A post for...

Guyana Gyal.

Arriving in Rome, Sean (that's him on the right, a too flattering photo to my mind) and I disembarked from our train at the San Pietro station and walked to St Peter's Square. The square itself is a fairly grand affair demonstrating as much the wealth and power of the Catholic church as the Glory of God. To be honest its grandeur was the only thing I found interesting and the layer upon layer of statuary and symbolism too crowded and too overwhelming. The square is situated in the centre of huge columned curves topped off with numerous statues of those the church wish to honour.

Grandeur though, was the common denominator in Rome and grandeur linked St Peter's Square, the Colosseum, The Pantheon and all the other places we experienced. Rome is a city of grandeur, of magnificence, of great beauty and to be honest I fell in love and dream of returning. Given I'm from a cold and wet Manchester it was a pleasure to sit in pavement cafes drinking aromatic espresso coffee and watch the world go by. For holiday reading I took with me Tom Holland's Rubicon, his very fine narrative history of Rome from it's origins in 753BC until the death of Caesar Augustus in AD14. Holland mainly concentrates his energies on the period of dynastic and internecine struggles that characterised Rome from the end of the wars with Carthage to the more stable government established by Augustus.

Rome's many baroque attractions were impressive by any standards and I was particularly taken by the Trevi Fountain and Castel Sant'Angelo, However in terms of jaw dropping impressiveness the infinitely older Pantheon and The Colosseum stood out particularly. The Pantheon is a circular building 43 metres in diameter and 43 metres in height with a roof span of 43 metres unsupported by columns or external buttressing. That is to say the roof is totally supported by the walls and there are no buttresses on the outside. Durham Cathedral in the UK is one of my favourite buildings but the weight of its height requires huge flying buttresses to stop the walls from bulging outwards. The Pantheon although a fraction the size of Durham nevertheless presented similar architectural problems for supporting a single span roof. Roman architects and engineers, expert concreters that they were, solved the weight problem by using pumice in the roof concrete to make it light and rigid. Clever stuff, especially given another 900 years were to pass before thoughts as grand as Cathedrals in Durham was even pondered.

Ah, GG has set me going now and I want to describe the Roman Forum and our visit to the opera where we heard a wonderful Tosca at the tiny Teatro Flaiano sung by Olga Kotlyarova. I was also excited by the Colosseum, the Palatine Hill, the gardens in the Villa Borghese, and to be frank, the literally hundreds of places we did not see. Plus, I'm unable to leave Rome alone until I've mentioned the sheer brutality of those early times that Tom Holland so ably describes in Rubicon. Cruelty, sacrifice and suffering were the foundations of ancient Rome and whilst it's monuments are astonishing in their beauty and scope I could not enjoy them without also reflecting on the human cost of that Imperial vision.

More of this later...