Rome: history's masterpiece

The city had just begun to pull itself out of the horrors of World War II; Italy was so poor it figured among the first beneficiaries of UNICEF, the newly founded UN Children's Fund. But already glamorous movie stars were flocking to the Via Veneto in their big black convertibles, stalked by the stealthy, persistent photographers who were not yet called paparazzi -- that would come in 1960 with Federico Fellini's film La Dolce Vita, the phantasmagoric vision that gave a name to Rome's new-found cinematic glamour and the passionate, stylish world it created.

What the young architecture student saw instead must have been more like the young Rome, and the young Romans immortalised in Dino Risi's modest but wildly popular film of 1956, Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful). Cars were scarce; people navigated the Seven Hills on foot, on bicycles, streetcars, electric buses. The ruddy ochre paint that contributed to the city's golden glow had faded from most buildings and the corners smelled of urine. So did the upper banks of the Tiber, with their vespasiani, concrete pissoirs named after the emperor who first fitted the city with public toilets. (Public-minded Vespasian also built the Colosseum.)

But, as Poveri ma belli still reveals, the Tiber in the 1950s was clean enough for swimming, and the nights echoed with songs in Roman dialect rather than the thrum of motorcycles and the flattened digital thump of world music. There were awful things about that post-war Rome; Pier Paolo Pasolini focused relentless attention on life in the borgate, the burgeoning, violent, dirt-poor suburbs (as did a scene in La Dolce Vita), but for all its millennial antiquity, the post-war city almost quivered with a sense of expectancy, a faith in the future, in hard work, in the power of imagination. It is no wonder that this young, expectant Rome entranced the young, expectant Hughes, and perhaps only Rome could have transformed the aspiring Australian architect into what he became instead; a writer and critic of extraordinary breadth. Hughes's Rome is therefore, fascinatingly, a book about Hughes, not by any deliberate self-referential design but for the practical reason that any account of so infinite a city must, in the end, be personal, and because Rome is clearly where the Hughes we know, the sharp mind and pen, "nothing if not critical", must first have found his voice.

(Sixteen years later, in 1975, your scribe, at 21, an aspiring scholar of Greek, came to a Rome reeling from violent conflict between old and young, Left and Right, but the same sights that beguiled the young Hughes in a happier time still worked their magic: once again, the city's sensory and intellectual overload served a young person as a source of supreme clarity rather than confusion. But then Rome has straightened out generations of students in this way, as well as Byron, Goethe, Petrarch and so many others.

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