Back in Rome

Has it really been twelve years since the last (and first) time I was in Rome?

Well, to be accurate it’s been twelve and a half years. My first day in Rome turned out to be a day to remember, wherever you happened to be – September 11, 2001. I was a naïve 21-year-old backpacker who had just interrailed his way through Paris, Marseilles, Nice, and Pisa, and had arrived in Rome without thinking to book accommodation in advance.

The city’s youth hostels were fully booked, and I didn’t have the cash for a hotel room, so my 9/11 was spent frantically heading from one tourist office to the next, studying my hopelessly inadequate Rough Guide map to work out where places were, darting between public phones (no mobile in those days), and fumbling with loose change to call pensiones that inevitably turned out to be fully booked as well.

Every time I entered a tourist office, all I saw on the TV was the image of the Twin Towers. Tourists were staring at the screen in that strange suspension of horror and belief we all felt that day. As evening drew on and the tourist offices closed, I had the added fear that I might end up sleeping that night on a bench in Termini Station.

Eventually, through sheer luck, I ended up staying in the spare room of an old Italian lady who spent the whole evening in front of her TV, watching the news coverage from New York. She spoke no English, and I spoke no Italian, not that it mattered. ‘Mammia mia,’ she muttered, over and over again, shaking her head.

Thankfully my second arrival in Rome has been less eventful, and this time I’ve even got a place to stay for a week. I’ve also come properly equipped for some hard-core Roman sightseeing.

• Filippo Coarelli, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (2007)
• Amanda Claridge, Rome: An Oxford Archaeological Guide, 2nd edn (2010)
• John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, 2nd edn (1979)

Together, these books offer an unbeatable guide to Classical and Late Antique Rome. They point the reader towards some lesser-known sites, as well as revealing the more arcane secrets of the necessary tourist traps of the Colisseum, Forum, and so on.

Needless to say, there’ll be some intense (and overdue!) posting on this blog over the coming days, as I explore ancient Rome to a depth I’ve been dreaming of for years... please subscribe to the mailing list above, to make sure you don't miss a post!