guard. Augustus heaved Rome into the Imperial era: he was determined to turn the city as he claimed from one of stone to one of marble, building arches, theatres and monuments of a magnificence suited to the capital of an expanding empire. Under Augustus, and his successors, the city swelled to a population of a million or more, its people housed in cramped apartment blocks or insulae; crime in the city was rife, and the traffic problem apparently on a par with today's, leading one contemporary writer to complain that the din on the streets made it impossible to get a good night's sleep. But it was a time of peace and prosperity, the Roman upper classes living a life of indolent luxury, in sumptuous residences with proper plumbing and central heating, and the empire's borders being ever more extended, into other parts of Europe and the Middle East, reaching their maximum limits under the Emperor Trajan, who died in 117 AD. This period constitutes the heyday of the Roman Empire, a time which Gibbon called "the happiest times in the history of humanity".
The decline of Rome is hard to date precisely, but it could be said to have started with the Emperor Diocletian, who assumed power in 284 and divided the empire into two parts, east and west, while becoming known for his relentless persecution of Christians. The first Christian emperor, Constantine, shifted the seat of power to Byzantium in 330, and Rome's heady period as capital of the world was over, the wealthier members of the population moving east and a series of invasions by Goths in 410 and Vandals about forty years later only serving to quicken the city's ruin. By the sixth century the city was a devastated and infection-ridden shadow of its former self.
After the fall of the empire, the pope who was based in Rome owing to the fact that St Peter (the Apostle and first pope) was martyred here in 64 AD became the temporal ruler over much of Italy, and it was the papacy, under Pope Gregory I ("the Great") in 590, that rescued Rome from its demise. In an eerie echo of the empire, Gregory sent missions all over Europe to spread the word of the Church and publicize its holy relics, so drawing pilgrims, and their money, back to the city, and in time making the papacy the natural authority in Rome. The pope took the name "Pontifex Maximus" after the title of the high priest of classical times (literally "the keeper of the bridges", which were vital to the city's well-being). The crowning a couple of centuries later of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, with dominions spread Europe-wide but answerable to the pope, intensified the city's revival, and the pope and city became recognized as head of the Christian world.
There were times over the next few hundred years when the power of Rome and the papacy was weakened: Robert Guiscard, the Norman king, sacked the city in 1084; a century later, a dispute between the city and the papacy led to a series of popes relocating to Viterbo; and in 1308 the French-born Pope Clement V transferred his court to Avignon. In the mid-fourteenth century, Cola di Rienzo seized power, setting himself up as the people's saviour from the decadent ways of the city's rulers and forming a new Roman republic. But the increasingly autocratic ways of the new ruler soon lost popularity; Cola di Rienzo was deposed, and in 1376 Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome. As time went on, power gradually became concentrated in a handful of families, who swapped the top jobs, including the papacy itself, between them. Under the burgeoning power of the pope, the city began to take on a new aspect: churches were built, the city's pagan monuments rediscovered and preserved, and artists began to arrive in Rome to work on commissions for the latest pope, who would invariably try to outdo his predecessor's efforts with ever more glorious self-aggrandizing buildings and works of art. This process reached a head during the Renaissance; Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo all worked in the city, on and off, throughout their careers. The reigns of Pope Julius II, and his successor, Leo X, were something of a golden age: the city was once again the centre of cultural and artistic life, and site of the creation of great works of art like Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, Raphael's Stanze in the Vatican Palace and fine buildings like the Villa Farnesina, Palazzo Farnese and Palazzo Spada, not to mention the commissioning of a new St Peter's. However, in 1527 all this was brought abruptly to an end, when the armies of the Habsburg monarch, Charles V, swept into the city, occupying it and wreaking havoc for a year, while Pope Clement VII cowered in the Castel Sant'Angelo.
The ensuing years were ones of yet more restoration, and perhaps because of this it's the seventeenth century that has left the most tangible impression on Rome today, the vigour of the Counter-Reformation throwing up huge sensational monuments like the Gesω church that were designed to confound the scepticism of the new Protestant thinking. This period also saw the completion of St Peter's under Paul V, and the ascendancy of Gian Lorenzo Bernini as the city's principal architect and sculptor under the Barberini pope, Urban VIII a patronage that was extended under the Pamphili pope, Innocent X.
The eighteenth century saw the decline of the papacy as a political force, a phenomenon marked by the occupation of the city in 1798 by Napoleon; Pius VI was unceremoniously sent off to France as a prisoner, and Napoleon declared another Roman republic, with himself at its head, which lasted until 1815, when papal rule was restored. Thirty-four years later a pro-Unification caucus under Mazzini declared the city a republic but was soon chased out, and Rome had to wait until Garibaldi stormed the walls in 1870 to join the unified country symbolically the most important part of the Italian peninsula to do so. "Roma o morte", Garibaldi had cried, and he wasted no time in declaring the city the capital of the new kingdom under Vittorio Emanuele II and confining the by now quite powerless pontiff, Pius IX, to the Vatican until agreement was reached on a way to coexist.
The Piemontese rulers of the new kingdom set about building a city fit to govern from, cutting new streets through Rome's central core (Via Nazionale, Via del Tritone) and constructing grandiose buildings like the Altar of the Nation. Mussolini took over Rome in 1922, and in 1929 signed the Lateran Pact with Pope Pius XI, a compromise which forced the Vatican to accept the new Italian state and in return recognized the Vatican City as sovereign territory, independent of Italy, together with the key basilicas and papal palaces in Rome, which remain technically independent of Italy to this day. Mussolini's motivations weren't dissimilar to the popes, however, when he bulldozed his way through the Roman Forum and began work on the futuristic, self-publicizing planned extension to the city known as EUR.
Since World War II, Italy has become
renowned as a country which changes its government,
if not its politicians, every few months, and for
the rest of Italy Rome has come to symbolize the
inertia of their nation's government at odds with
both the wealthy north and the poor south. Despite
this, the city's growth has been phenomenal in the
post-war years, its population soaring to close on
four million. Though famous in the Sixties as
the home of Fellini's Dolce Vita and Italy's
bright young things, Rome is still, even by Italian
standards, a relatively provincial place, and one
which is in some ways still trying to lug itself
into the twenty-first century. Great efforts were,
however, made to prepare the city for the arrival of
the Millennium, and the city is looking better than
ever. In many ways there has never been a better
time to visit Rome.
Rome Picture gallery
Rome Museums
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