A passionate narrative about Roman history

&lsquoThe real Rome was Calcutta-on-the-Mediterranean &mdash crowded, chaotic, and filthy.&rsquo So writes Robert Hughes of the Rome of late classical antiquity, and his book, a vigorous, passionate, ambitious account of the city from its legendary foundation to Silvio Berlusconi&rsquos sleazy present, offers recurrent glimpses of that &lsquoreal&rsquo Rome against the dazzling riches of Roma eterna, the seat of what Virgil called an empire without end.

In fact, the Roman Empire came to an end in about the 5th century CE, and has experienced no political resurrection, despite the cultural wealth of the Renaissance and the megalomania of the Fascist period, under Mussolini. Nevertheless, Rome, an aging seductress &lsquowrinkled deep in time&rsquo, exerts on all its visitors the fatal charm that Robert Hughes evokes brilliantly in his account of his first visit as a raw 21-year-old Australian in 1959.

Reading Hughes&rsquos account of his discovery of the statue of Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori, now an open-air vegetable and flower market, where Bruno was burnt at the stake for heresy on 17 February, 1600, I was vividly reminded of the vacations I spent just round the corner from the Campo dei Fiori, in the Piazza del Paradiso (unforgettable address), beginning my own long love-affair with Rome as a penniless student, about fifteen years after Hughes.

For much of his working life, Hughes was the lead art critic for Time magazine, and the strength of his book is his ability to build a substantial historical and cultural narrative out of an intensely personal engagement with the city. This is no tourist guide, nor is it the kind of biographical portrait of a city that Jan Morris produced in her iconic Venice (1960). After the Prologue, Hughes plunges directly into Rome&rsquos foundation and its imperial history, telling a long and complex story in about 200 pages of dense but lively narrative. There are some surprising errors here, odd confusions of date, and a strange list of Roman autocrats beginning with Augustus and going on to Julius Caesar and Pompey (reversing their chronology, as every child who has read Julius Caesar in school knows). After this comes a sort of black hole, with the sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth in 410 not mentioned, no account of Theodoric the Great and only a passing reference to Charlemagne, and the narrative suddenly revives with the Renaissance. In fact, one might argue that Hughes reproduces the typical Renaissance (in fact, Petrarchan) trope of Roman history, made up only of the classical period and its &lsquorebirth&rsquo in the fifteenth century, with everything intervening banished to the Dark Ages.

But having arrived at the Renaissance, Hughes&rsquos writing undergoes its own zestful revival, and this is much the best part of the book, crammed with stories about artists and artworks. Enormously pleasurable, too, is Hughes&rsquos style, full of caustic phrases about Papal pretension and artistic excess, though I wish he had denounced Bernini&rsquos frightful baldacchino, or bronze canopy, over St Peter&rsquos tomb in his Roman basilica. In fact, he celebrates it, justifying the stripping of the roof and portico of the Pantheon to provide the bronze for this monstrosity (though the story may not be true, since Pope Urban stated that the Pantheon bronze was used for making cannon, and Bernini sourced his from Venice). But the story of the baldacchino is one of many that suggest how Rome, careless of the glories of her past, was constantly cannibalising them for its present and future. Hughes is also extremely good on the neoclassical period and the Grand Tour, chronicling the city&rsquos history as a site of sexual discovery for young aristocrats. Post-Renaissance, the book acquires a new strand, that of a history of modern cultural tourism, with Rome acting as a magnet for all kinds of journeys of self-discovery. I missed Henry James here, but there is a great deal else to compensate.

The end, though, is sombre, with a rapid account of Fascism and Futurism, and their progenitors D&rsquoAnnunzio and Marinetti &mdash who had nothing to do with Rome &mdash culminating in a bleak vision of the city rebuilt by Mussolini. Even bleaker is Hughes&rsquos jaundiced vision of Rome today, an overcrowded tourist hell, as he anticipates still more hordes from newly prosperous China. This ethnic bias is as charac-teristic of Hughes as anything else in the book. In fact, Rome was repeatedly overrrun by ancient and modern Teutons (and by other categories of visitors including travelling Australians, though their numbers are admittedly limited), and there is no likelihood that the Chinese will cause new damage to the city&rsquos fabric, about which the Romans themslves are indifferent, as Hughes notes with irritation. Apocalypse is not now the eternal city is also open city, as in the title of Roberto Rossellini&rsquos great film Roma, Citta Aperta.