The Italian Job…

Talk about polar opposites!

Milan and Rome.

I had a week in Milan and a day in Rome, and boy do I wish it had been the other way round.  I made a flippant comment on Facebook that I salute the Milan marketing team for being able to position the city as an international destination when really it’s a dump.  I guess it has the reputation through it’s fashion design centres, which is probably fair, but I am hardly the target market, and I’ve yet to find a city that doesn’t have a set of Prada/Gucci/Dior store of some kind.  Not sure why you would need to traipse to Milan just for shiny shoes.

Aside from the Duomo, La Scala, The Last Supper and a few other interesting things in the city centre, everything else is just fucking miserable.  Acres of boring grey flats and run down shops fill the streets and the whole place is covered in graffiti.  I know some people think that it’s an art form, but 99.99999999% of graffiti is just total crap.

Anyway, more importantly, Rome is simply staggering.  Sure, on the outer parts of town there are tower blocks and grubby shops – it is still Italy after all… – but the city centre is just mindblowing if you like history and architecture.

Now I’m going to say something stupid here, and I figure that’s fine, you can use it against me if you wish but I’m going to go ahead and say it.

I don’t think I’d ever really made the connection between ancient Rome – heart of the Roman Empire – and modern Rome; a city you can get a high speed train into.  Now obviously, I know that they are one and the same, but it’s still staggering to be wandering around a modern city and find the Colosseum, Pantheon, etc all within the heart of the city.  Maybe I expected it to be like Stonehenge where you are miles from anywhere. I don’t know.  But it’s just amazing to find these extraordinary constructions right there next to traffic lights.  In fairness, some of them, notably the Colosseum would be extraordinary anywhere, but you get my point.  It was funny, we were at the San Siro football stadium on the Sunday in Milan, admiring the sheer size and audacity of the building for a sports building, and Rome pretty much says, “yeah, we did that 2,000 years ago…”.

So, I’m not going to do a TripAdvisor review of Rome for you, there are people better qualified and more experienced than I who can do that in their sleep, but what I would say is that I genuinely believe that it’s a city that everyone should visit before they die.  You can see the foundations of so much about the way that we live our life now right there in the brickwork laid in BC times.  We are constantly marveling at technology and how advanced our lives are, but so much of it has its origins in a little city on the river Tiber in Italy.

An example; we were sitting having a delicious cup of tea in one of the million piazzas, and I said to Paul, “how did the fountains work before electricity”?  Now obviously, we’re a pair of oafs and not engineers so we had to Google it.  And as it turns out, they just used the water pressure from a higher water source (admittedly outside of the city) and had one fountain feed others lower down and then drain out the bottom into the sewage system.  Simple really, but did not occur to us for 1 second.

Anyway, enough of this wittering, I’ve posted some of the usual tourist snaps over in Flickr for your amusement.

But seriously, visit Rome before you die.