I first asked myself the question when I walked on the paving of the Roman Forum at six in the evening, with the light turning orange and the cats sleeping on the capitals. I was looking at a column of the Temple of Saturn, tall and white against the sky, and I wondered: how many layers on top of one another is what I am seeing made of? I was not thinking about art history. I was thinking that that column had seen Julius Caesar walk past it, the Visigoths sack the Forum, a Middle Ages that planted churches inside it, and now me — in trainers and with a navigation app in my pocket. Rome is not a city: it is an open question about the duration of things.
I have been back many times, and each time I try not to do what most tourists do: I do not try to see everything. Rome is a city that punishes ambition and rewards slowness. Three buildings seen with attention are worth ten routes with an audio guide. What follows is the way I learned to read Rome as a layered text — looking for the point of contact between the centuries, not the individual things.
The Pantheon — 7 in the morning
You need an early alarm. The Pantheon at seven in the morning, before the queue forms, has a quality of air and light that no longer exists at eleven. The square is almost empty. The café on the left side opens early and serves a decent coffee. Sit down with the cup in your hand and look at the façade.
What I understood after three or four visits is that the Pantheon is understood from the inside out, not the other way round. The façade is in fact a kind of liar: the portico seems integrated with the rotunda, but it is awkwardly grafted onto it — and the whole building is Hadrianic: of Agrippa only the inscription remains — and the proportions do not quite add up — the pediment is slightly squashed compared with the columns. You have to go in to understand the design. And inside, the first thing the space does is annihilate you. Not because it is large — the Colosseum is much larger. It is because it is proportioned in a way the body perceives before the mind.
The dome has exactly the same diameter as the total height of the interior: 43.44 metres. A perfect sphere can be inscribed inside the rotunda. The oculus at the top — 8.92 metres across — has no glass. When it rains, the water comes in. There is a drainage system in the floor, invisible and working for two thousand years. The Pantheon does not defend the interior space from the exterior: it puts them in contact, deliberately. It is not constructional negligence. It is spatial theology.
To go deeper into the structure of the dome and the Roman building system, the article The Pantheon and the sphere nobody sees goes into the technical details I can only touch on here.
The Roman Forum — walking at sunset
I am convinced that the Roman Forum should be seen walking, not from a viewpoint. The Via Sacra is still there, under your feet, and walking on it has a strange effect: the past is not in a museum, it is the floor. Arriving in the late afternoon means having the raking light that lights up the travertine of the arches and stretches the shadows of the fallen capitals across the ground. It is the moment when the Forum stops being a site and becomes a landscape.
What strikes you, walking inside it, is the sense of temporal compression. The Arch of Septimius Severus is from AD 203. The Column of Phocas is from AD 608 — one of the last monuments erected in the Forum, dedicated to a Byzantine emperor, who remounted an earlier statue on a pre-existing column. Beside it, the church of Santi Luca e Martina — built in the seventh century on the remains of the Secretarium Senatus. Rome does not demolish: it reuses. Not because it respects the past, but because it is practical. Marble is expensive, the foundations are already made, the structure is already there. It is an economy of involuntary memory.
There is a point of the Forum, high on the Palatine, from which you can see everything together: the remains of the imperial baths, the Arch of Titus, the foundations of the Basilica of Maxentius, the medieval bell tower of the church that grew inside it. From that point you understand that Rome is a palimpsest city. Every layer is still visible, superimposed on the previous one, and nobody has made an effort to hide it.
The article The Roman Forum as an urban document reconstructs the sequence of the monuments over time.
Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana — the emptiness of the 1930s
You need metro line B to EUR and then ten minutes on foot. It is not a detour: it is a complete change of register. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana — the “Square Colosseum” to Romans — is one of the strangest things Italian architecture has ever produced. Fifty-four perfect arches per façade, superimposed in a nine-by-six grid, gleaming white travertine, the structure suspended on a raised base in the middle of a planned park. It is the rationalist 1940 in dialogue with — or rather, quoting with maniacal seriousness — the AD 80 of the Colosseum.
The design is by Guerrini, La Padula and Romano, selected by a competition in 1937. The building was meant to be the heart of the 1942 Universal Exposition, never realised because of the war. It has stayed there, unfinished in its context, with the EUR districts having grown around it in a not entirely coherent way. Today it is home to Fendi. It is not irony: it is Rome.
What interests me about the Palazzo is the emptiness. The arches contain nothing — there are no windows, glazing, frames. They open onto a void that passes through to the other side. At night, with the internal lighting, the arches become dozens of lamps. But by day the sky filters through the structure in an unexpected way. It is a building that has understood something about Roman architecture — that the real subject is not the wall but the void the wall defines — and has replicated it with different tools, nearly nineteen centuries after the original Colosseum.
MAXXI — the contemporary that takes up space
Zaha Hadid won the competition for the MAXXI in 1999. The building opened in 2010, after eleven years of construction and controversy. It stands in the Flaminio district, in an area of the city that was already a laboratory of twentieth-century public architecture: not far from the 1960 Olympic Village and Renzo Piano's Auditorium, completed in 2002.
The MAXXI is the building that most divides Romans between those who have noticed it and those who prefer not to deal with it. It is not a criticism: it is almost inevitable. A contemporary-art museum with a grey concrete structure that seems to have no façade — just continuous surfaces that fold and intersect — is an object hard to metabolise in a city that already has everything else.
Inside, the exhibition spaces are organised on levels connected by inclined ramps, and light enters from above through bands of glass between the concrete walls. It is not a neutral space: it is a space that takes a position, that decides how you move and what you see before and after. Hadid built a building that does not accompany the works: it contests them, puts them in tension. The fact that the MAXXI exists in this city, beside everything else, is already a statement of method: Rome can contain contradictions without their exploding.
For Hadid's architectural biography and her method: Zaha Hadid — space as movement.
The city that remains
Rome is the only city in which I have stopped worrying about time. Not in the sense that it does not matter — in the sense that in Rome time works differently: it does not flow in only one direction. You look at the base of a wall and there are three centuries superimposed. You enter a church and beneath the naves is the floor of a temple. You go out and cross an alley that has remained unchanged since Giambattista Nolli's 1748 map.
What Rome teaches, in the end, is not the history of architecture: it teaches that cities do not die of old age. They die of abandonment, of demolition, of obtuse planning. Rome has survived because every generation has found useful what was there before — and adapted it instead of replacing it. It is a lesson in pragmatism that sounds like poetry.