A history of Rome in 15 places

In a nutshell: the story of Rome is an epic tale of ancient glory and Renaissance drama, of papal scheming and the swagger of 20th-century fascism, and it is told here through fifteen places. Five chapters carry it forward: Foundations, the Palatine and the Etruscans; Ancient Rome, the Colosseum and Ponte Milvio; Christian Rome, the Lateran, St Peter's and Castel Sant'Angelo; Renaissance & Baroque, with the Gesù, the Ghetto and the Spanish Steps, then Modern Rome, the Vittoriano, EUR and the Auditorium.

Rome's story in a nutshell

Legend places the city's birth in the heroic age. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, fled the flames of his burning home around 1200 BCE, wandered the Mediterranean like Odysseus and finally settled on the banks of the Tiber. His descendants, the twins Romulus and Remus, were abandoned as newborns, nursed by the she-wolf and brought up by local shepherds; as young men they stole wives and raised a wall, and so Rome was founded in 753 BCE. Closer to fact, the Latin-speaking farmers of the region lived for centuries in the shadow of more cultured neighbours, the Etruscans to the north and the Greek colonists to the south, yet their spot on the Tiber was ideal for a climb to power. For its first five centuries the city ran itself as a republic (509-27 BCE). It spread across the Italian peninsula, crushed Hannibal and his Carthaginians in the Punic Wars (264-146BCE), and humbled Greece in 168 BCE, becoming mistress of the Mediterranean. Plunder and captive slaves flowed into the city, and Romans squabbled over the spoils: the wealthy landowners of the Senate against the common plebs and the rebel slaves of Spartacus (73 BCE). Out of the turmoil came ambitious generals, men like Julius Caesar, who could promise wealth and security and were soon behaving like dictators.

When republican conspirators murdered Caesar, his adopted heir Augustus seized sole power, ended the civil wars and declared himself emperor, adopting a family member as his successor - a pattern that would govern Rome for the next five hundred years. The empire he founded ruled some 54 million people across lands stretching from Britain to North Africa and from the Iberian peninsula to Asia Minor. The capital, home to over a million souls, dazzled the known world with marble-faced monuments and Greek-style statues even while emperors like Caligula and Nero indulged their wildest whims. The famous Pax Romana, the Roman peace of the first two centuries CE, rested on an economy of plunder, slaves and trade that looked more solid than it was. Ancient Rome follows the empire at its height, from the Colosseum to Ponte Milvio.

The empire grew too unwieldy to hold. Corruption and disease gnawed at it from within while barbarian peoples picked at its borders, and despite Diocletian splitting the empire in two and Constantine legalizing Christianity in 313, Rome was sacked in 410 and the last western emperor abdicated in 476. The collapse was stunning: a capital of a million souls dwindled to a village of barely 20,000 people, with forgotten ruins, malaria-carrying mosquitoes and a corrupt papacy. Cattle grazed among the fallen columns of the Forum, wolves prowled near the Vatican after dark, and in the 1300s even the popes abandoned the city for France. What glory remained belonged to the Catholic Church, and Christian Rome tells how the popes built on that inheritance.

With Europe's economy recovering, the popes returned from France and rebuilt the city's roads, bridges and monuments, and the Renaissance that had bloomed in Florence shifted to Rome. Michelangelo and Raphael filled it with masterpieces - the Sistine ceiling, the dome of St Peter's, the Capitoline square - and the struggle against Protestantism (roughly 1520-1648) sparked the Counter-Reformation and its flood of baroque invention from Bernini, Borromini and Caravaggio, the Rome of the Renaissance & Baroque chapter. In 1870 the city finally became the capital of a united Italy under the monarchy of Victor Emmanuel II; Mussolini's fascist regime gave it grand boulevards and the EUR quarter; the Second World War ended with Italy a republic and Rome, in the postwar boom, a global centre of banking, cinema and tourism, as Modern Rome recounts. The 21st century keeps adding layers: Renzo Piano's Auditorium (2002), Richard Meier's Ara Pacis museum (2006), Zaha Hadid's MAXXI (2010), the new Metro line C and the high-speed rail hub at Tiburtina, while a new mayor elected in 2021 has promised to clean up the city's ailing parks, transport and overflowing bins. For the deeper story, the Rome books page gathers the best further reading.

Eras at a glance

The empire's fall opened the door for the papacy's rise. Christianity put down deep roots in Rome, and within a few centuries the city had become the heartland of Catholic Christendom; for long stretches of its history the popes were its rulers, their authority anchored in the Papal States; only in 1871 did it finally become Italy's capital. Over the centuries fortunes waxed and waned, usually when papal ambition collided with the prevailing mood of religious and social change. Humanist thinking set off the Renaissance, an era of deep ferment in Rome, and the Protestant challenge brought the Counter-Reformation, with its flood of baroque invention. In recent decades the city has watched Mussolini rise and fall, the dolce vita years blossom, and national politics unfold inside its grand institutional palaces - follow the fifteen places, chapter by chapter, and the whole arc of the Eternal City comes into view.