Rome

Rome

·        Introduction

Rome, Italian Roma, historic town and capital of Roma provincia (province), of Lazio regione (region), and of the country of European country. Rome is found within the central portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tevere watercourse regarding fifteen miles (24 km) inland  from the sea. Once the capital of an ancient republic and empire whose armies and polity defined the Western world in antiquity and left seemingly indelible imprints thereafter, the spiritual and physical seat of the Roman Catholic Church, and the site of major pinnacles of artistic and intellectual achievement, Rome is the Eternal City, remaining today a political capital, a religious centre, and a memorial to the creative imagination of the past. Area city, 496 square miles (1,285 square km); province, 2,066 square miles (5,352 square km). Pop. (2011) town, 2,617,175; province, 3,997,465; (2007 Eastern Time.) urban agglom., 3,339,000; (2016 est.) city, 2,873,494; province, 4,353,738.

·       Character Of The City

For overflow a millennium, Rome controlled the destiny of all civilization known to Europe, on the other hand it fell into dissolution and unsoundness. Physically mutilated, economically paralyzed, politically senile, and militarily impotent by the late Middle Ages, Rome nevertheless remained a world power—as an idea. The force of Rome the leader, teacher, and builder continued to radiate throughout Europe. Although the situation of the popes from the 6th to the 15th century was often precarious, Rome knew glory as the fountainhead of Christianity and eventually won back its power and wealth and reestablished itself as a place of beauty, a source of learning, and a capital of the arts.

Rome’s modern history reflects the long-standing tension between the non-secular power of the pontificate and therefore the political power of the Italian city. Rome was the last city-state to become a part of a unified European country, and it did so only under duress, after the invasion of Italian troops in 1870. The pope took refuge in the Vatican thereafter. Rome was created the capital of European country (not while not protests from Florence, that had been the capital since 1865), and therefore the new state stuffed the town with ministries and barracks. Yet the Catholic church continued to reject Italian authority until a compromise was reached with Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1929, when both Italy and Vatican City recognized the sovereignty of the other. Mussolini, meanwhile, created a cult of personality that challenged that of the pope himself, and his Fascist Party tried to re-create the glories of Rome’s imperial past through a massive public works program.

·       Landscape

·       City site

The Roman countryside, the Campagna, was one of the last areas of central Italy to be settled in antiquity. Rome was built on a defensible hill that dominated the last downstream, high-banked river crossing where traverse of the Tiber was facilitated by a midstream island. This hill, Palatine Hill, was one of a group of hills, traditionally counted as seven, around which the ancient city grew. The other hills square measure the Capitoline, the Quirinal, the Viminal, the Esquiline, the Caelian, and the Aventine.

·       Climate

Rome’s hot, dry summer days, with high temperatures often above 75 °F (24 °C), are frequently cooled in the afternoons by the ponentino, a west wind that rises from the Tyrrhenian Sea. The city receives roughly thirty inches (750 mm) of precipitation annually; spring and season square measure the rainiest seasons. Frosts and occasional light snowfalls punctuate the otherwise mild winters, when high temperatures average just above 50 °F (10 °C). The norther, a cold, dry wind from the north, frequents the city in the winter.

·       City layout

The ancient centre of Rome is split into twenty two rioni (districts), the names of most dating from Classical times, while surrounding it are 35 quartieri urbani (urban sectors) that began to be formally absorbed into the municipality once 1911. Within the city limits on the western and northwestern fringes are six large suburbi (suburbs). About 6 miles (10 km) out from the centre of the city, a belt highway describes a huge circle around the capital, tying together the antique viae (roads)—among them the Via Appia (known in English because the Appian Way), the Via Aurelia, and the Via Flaminia—that led to ancient Rome. Masses of modern apartment buildings rise in the districts outside the centre, where, by contrast, contemporary construction is less conspicuous.

·       Via del Corso and environs

The main street in central Rome is that the Via del Corso, an important thoroughfare since Classical times, when it was the Via Flaminia, the road to the Adriatic. Its present name comes from the horse races (corse) that were part of the Roman carnival celebrations. From the foot of the Capitoline Hill, the Corso runs to the Piazza del Popolo and through a gate in the city wall, the Porta del Popolo, there to resume its ancient name.

·        Vittoriano

The Corso begins stunningly with the Vittoriano (1911), the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, 1st king of united European country, made in Brescian marble to coincide with the fiftieth day of unification. The nation’s unknown soldier was interred there after World War I. A Neo-Baroque marble mountain, it is the whitest, biggest, tallest, and possibly most pompous of Rome’s major monuments. Locals refer to it as the “wedding cake” or the “typewriter.” Useful as well as ornamental, it contains a museum of the 19th-century cultural revival. The Vittoriano was bombed by neofascist terrorists in December 1969 and was immediately closed to the public; it reopened in 2001.