Get Ready for Rome!

My name is Wayne Ambler, and back when I was a college student it took me a while to realize that I would get more out of class discussions of a book if I actually read the book before showing up for class. It’s the same with Rome: you will enjoy and appreciate the city much more if you know a little about it before you arrive. If you get ready before you go, you can lift your eyes from the pages of a guidebook, start thinking on your own, and season your meals with good conversation about a wonderful city. You might even put yourself in a position to enter the debate over the merits and shortcomings of the civilization(s) of which Rome was long the capital. But how should we get ready? My strategy is to find the order that underlies Rome’s cultural cacophony. I describe and illustrate this approach especially in the first three podcasts. The gist is that I propose putting aside, at least for a while, the idea that Rome is an “Eternal City.” Instead, consider Rome as three distinct and opposed cities, which are divided by two periods of “transition” or, more accurately, cultural warfare. The first Rome was pagan, generally aristocratic, and eventually classical. We call it “Ancient Rome”; a Father of Modern Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini, labeled it “Rome of the Caesars.” After a long struggle that included both persecution and counter- persecution, Rome’s pagan empire became Christian, and the art, architecture, and soul of the city changed. After 1,500 years of the “Rome of the Popes,” the new ideas of the French Enlightenment were advanced with vigor by powerful thinkers and by Napoleon’s powerful armies, and the Italian movement known as the Risorgimento got rid of papal rule and introduced the “Rome of the People.” This gives us a simple and useful schema with which to begin. You may wish to respond by saying, “But there are agreements as well as disagreements among the three Romes!” and “But there are more than three Romes!” True. True. But first things first.