Introduction to the city of Rome

Nowadays it is difficult to write about the city of Rome without risking to be rhetoric or pettifogging and inevitably to glorify it ostentatiously.

For this reason, we prefer to lend some sentences which were written by artists who experienced their palaces or public squares and who were able to catch their living peculiarities in past times. These sentences can represent many reflection points for who is going to visit the "eternal" city for quite long or short time.

"Possis nihil Urbe Roma visere maius" ("May you see nothing greater than the city of Rome") Orazio (Venosa, 65 B.C.- Rome 8 B.C.)

"Rome is common mother of every people and receives in its womb who wants to be a part of it . It honours friends, forgives defeats, glorifies oppressed with sublime goodness and persecutes superb" Pietro Metastasio (Rome, 1698- Vienna 1782)

"I live here in a condition of purity and peace whose I even haven't idea since time . Every day I discover a new noteworthy object, living, great and wild images and this whole world is been living in my mind for a long time, but the imagination couldn't be able to catch. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Francoforte sul Meno, 1749 - Weimar, 1832)

"The weather is the greatest artist here", "You can get bored perhaps during your second month of stay in Rome, but never your sixth and if you remain until the twelfth, you'll decide to settle there" (Grenoble, 1783 - Parigi, 1842)

"Dear Lou, do you still remember of Rome ? How does it look in your memory? Only its clear, magnificent, moving water will remain in my mind as true peculiarity of its public squares; also their stairways which seem moulded on falling waters thanks to their steps which slip one from another as water waves; I will remember of its frisky gardens and great magnificent balconies, of their long, silent and starred nights" Rainer Maria Rilke (Praga, 1875- Montreux, 1926)

"Everything that was, has been and will be can coexist with everything only in that consecrated by millenniums place: high and low, old and new, religion and impiety , splendour and poverty, even God and Devil seemed to have found a stable and lasting balance in that city where all is already happened, but not just once!! A thousand of times" Sebastiano Vassalli (contemporary Italian writer)