Rome 2001

My immediate impression of Rome was of clutter. Rome is full, even in February. The streets are teeming with people.

The hillsides are smothered in buildings.

The rooftops are crammed full of domes and bell towers.

St Peters is crammed with ornament.

The boat fountains are sinking under the weight of people doing the passegiata, having a stroll and a chat between work and dinner. In northern Europe we watch TV, in Rome they have decent weather (the Italians might be in coats, but I was wearing a shirt).

Even the pigeons are forced to share one drinking fountain between four.

But I found space and peace, in Bernini's piazza in front of St Peter's. This is big enough to take 300,000 people.

You can have your own pillar to lean against.

St Peter's basilica itself is heaving with tourists on a Saturday morning, but it's pretty quiet in the sepulcrum downstairs.

[Any black and white pictures on this page are caused by metal halide light putting a maroon cast on my negatives, which proved beyond my colour correction skills in Photoshop.]

Sunday morning, sunshine, a view of the forum, a bench, the papers...

Five minutes later the industrial grade busking started.

Escaping the guys who looked set to play pan pipes for the next 8 hours, I headed round the forum and up the Capitol hill towards my favorite museum, of which more later.

All cities should have a river. San Francisco suffers terribly for not having one, even though it's almost surrounded by water. They should flood Market Street.

The Tiber is not the Seine or the Thames, but it'll do.

Saturday afternoon frisbee stunts.

I first went to Rome about 7 years ago, and the Capitolene museums (there's a pair on top of the Capitol hill) immediately became my favorite in the world. I haven't changed my mind. I'm a sculpture fan, and three of my personal top ten are here.

They started when a Pope gave a bunch of work to the city of Rome back in the 15th Century or thereabouts and it may well be the oldest public museum in the world.

The legendary statue of Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf. The statue may be older than the legend -- it's probably Etruscan, and could easily be 3000 years old.

There's a raw power to Etruscan art, which is different to the elegance of the Greek tradition and its Roman imitators, and quite interesting.

Now here's a Roman copy of a Greek original, the boy pulling a thorn from his foot.

Photographing statues is a mug's game. You need to walk round them. I've not done a lot of justice to this one, another ancient work which Michaelangelo thought was the best statue in Rome.

It is wonderfully understated, and just plain right, and I think it might well have been the best thing in town until ...

... they put this astounding statue of the Dying Galatian about six feet away, and ...

... he himself carved his Pieta a couple of miles across town, just inside the front door in St Peter's.

The Capitolene Museums have been refurbished since I last went there. They've added a tunnel linking them under the piazza, and put four old reliefs in the stairwell leading down to the tunnel.

I'm not usually much on relief work (Greece can have the Elgin Marbles back for all I care), but these were special.

Rome, you will be astounded to know, is full of old stuff. And it's not just set pieces like this.

It's everywhere. Old buildings get converted for reuse all the time and people wander round them as if they're nothing out of the ordinary. In London this would have a sign on it saying what it was and the windows would be back to ye olde Englishhe style before you could blink. In Rome it's so unremarkable I couldn't even find out what it is/was.

The locals wander down by the Colosseum and just sort of hang out, instead of climbing half way up a wall to get a photo of it like certain gawping tourists I could mention.

OK, so the forum is fenced off and you have to pay to get in. But after 1500 years of people nicking stone to build their garden sheds, they probably had to do something.

My collection of bridge photos grows.

They do also have few bits of new-ish stuff.

I always end up taking photos of people with cameras. For once I got a pro with a TLR, photographing the tourists. You get the print in the post later.

I like my new 135/2.8 lens, it's long enough to permit some discretion but small enough to carry around all the time.

Oh look, another camera.

A rare pair of tourists appreciating the scene above without a viewfinder? Oh no, they're local. Just having a stroll before dinner.

And so I joined the queue to photograph people playing on the lions.

The streets in the Vatican look much the same as the rest of Rome through a long lens, except that there are these really polite dudes in weird clothes who won't let you in.