Exploring the Hidden Gems of Rome Beyond the Tourist Trail
The Eternal City's monuments and museums are busy at the best of times, but there remain myriad treasures to explore that are well off the beaten track.
One of the earliest European printed books was a tourist guide to Rome. Ranging from information on ancient ruins, fallen temples and classical bathhouses to the place where an emperor "saw a vision in the sky", Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Marvels of the City of Rome) was written in Latin in the early 12th century. The popular text was reproduced in dozens of manuscripts and printed in the mid-1470s, a mere two decades after the Gutenberg Bible. As with many a menu in modern-day Rome, English, French, German and Italian versions were available.
Later, the Grand Tour brought throngs to the Eternal City of monuments and museums. Beguiled by its beauty, its mixture of terracotta and mocha colours, the galleries of renaissance sculpture and dark chapels full of old masters, many thought it a heaven on Earth. Dickens had mixed feelings. Recollecting the Piazza di Spagna, where artists' models gathered in public to be hired, he wrote: "They started up before me, in Rome, in the broad day, like so many saddled and bridled nightmares."
James Joyce, another literary genius given nightmares by Rome, lived and worked here as a bank clerk. In a letter to his brother, Stanislaus, he singled out tourism as public enemy number one. The Romans were like "a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother's corpse", Joyce said, and wished the locals would "let the ruins rot".
Harsh judgments, but even lovers of Rome will admit there are times when you need to find a place of peacefulness. Living there, I found the city's riot of glories grew lovelier when stepped out of for a while.
Once the grand and glorious park attached to a palazzo, the Orto Botanico, the botanic gardens, are now owned by Sapienza university. They're an extraordinarily restful oasis of rare plants, exotic flowers and almost extinct species of trees, with walkways spreading up into the slopes above Trastevere. Ruined temples, toppled statues, terraced fountains and the calls of wild parrots create an otherworld that is hard to forget.
Beneath palm trees, the medicinal herb garden seems a place of ancient secrets and stories. At the summit, a back gate leads to the terrace by the church of San Pietro in Montorio, from which there is a panoramic view of the domes and steeples of Rome. A stroll along the nearby leafy avenues leads to plush-gardened embassies, the American Foundation and the convent where Jews and other refugees were hidden during the Nazi occupation of the city. A grain store nearby was the hideout for escaped Allied prisoners of war. Any view of Rome contains more than it seems.
In 1997 an exhibition entitled Le Macchine e gli dei (The Machines and the Gods) was staged at the site of the disused Centrale Montemartini, Rome's first electrical substation. The show led to a remarkable reimagining of this former industrial building from the fascist era into a classical sculpture gallery like no other.
Busts of classical goddesses and stone-eyed Etruscan warriors are placed in boiler rooms among turbines, pumps, pistons and diesel tanks and seem even more beautiful in such a defamiliarising setting, as do the redundant engines and gyroscopes. This hall of machines and gods pays moving homage to both.
What for many years was the Protestant Cemetery is now renamed the Non-Catholic Cemetery. A hideaway of tranquillity, shadows and umbrella-like Roman pines, it's the final resting place of a ghost army of rebels and dreamers, including Shelley, Gregory Corso, Antonio Gramsci and Keats, whose epitaph "Here lies one whose name was writ in water" bows a brow to the indifference of time. In this sanctuary of mausoleums and monuments, statues stare at the sky or sink into stony regret. Street cats, sleek and curious, wander between the tombstones. Over the boundary fence, Rome's last surviving pyramid, the tomb of Cestius, adds to the otherworldly restfulness of a place that seems a field of dreams.
Some of Rome's museums have been in business for hundreds of years, a long time to build up popularity. Palazzo Altemps is a relative newcomer. Built in the 15th century by the Riario family and refurbished a century later under the orders of Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps, the Altemps opened its doors to the public in 1997 as part of the National Museum of Rome. It is only a few steps away from the gobsmacking Piazza Navona but somehow escapes the fleets of tourist coaches, armies of buskers and living statues dressed as centurions or emperors. Instead, this small and lovely palazzo offers leafy peacefulness and spacious halls of statuary.
The most beautifully organised museum in Rome, the Altemps's airy old rooms are uncrowded, its treasures given space. Glance down a long corridor and a marble huntsman stares back, his elegant chalk-coloured hands stretching his invisible bow and arrow. You can walk right up to the exhibits, see delicate chisel marks on a torso, incredibly subtle carvings of musculature or hair. Several rooms are given over to the story of the collector Evan Gorga, who amassed two house-loads of archaeological finds and bequeathed them to the state. A remarkable man, he was a gifted tenor and sang the role of Rodolfo in the original production of La Bohème in 1896. Faded murals in the backstreets add to the sense of the past's closeness. In Palazzo Altemps, absence becomes presence.
Running parallel to the river near the Ponte Sisto, Via Giulia is one of the oldest streets in an ancient city and was a pilgrimage route for centuries. The via is a mere kilometre in length, yet you could spend a week exploring the shadowy back streets and cobbled lanes. Antique shops and restaurants have appeared in recent years, but blink and there's a cowled monk stepping slowly from a doorway, head bowed. Fountains chuckle slyly. An engraved skeleton adorns the front of a crumbling church.
One of Michelangelo's doomed dreams was a bridge commissioned by Pope Paul III to cross the Tiber, connecting Palazzo Farnese and Villa Farnesina. Building began but was abandoned due to the fantastic expense. You can still see the haunting unfinished structure of the Arco dei Farnesi high above Via Giulia, swathed in encroaching ivy.
Francis Darcy Osborne, British ambassador to the Vatican during the Nazi occupation, a war hero who helped to save thousands of fugitives, retired to an apartment in an old palazzo on this street and often walked the riverbank nearby. A close friend of the Queen Mother, Osborne was a brilliant diarist, a cunning activist, a lover of Rome and an inveterate art collector. He appears as a character in my novels My Father's House and The Ghosts of Rome. Via Giulia was his favourite Roman street.
The basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, once known as Our Lady of the Snows, is less frequently visited than the great if somewhat forbidding bastion of St Peter's but in many ways is more impressive and charming. One of its delights, viewable by private tour for only a couple of euros, is the Loggia, the arched balcony adorning the basilica's facade, home of the mosaic of the miracle of the snow.
This sumptuous but endearing artwork has its roots in a story from the fourth century, after Christianity had been decriminalised by Emperor Constantine. Among the converts were a Roman nobleman, Giovanni, and his wife. The Madonna appeared in a dream to the couple, instructing them to pay for the building of a new church on the Esquiline Hill. She would show them the precise site by causing snow to fall there, despite it being high summer.
Going out into the sweltering midnight to find the place, Giovanni met Pope Liberius, who had experienced the same dream. Snow fell, the basilica was built, and every August the miracle is commemorated by a snowfall of white petals at the church. The mosaic, guarded by golden-winged angels, tells the magic realist tale in storyboard form. It's a glorious if relatively rarely visited artwork. Nearby, off the loggia, is a breathtaking triumph of interior architecture, Bernini's spiral staircase. To this day, experts aren't quite certain how it was built.
This long-loved city does not give up its secrets easily. But sometimes, in its quieter places, far from the queues, you feel the old stories shake themselves down and come to life.
