Roma: Cultura

Rome’s culture is layered like its buildings, and the baroque layer is the one that shaped how the city looks.

The baroque

The seventeenth century turned Rome into theatre. Bernini designed fountains, churches and the colonnade embracing Saint Peter’s square, and carved marble that appears to move — the Apollo and Daphne in the Borghese is the demonstration piece. Borromini, his rival, built small churches of extraordinary geometric invention. Caravaggio painted saints as street people lit by a single raking light, and several of those paintings are still in the churches they were made for, free to walk in and see.

Roman dialect and comedy

Romanesco has its own poetry, from the sonnets of Belli, and feeds a tradition of satirical comedy and cinema that is distinctly Roman rather than Italian.

Music and opera

Rome has had a musical establishment since the papal chapels, and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, founded in 1585, is among the oldest musical institutions in the world. Its orchestra now plays in Renzo Piano’s Auditorium, and summer opera moves outdoors into the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.

Cinema

Cinecitta studios and the neorealist films made in the streets after the war; Fellini shot the city as a character.

The four pastas

Roman cooking rests on four related dishes made from almost the same short list of ingredients: cacio e pepe with pecorino and pepper; gricia adding cured pork jowl; amatriciana adding tomato; and carbonara adding egg. Which fat, which cheese and which pasta shape are matters of genuine local argument, and cream appears in none of them.

Food as identity

The four classic pastas and the offal-based quinto quarto cooking of Testaccio are defended with a rigidity that outsiders find comic and Romans do not.