DESTINATION FOCUS: Rome Sweet Rome
Does modern Rome provide an opportunity to indulge decadent desires? A former ambassador to Italy reveals all...
Rome sweet Rome
It’s the destination of choice for a luxe Mr & Mrs Smith weekend away, but is Rome really so decadent, asks Jeremy Kinsman. Do Caligula and bacchanalia still inform the life of Italy’s capital? It’s not even clear that the citizens of Ancient Rome did enjoy lives of carnal depravity, forever indulging their appetites for food, wine and each other. In the first century, emperors Caligula (who probably didn’t actually make his favourite horse a consul, although the rumour is a tempting one) and Nero may have enjoyed some dark and strange sexual practices, but most people were just after the good life.
Many Romans could afford the good life, because all the heavy lifting, and even the light lifting, was done by slaves. Perhaps that suggests the recipe for decadence: boredom, the illusion of wealth and a dark underbelly. They spent their days at the baths, Caracalla being the biggest, with a pool able to accommodate 1500 people with hangovers. Women bathed in the morning and then spent their afternoons having their hair coiled. Men enjoyed sport in the mornings, then took to the baths after lunch before joining the ladies for a grand dinner. The theory is that the Romans thus grew soft, addicted to excess, substituting the “reality shows” of chariot-racing at the Circo Massimo and lion-feeding at the Coliseum for any real challenges in their own lives. It sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it, even if you don’t live in Rome...
The ruins of the Coliseum and the baths of Caracalla can still excite the imagination, but to really feel the grandeur of history’s greatest empire, spend a day at Hadrian’s Villa, near the hillside town of Tivoli just outside Rome. Here, over 300 acres, emperor Hadrian had his favourite buildings recreated, full-scale. The effect of this Xanadu Legoland, the columns, sculptures, theatres, pools and gardens, is dizzying.
Life is sweet
While Rome today is still the perfect choice for a long weekend, and has these huge, startling reminders of its past, it’s no longer just about decadence, extravagance and conspicuous consumption. Perhaps the most powerful indulgence here, in the eyes of some of us uptight Anglo-Saxons, is how the citizens enjoy just killing time, living the moment, making their days their own.Evenings in Rome are soft and romantic. Before nightfall, the pastels of ancient walls warm to the eye as the sky shifts from gold to pink to deepest blue. The piazzas become the city’s parlours, with trattorias and ristorantes alive with chatter, and at the heart of all this is the food, addictive in its freshness and simplicity. Modern Romans actually drink very little. Teenagers will nurse a birra for hours in the Campo dei Fiori where they collect by hundreds at night, watched by the beautiful statue of Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century philosopher and astronomer burned at the stake on this square after offending the Church. Civilised youth and a reminder of murdered heretics do not suggest a city of decadence, do they?
There is excess elsewhere, though. Monsignors in vivid robes being helped out of Alfa Romeos bring a smile, and cosmetic surgery is a contemporary form of decadence here. At rooftop parties in the swank suburb of Parioli, groomed and sculpted women with injected lips mingle and sip prosecco like schools of sparkling fish.
There’s more at the beach at Fregene, out past the airport, where beautiful bodies stretch out for the day, in old-fashioned sun worship and with no apparent thought for SPFs. This is something of La Dolce Vita, that chase after the good life, but it’s hardly decadent (Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain was a glorious exception). In that film, Marcello and Paparazzo were voyeurs, not disciples of the God Priapus.
Rome with a view
Rome is still a voyeur’s heaven, because there’s still a lot to see: the people here are good-looking, and they dress to please, even casually. Italians spend a higher proportion of income on clothes than anybody else, and it works. But do they indulge in an excess of beauty? Maybe, but can we ever have too much beauty? The Borghese family went for it in the 17th century, and Rome’s Villa Borghese houses a museum collection of Bernini’s sumptuous sculptures that other sculptors have writhed in front of ever since, in awe of the master. His Baroque forebear Caravaggio was a dangerous man, certainly decadent, probably a murderer, but that’s not the point. If there was nothing else worth seeing in the whole of Rome, Caravaggio’s luminous paintings in the Church San Luigi dei Francesi would be reason enough to visit the city.
And amid the history and the hecticness, is there one place where the visual miracle of Rome comes together, for the weekend visitor who wants to see that dolce vita in a single sweeping vista? The Hotel Eden above the Villa Medici has a restaurant with beautiful food at prices that might, politely, be described as decadent. But it also has a rooftop bar which satisfies the most extravagant expectations: Rome stretches out over domes and cupolas up to St Peter’s and the hills beyond. It may be the world’s most magnificent view, especially at sunset, and it’s yours for the price of a Bellini.
For a list of Smith boutique hotels in Rome, click here
