Largo di Torre Argentina Square

Everywhere you turn in Rome well pretty much anywhere in Europe you stumble across something truly amazing. Look at these ruins. Centuries old, just sitting in the middle of all these modern buildings.

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Rome is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world. Three thousand years or so of history take us down beneath the modern streets, past Mussolini’s imperial city, on through the capital of Risorgimento Italy, past Baroque palazzos and churches, through the castles of medieval militias, and on to the Romes of Constantine, Trajan, Augustus, Caesar and their republican predecessors. Deepest of all is the archaic age, where mythology locates Romulus and Remus and their Trojan ancestor Aeneas, and archaeology finds clusters of wooden huts on hilltops around the boggy forum.

Notoriously the modern city preserves traces of nearly all these ancient Romes, often incongruously juxtaposed. An ATM pokes out of a wall right next to the columns of an ancient temple opposite a Baroque church. A trattoria shelters in the substructures of Pompey’s theater. Christian basilicas cannibalize the column capitals from pagan temples; gardens planted in the 16th century spread among the ruins of imperial palaces. The manhole covers in the streets read SPQR, a Latin abbreviation for “Senate and People of Rome,” echoing ancient coins. Freud used the city of Rome as a metaphor for the human mind, an accumulation of material from all ages still in some sense accessible if we just refocus our gaze.

Rome makes concrete our sense of a deeply layered past, but not one formed by gentle sedimentation. The city’s geological stratigraphy has been repeatedly convulsed, metamorphosed under spectacular pressures. It is an accumulation of urban wreckage, some put to new uses, the rest a sober reminder that no city can become eternal except through constant demolition and reconstruction.Leer más