It isn’t easy to sum up the history of Rome in a few lines: a whole library wouldn’t be enough to convey the fascination of the eternal city. Still, a mental map helps, because in Rome the ages don’t follow one another in order, they overlap: in a single square you can have an Egyptian obelisk, a Roman column, a medieval church rebuilt in the seventeenth century and a nineteenth-century palace.
So here is the history of Rome from its founding to today, with the art each age left behind.
The origins and the seven kings (753-509 BC)
According to tradition Rome was founded by Romulus on 21 April 753 BC on the Palatine Hill, and to this day 21 April is celebrated as the city’s birthday. It is a legendary date, not a historical one: excavations show villages of huts on the Palatine as early as the tenth century BC, so the city was born slowly, from the union of those villages, not on a single day.
Rome had seven kings, the last three of them Etruscan, and to them we owe the first great works of engineering: the draining of the valley where the Forum would rise, and the Cloaca Maxima, the monumental sewer that, incredibly, still works today.
In 509 BC the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out: the Republic was born.
The Republic: expansion (509-27 BC)
The city’s real expansion came in the time of the Republic. In this period the Romans conquered much of Europe and North Africa, built many important monuments and produced masterpieces of literature and poetry.
This is the age of the great roads, starting with the Via Appia opened in 312 BC, of the aqueducts and of the first civic basilicas in the Forum. The Roman art of these centuries absorbs everything it meets: above all Greece, conquered militarily but victorious culturally.
The Republic ends in a long season of civil wars, closed by the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
The empire: the most flourishing period (27 BC-AD 476)
The most flourishing period of Roman society came under Octavian Augustus, the adopted son of Julius Caesar. In 27 BC the senate granted him the title of Augustus, and that date conventionally marks the beginning of the imperial age. Augustus promoted the development of culture and the arts, so much so that he boasted of having found a city of brick and left it in marble. Rome became the capital of the greatest empire of the ancient world and remained so for centuries.
Imperial art is the kind you still recognise at a glance: the Ara Pacis of Augustus, the Colosseum inaugurated in AD 80 under the Flavians, the Pantheon rebuilt by Hadrian around AD 125, with its concrete dome that remains, nineteen centuries on, the largest unreinforced dome in the world. In the second century the city probably passed a million inhabitants: no European city would reach that again before the nineteenth century.
Christianity and the end of the empire
Christianity profoundly transformed the city’s social structure and its beating heart, beginning with the emperor Constantine, who in AD 313 granted freedom of worship with the Edict of Milan. In this period the building of the great basilicas began: St Peter’s in the Vatican, St John Lateran (which is the cathedral of Rome, not St Peter’s), Sant’Agnese and San Lorenzo fuori le mura.
Then comes the collapse. In AD 410 Alaric’s Visigoths sacked the city, the first time in eight hundred years that Rome had fallen to an enemy: it was an enormous trauma for the ancient world. In 476 the last emperor of the West was deposed. Rome lost its political centrality but remained the spiritual centre of Europe as the residence of the popes. In the Middle Ages the population collapses to a few tens of thousands: entire monumental districts revert to countryside, and the Forum becomes pasture for cattle, the Campo Vaccino.
The Middle Ages: churches, mosaics and a long abandonment
During the Middle Ages many interesting and distinctive churches were built, often reusing columns and marbles from ancient buildings. In this period San Clemente and Santa Maria in Trastevere were built or rebuilt and, as early as the fifth century, Santa Maria Maggiore, which preserves extraordinary mosaics.
The darkest moment comes in the fourteenth century, when the popes move to Avignon (1309-1377): without the papal court Rome empties and decays, reduced to a few thousand inhabitants among the ruins.
The Renaissance: the patron popes
Rome became a centre of culture again in the Renaissance, when many popes, effectively sovereigns of the city, became great patrons of art.
It was then that work began on the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by Sixtus IV and completed in 1481, whose walls were decorated by the most famous artists of the time (Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio) before the celebrated intervention of Michelangelo on the ceiling, in the following century. In 1506 Julius II had the old Constantinian basilica pulled down and launched the building of the new St Peter’s, which would pass through the hands of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini and run for over a century.
This season is brutally interrupted by the Sack of Rome in 1527, when the imperial troops of Charles V devastated the city for months. Artists fled everywhere, and paradoxically that very diaspora spread the Roman Renaissance across Europe.
The Baroque: the city as theatre
The policy of the Counter-Reformation included the aim of turning Rome into a magnificent, theatrical city, capable of astonishing pilgrims. The result was the Baroque works of artists such as Bernini and Borromini, rivals all their lives.
Think of Bernini’s sculptures at the Galleria Borghese, the colonnade of St Peter’s Square, or Piazza Navona with the beautiful Fountain of the Four Rivers and the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone. It is in these decades that Rome takes on the scenographic shape that still feels to us like “the” Rome: squares with a fountain at the centre, curving façades, obelisks raised at the crossroads.
From capital of the popes to capital of Italy (1870)
On 20 September 1870 the bersaglieri of General Raffaele Cadorna opened the breach of Porta Pia and entered the city: with that day the temporal power of the popes ended. Beware of a very common misconception: Garibaldi had nothing to do with it; his attempts to take Rome had failed years earlier, at Aspromonte in 1862 and at Mentana in 1867. On 3 February 1871 Rome officially became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, replacing Florence, under Victor Emmanuel II.
The city changes its skin again, and fast: great streets such as Via Nazionale and Corso Vittorio Emanuele are opened, whole districts are built for the ministries and the new civil servants, and urban set pieces are created such as Piazza Esedra, today’s Piazza della Repubblica, with its Fountain of the Naiads. The aim was to make Rome resemble the other great European capitals.
Rome has changed its face many times!
The twentieth century and the Rome of today
Another transformation was carried out by Benito Mussolini: in power from 1922, with the dictatorship proper from 1925 until 1943, the regime propagandised the restoration of the Roman empire. To display and emphasise the ancient ruins, the regime demolished entire medieval and Renaissance quarters: this is how Via dei Fori Imperiali (1932) was born, driven over the forums by gutting the Alessandrino district, and later Via della Conciliazione, which erased the spina di Borgo in front of St Peter’s. The EUR district, with its “square Colosseum”, was also designed in those years.
After the war, Rome becomes the city of Cinecittà and of the dolce vita, and in 1980 its historic centre entered the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Its long history and the great changes that have reshaped its urban fabric make Rome a unique and incredible city: the only place where you can go down a staircase and cross a thousand years in a few metres, as at San Clemente, where beneath the medieval basilica there is an early Christian one, and beneath that a temple of Mithras.
And you, which Rome do you prefer: the imperial one of the ruins, or the Baroque one of the squares?
