Roma: The City That Keeps Going

The Pantheon is free now. It used to cost five euro, then two, then nothing. I walked past it three times before going in, not because I wasn't interested but because the queue was short and the morning was fine and I wanted to keep walking. When I finally went in — late morning, the queue having evaporated — I stood in the centre and looked up at the oculus and felt the thing that everyone who has ever written about the Pantheon has felt, which is a kind of structural awe at the perfection of the proportion. The dome is exactly as tall as it is wide. It has been that way for 1,900 years. The concrete it's made of — Roman concrete, incorporating volcanic ash — has not cracked.

Rome resets your sense of scale constantly. You turn a corner expecting a street and find a forum. You go down stairs to a church basement and find yourself in the first century. You eat lunch at a table in a piazza and the building behind you was a temple to Minerva in 50 AD. The city has been continuously occupied for more than two and a half millennia and the result is a place where the past is not preserved separately but is simply present, as infrastructure, as the reason walls are at particular angles and streets follow particular curves.

Trastevere

Trastevere is the neighbourhood where Romans go when they want to eat and the neighbourhood where tourists go when they want to feel like they're somewhere real. Both things are simultaneously true. It sits south-west of the centre across the Tiber, a tangle of narrow streets and ochre buildings and ivy-covered walls that looks exactly as it's supposed to look and somehow isn't disappointing anyway. Eat at the restaurants that have handwritten menus and no photos. Eat cacio e pepe. Eat supplì — fried rice balls filled with ragù and mozzarella — from the window of a small shop on Via di San Francesco a Ripa. Walk after midnight when the streets clear and the cats come out.

The Vatican

The Vatican Museums require booking in advance and should be done in the morning, early. The Sistine Chapel is at the end of the museum circuit and you will be tired by the time you reach it, which is part of what makes the ceiling hit differently than expected — you walk in spent from two hours of Greek sculpture and Raphael Rooms and fifteenth-century maps, and then the ceiling is above you and it is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo painted it lying on his back for four years and the figures are enormous and the colour has come back since the restoration and it is, simply, extraordinary.

St Peter's Basilica is free and enormous. The climb to the dome — 551 steps, or an elevator for part of the way — gives you a view over the city that recontextualises everything. From up there, Rome looks like the city it is: terracotta rooftops, umbrella pines, domes of churches every few hundred metres, the Tiber curving south.

Coffee and the Rhythm of the Day

Roman coffee culture is austere and precise. Espresso at the bar, standing, from a machine that has been calibrated by someone who takes this seriously. No laptops. No long conversations. You drink it in two minutes, pay, leave. Caffè Sant'Eustachio near the Pantheon is the famous option and it is genuinely excellent. The secret is that almost every small bar in Trastevere and Testaccio is also excellent, and costs seventy cents less.