John Fort

City of the Mind

[This article first appeared in The Times on February 7th 2004]

There is only one classic guide to Rome and someone has had the temerity to revise it. The result is masterly, says Richard Owen.

I am beginning to wonder if Rome really exists. Absurd: to the left of where I live, on the Tiber, looms the great, solid bulk of the circular Castel Sant' Angelo, the medieval fortress which was once the mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian. To the right is St Peter's. Any visitor to Rome walks past - and on - the stones of over 2,000 years of history.

But more than any other country, Italy provides us with cities of the mind: as Henry James observed, like great works of art (which they are), we feel we know them before we see them. Perhaps this explains the peculiar hold of Italy on the northern - and particularly British - imagination. I only noticed the other day that Rome, a perceptive and thoroughly down-to-earth guide by Jonathan Boardman, the Anglican vicar in Rome, is part of a series entitled Cities of the Imagination.

In our hearts we know that when we get to the Celestial City, it will look much like a hilltop town in Umbria. In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the Venetian Marco Polo, the world's first foreign correspondent, obediently reports to Kublai Khan - in lyrical detail - on all the wondrous cities he has visited. They are, of course, all Venice. The way we imagine Italy, and in particular the way we imagine Rome, changes according to mood, cultural conditioning, and the spirit of the times.

"Each generation invents its own Rome," observed Neil McGregor, the director of the British Museum, when he inaugurated a new lecture hall last year at the British School at Rome. McGregor was talking about items from the BM's own collection, from Etruscan and Roman times to the Renaissance, the Romantics and the Victorians. But the point is well taken: all the visitors brought back what they valued most, and all saw Rome through different prisms. Rome is what we make it.

Differing visions of Rome are reflected in writings from Gibbon to Shelley and Byron, Goethe, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, and in successive guide book authors whose volumes have informed and amused successive generations of Italy lovers - Augustus Hare, Cedl Roberts, H.V. Morton, and of course Georgina Masson. Which brings me to the new edition of Masson's much loved, well-thumbed, universally revered Companion Guide, first issued in 1965.

Masson herself (a nom de plume - her real name was Babs Johnson) died in 1980, alas. Her classic walks through Rome were updated in 1998, by Tim Jepson. But the publishers have taken a deep breath and gone one further the book has been thoroughly revised by another hand, that of John Fort, to make it a guide for us, the readers of the early 21st century, rather than of the 1960s or even the 1980s.

This is bold. Masson, after all, was a one-off: born a daughter of the Raj in Rawalpindi, educated at a girls' school in Bath, she worked for the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information, and arrived in Rome exactly 60 years ago, in 1944, with the liberating Allied forces. She came, she saw; above all, she walked, in shoes specially made for her by a Rome cobbler.

She lived as a tenant of the Anglo-Italian Doria Pamphilj aristocratic dynasty, entertained the British community and visitors such as Evelyn Waugh; and doted on a dog called Willy, described by friends as "frightful". She wrote Italian Gardens and Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance as well as her guide, and is irreplaceable. So is it right to exhume her to observe the Rome of 2004?

The good news is that Fort - who has lived in Rome for 30 years - has caught her tone of voice exactly, so much so that you cannot tell where Masson ends and Fort begins. Like her. Fort (Eton and Oxford, and known to all as Johnny) is a tenant of the Doria Pamphilj family, and has the same drily witty, civilised and passionately curious tone. He nonetheless admits that he risks upsetting "devotees" of Masson by doing "a rewrite".

"What I had expected to be a simple coverage of new museums and updating of opening hours and so on became an absorbing passion to see absolutely as much of the city as possible," he says. like Masson herself, Fort believes, rightly, that walking is the only way to see Rome, not least because of the traffic congestion (far worse since Masson's day.) One of the main differences between his vision and hers, though, is the pace.

Masson's walks, Fort says, range "from the gruelling to the exceedingly gruelling, and I soon came to the conclusion, that the suggested regime of two walks a day for two weeks was quite categorically impossible to follow". Where Masson rushes you along, in her 1960s way, cramming in as much as possible. Fort offers a more leisurely stroll, mindful of the Italian writer Silvio Negro's dictum that to see Rome "non basta una vita" - not even a lifetime is enough.

In her forced march Masson, surprisingly, missed some of the more obvious places of interest, above all Baroque churches and palaces. She evidently "did not approve of the Baroque with its cherubs, gilt, stucco, coloured marble and general frivolity", Fort says. We, on the other hand, revel in it (well, most of us). The more startling omissions include the churches of Sant' Andrea delle Fratte - Bernini's church San Silvestro and Santa Susanna, all of which he includes in detail.

Masson also bypassed frescoes in San Clemente and the Museum of Modem Art, and many of the treasures in the Capitoline Museums, including the bronze head of Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Republic, whose "austere features, direct gaze and stern mouth". Fort suggests, offer a mental image of what Republican Romans were like. So here we have it: our Rome is observed in close-up, with the serious-minded, 21st-century reader focusing on the Rome he or she finds most congenial - pagan, classical, Christian, medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, even Fascist or postwar.

Perhaps, in the end, every visitor, and every guide-book writer, has to make choices. Even the great Augustus Hare - who detested the buildings of post-Risorgimento late 19th-century Rome, to our eyes mellowed by the patina of age - admitted that he had missed here and there "an ancient cloister and sculptured fountain, a mouldering fresco and medieval tomb, a mosaic crowned gateway or a palm shadowed garden".

More than a hundred years on, the Time Out guide notes that "even after gawping at the Pantheon, the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel you feel dissatisfied, because as you board your plane home, you know somehow that you have barely scraped the surface". Fort himself observes that for all its famous sights, Rome is "an introvert and secretive place which can still spring surprises, even on long-term residents". Perhaps he will follow his masterly revision of a classic by emerging from behind Masson's mantle and giving us his own vision of the city he - and we - find so seductive in its infinite variety.

The Companion Guide to Rome by Georgina Masson, revised by John Fort
(Companion Guides, £16.99; offer £13.59)