Introduction:

The city of Rome stands out as one of Europe’s greatest tourist destinations. Perhaps the world’s most fascinating place historically, religiously, and aesthetically, it annually attracts more than 9 million international visitors, and for good reason.

The allure of this Universal City of emperors and popes to which all roads lead, results largely from the fact that Rome consists not simply of one city, but many, a metropolis whose roots stretch back continuously well over 2500 years. Rightly, the Roman poet, Tibulus, attached to it the moniker, Eternal City. Its secular and religious monuments, art, and architecture reflect the many different epochs of the turbulent history it frequently witnessed and over which it often presided. The tangible and ready accessibility of these timeless, relevant, and important treasures continues to unite past, present, and future as powerfully as it touches and intoxicates, as one writer once put it, the minds, hearts, and imaginations of its many visitors.

Too numerous to list are the components which make it one of the greatest artistic wonders of the world, a great impressionistic painting, brimming with splashes of color which simultaneously bombard the eye, stimulate the mind, and soothe the soul. Think of all the epithets attached to it over the centuries: Rome the Eternal City, the City of – you name it: churches, palaces, fountains, ancient roads, columns, statues, gates, courtyards, umbrella pines, ruins and monuments, madonellas, balconies, arches, cupulas and dome, shops and boutiques, obelisks, narrow and winding streets, outdoor markets, museums, belltowers, outdoor restaurants, ivy draped walls, bookstalls – all these rolled into one magnificent, a City-wide museum and work of art. For the ancient historian, Livy, ‘the gods themselves designed the City: fata interveniunt (divinely willed), he said.  And yet, despite the continuous changes the City has experienced over its long history still, for its visitors, as the art critic Johanne von Goethe once noted, it remains always the Eternal City, ever “the same soil, the same hill, often the same column or the same wall”. This, of course, is so because, as the artist Raphael once remarked, ‘today’s Rome is built from the debris of yesterday’s Rome’.

Rome Through The Ages was from 2005 to 2023 an interdisciplinary course taught at Holy Cross College. It explored and shared with students, aspects of Rome’s ancient, medisix and a half eval, and modern cultures: historic and aesthetic, secular and religious. Classroom instruction prepared students for a six-and-a-half day tour of the City’s most important sites, monuments, churches, shrines, and museums during their annual Spring vacation. It examined the history of Rome in its most important stages with emphasis especially on its artistic and architectural heritage. Students visited popular tourist places like the Roman Fora, Colosseum, Pantheon, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Trevi Fountain. Every itinerary, however, included, as much as possible, Rome’s sometimes overlooked treasures such as the medieval Tre Fontane Abbey and places holding heralded and unheralded works of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Borromini, and Bernini. Places which to many seem mundane or insignificant truly are works of art in and of themselves: piazzas, fountains, courtyards, cloisters, devotional shrines. Dispersed throughout the City, they played a significant part of the daily itinerary.

This guide is intended for Holy Cross College students – current and former, members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, and friends who intend or, perhaps, hope to visit Rome, short or long term, and are desirous of a reasonably focused, informed, efficient, and easily manageable on-line guide to the most important and interesting monuments and sites described in the introduction. The presentation of the guide is both descriptive and visual. Its narrative part aims for “substantive brevity”.

Attached to every article are photos appropriate to the specific content.  Readers of the guide can benefit visually from the City’s many magnificent and memorable monuments either on site in Rome with the guide in hand, or from chairs in the comfort of their own rooms. It offers a description of many, but not all, of the City’s historical places and its content focuses on sites visited by students in their daily itineraries. These followed several, daily, itineraries centered diverse, but specified, geographical locations each day.  By systematically saturating  targeted parts of the City, students maximized the number of important places they encountered in any daily 7-8 hour period.

The guide contains 12 itineraries followed through the City for five-and-a- half days (one entire day was spent in Assisi whose itinerary is not included in this manuscript). Most of these explore areas in the central historical zone of the City. For the hale, hearty, energetic and curious, virtually all sites are accessible on foot. Those places outside the City walls require other means of transportation, easily accessible by way of bus, underground Metro service, taxi or uber driver.

The table of contents lists each of the itineraries by general title indicating its locale and enumerates within each, sequentially numbered articles of specific, targeted sites. Most articles describe more than one site. Highlighted parts of the text indicate places of special interest to the reader. Underlined  parts of the text alert the reader to objects accompanied by an image, expandible with the touch of a finger on electronic devices. The index lists alphabetically the specific sites and topics of the guide and provides the section number where information on these can be found. A search box and links in the guide itself provide easy navigation to and around itineraries, sites, and individuals mentioned in the text.

Future Congregational/student visitors to Rome, short term or longer, may find useful all, but more realistically, selective parts of the itineraries. They can read about or visit sites in particular areas or look at targeted places of special interest throughout the City.

I am grateful to the Holy Cross College administration, particularly Dr. Marco Clark and Provost Michael Griffin, for allowing me to host the manuscript on the College website. Thanks also to Mr. Douglas Blair, Director of IT at the College, and Elias Ramirez, Holy Cross student majoring in Computer Science, both of whom made possible the actual construction of the website.

Michael B. Sullivan csc

22 March 2024