BBC NewsBorrowing was £17.4bn last month, the second highest October figure since monthly records began in 1993.
Christopher Jackson
Rome is well-known as the Eternal City, and this has ramifications for the visitor. It would indeed take an eternity to see it, and many tourists have only the weekend. If you allow it to, this can create a tense situation.
It was the French writer Stendhal who fell into a swoon in Florence because of all that there was to see, giving rise to the condition Stendhalismo. We don’t know how he fared in Rome, but it would perhaps have engendered a stroke: at least Florence is physically small.
In Rome, all history vies for your attention. The Vatican Museums alone would not be assimilable after a hundred years of fervent study. Along the miles-long route to the Sistine Chapel, I’ve seen grown men weeping from exhaustion. All they wanted was to say they’d seen Michelangelo’s masterpiece, and hadn’t wagered on all this other stuff.
At such times, the weight of history upon the tourist’s shoulder, what’s required is a sound basis to work from. Always keen to help, I would recommend the Hotel Eden, the outpost of the Dorchester Collection here.
In the superb upstairs restaurant Il Giardino, I eat the finest guinea fowl I’ve had in a life whose key endeavour has been the consumption of guinea fowl. Afterwards, as a sort of unexpected digestif, I am introduced to Simon Ford, the architect here.
Ford unfolds a tale of recent renovation where the art downstairs echoes the art in the nearby Villa Borghese. The floors had to be completely stripped out to meet modern fire regulations. But a headache is an opportunity, and Ford has created a magnificent effect: a dramatic entrance eventually leads you upwards to the rooftop restaurant where St Peter’s Basilica can be seen as you eat, and lucky chefs cook with a view of the Coliseum.
The Hotel Eden’s location means you can walk each morning in the Borghese Gardens. On a clear day the light comes through the Roman umbrella trees creating stripes of light on the pavements.
Everywhere in Rome we see evidence of two Empires, the original pagan Roman Empire overlapping with the dominion of Roman Catholicism. This second is still stronger today than the agnostic tends to suspect. The city is always confronting you with a certain duality within yourself: the sacred and the profane.
No city on earth so rewards you for going off the beaten track. The Coliseum is a marvellous experience but what about Nero’s magnificent underground palace the Domus Aurea? Similarly, St Peter’s Basilica is a very grand thing, but you’d be mad not to try Michelangelo’s last church Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. You’ll still see tourists but you won’t lose 45 minutes of your day queuing.
It is a city of layers, with us the latest, our achievements one day to be built on top of by AI architects. In the church of San Clementi, as you explore deeper you find time reversing, until you reach a gushing spring: an image of timeless creativity which is what makes this city as relevant today as ever.
