FLUXEUROPA: ROME: FINDING YOUR BEARINGS

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ROME - FINDING YOUR BEARINGS

A conceptual diagram of central Rome

Despite having a proper street map I found it difficult to gain a sense of scale in advance of our arrival. We’re strong walkers and in the event we found all of central Rome to be easily accessible on foot though we sometimes took buses and the metro to places on the periphery.

Central Rome has numerous winding streets and it's easy to lose your sense of direction, but the Vittoriano monument (which looks like a giant wedding cake/typewriter) effectively marks the city centre and is a very useful landmark. Lying immediately in front of this omphalos is the Piazza Venezia where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia.

From this square, five main roads branch off like the arms of a starfish. Running north is Rome's main shopping street, the Via del Corso. To the West is the Via del Plebiscito/Corso Vittorio Emanuele II leading to the Tiber and the Vatican. Running north-east (via a slight detour) is the Via Nazionale, another shopping street leading to Termini, Rome's main railway station. To the south-west is the Via del Teatro di Marcello curling around the Capitol. To the south-east is Musollini's Via dei Fori Imperiali, which cuts across the forums and leads straight to the Colosseum. This provides an impressive vista but destroys the integrity of the Forums.

Armed with an awareness of your relative position to these five main roads and a simple magnetic compass you need never get lost. OK, I might have been the only tourist in Rome with a compass but it did prove useful. Towards the end of my stay I had a couple of Italians asking me for directions! Another way of capitalising on the mental picture of these roads is to treat the areas in between as ‘sectors’. In the north-west 'quintant' lie the Piazza Navona and the Piazza della Rotonda containing the Pantheon. In the north-east quintant lie the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain etc. Another important concourse consists of the narrow streets which run east-west and which form the most direct route from the Trevi across the Via del Corso to the Rotonda and Piazza Navona.

The River Tiber runs roughly down the western border of central Rome, with the Vatican across the river to the north-west and Trastevere (it means 'across the Tiber') to the south-west. Trastevere is an old artisan area now being transformed by fashionable bars and restaurants.

Rik - 8 June 2001

Mussolini's balcony at
the Palazzo Venezia