A Quick Travel Guide To Rome
Jun 20th 2008travelTravel Insurance
The Nation Within A City, Using Travel To See the Secrets
Jun 8th 2008travelTravel Insurance
Vatican City is a sovereign city-state whose territory consists of 108 acres and is almost completely walled, and situated within the city of Rome, Italy.
It is the smallest independent nation in the world created in 1929. The Head of State is the Pope, who as the supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority is also the Head of Government.
In 2004, there was a count of 114 Billion Catholics in the world. So it may be well worth your time to visit Rome again and revisit the nation behind the wall in Rome.
There is no doubt that the little nation within the huge city holds lots of secrets, yet, I can’t help but believe that these same secrets are in plain sight in other parts of the world! After all, the Roman Catholic Church is not the oldest religion in the world, only the largest.
To get to the truths behind the truths we may have to travel to more then one location. It has always been my belief that each destination holds a part of the truth concerning world (religion) history travel and each location will show and give you a glimpse of their piece of the puzzle if we would only visit. (Hence the Travel 360 slogan: Travel is Education at its Best)
It is also my belief that to see Vatican City more clearly, you may have to visit, the Holy Land and Egypt. When we read about world (religious) history we may forget; However, when you visit world history, you never forget! And in time, the truths that are not written, are revealed.
Because I am not a scholar, I do not feel comfortable saying more then I have said. However, if you are a world traveler, we would love to publish your thoughts on how travel has changed your life. Please, email your articles to be shared with thousands of people from all over the world who visit the www.travel360degrees.com travel site to read personal travel articles.
Article written by Cassandra Ingraham,
e-Publisher for http://www.travel360degrees.com
A web site for cost conscience travelers featuring travel articles with links to affordable Travel Suppliers.
Tags: catholic church, Italy, religion, rome, travel, vatican city, world historyRome Travel Guide
May 13th 2008travelTravel Insurance
Roma: The name inverts neatly to form ‘amor’. And that’s it - people tend either to love or to hate the place and Rome can reward you as no other city can. Rome, the eternal city which exerts the most compelling fascination, has to be visited by the Italy traveler. 29 million pilgrims and tourists went to Rome in the year 2000 alone.
Few cities have such a long and turbulent history as has Rome. No other city has been the focal point of the world for such a long period. The mistress of the Roman Empire, lavished with architectural jewelry by her emperors, but also often seiged raided and destroyed. Also fires and earthquakes left their scars, but each time the eternal city recovered from her injuries.
Rome’s history is tightly connected to the history of Europe. Not just the Roman emperors, but also medieval emperors and kings like Charlemagne or Otto I saw Rome as the true seat of power. They challenged the new rulers, the popes for the supreme power. It was the dispute about who was the true representative of God. Both emperor and pope claimed to be true inheritors of the Roman Empire.
It is said that one life is not enough to get to know Rome. Maybe you’ll need about nine, as much as the countless stray cats that also populate the city, but a week will do for a first introduction. At each corner of each street there’s a story to tell. Thousands of stories together tell the history of a three thousand year old city. Two weeks may be enough for a hasty tour through most everything; a month would be better. Fortunately, Rome (pop. 2.900.000) is compact enough to skim the best in three (full) days, and if you have more time we guarantee you will find delightful and fulfilling ways to use it.
Highlights in Rome include the Trevi fountain (remember Anita Ekberg in the classic scene in La Dolce Vita) and the Spanish Steps, the Roman heritage sights such as the Pantheon, the Colloseum and the Forum Romanum, at least some of the world famous churches such as Il Gesu, S. Giovanni in Laterano or Sta. Maria Maggiore. Make sure not to miss a stroll through the Vatican City with the incredibly huge St. Peter’s Cathedral and the unrivalled Vatican Museum.
Of all Italy’s historic cities, it’s perhaps Rome which exerts the most compelling fascination. There’s more to see here than in any other city in the world, with the relics of over two thousand years of inhabitation packed into its sprawling urban area. You could spend a month here and still only scratch the surface. As a historic place, it is special enough; as a contemporary European capital, it is utterly unique.
Placed between Italy’s North and South, and heartily despised by both, Rome is perhaps the perfect capital for a country like Italy. Once the seat of a great empire, and later the home of the papacy, which ruled its dominions from here with a distant and autocratic hand, it’s still seen as a place somewhat apart from the rest of Italy, spending money made elsewhere on the corrupt and bloated government machine that runs the country. Romans, the thinking seems to go, are a lazy lot, not to be trusted and living very nicely off the fat of the rest of the land. Even Romans find it hard to disagree with this analysis: in a city of around four million, there are around 600,000 office-workers, compared to an industrial workforce of one sixth of that.
For the traveller, all of this is much less evident than the sheer weight of history that the city supports. There are of course the city’s classical features, most visibly the Colosseum, and the Forum and Palatine Hill; but from here there’s an almost uninterrupted sequence of monuments - from early Christian basilicas, Romanesque churches, Renaissance palaces, right up to the fountains and churches of the Baroque period, which perhaps more than any other era has determined the look of the city today. There is the modern epoch too, from the ponderous Neoclassical architecture of the post-Unification period to the self-publicizing edifices of the Mussolini years. All these various eras crowd in on one other to an almost overwhelming degree: there are medieval churches atop ancient basilicas above Roman palaces; houses and apartment blocks incorporate fragments of eroded Roman columns, carvings and inscriptions; roads and piazzas follow the lines of ancient amphitheatres and stadiums.
All of which is not to say that Rome is an easy place to absorb on one visit; you need to approach things slowly, even if you only have a few days here. You can’t see everything on your first visit to Rome, and there’s no point in even trying. Most of the city’s sights can be approached from a variety of directions, and it’s part of the city’s allure to stumble across things by accident, gradually piecing together the whole, rather than marching around to a timetable on a predetermined route. In any case, it’s hard to get anywhere very fast. Despite regular pledges to ban motor vehicles from the city centre, the congestion can be awful. On foot, it’s easy to lose a sense of direction winding about in the twisting old streets. In any case, you’re so likely to come upon something interesting it hardly makes any difference.
Rome doesn’t have the nightlife of, say, Paris or London, or even of its Italian counterparts to the north - culturally it’s rather provincial - and its food , while delicious, is earthy rather than haute cuisine. But its atmosphere is like no other city - a monumental, busy capital and yet an appealingly relaxed place, with a centre that has yet to be taken over by chainstores and big multinational hotels. Above all, there has perhaps never been a better time to visit the city, whose notoriously crumbling infrastructure is looking and functioning better than it has done for some time - the result of the feverish activity that took place in the last months of 1999 to have the city centre looking its best for the Church’s jubilee. On the surface the city still looks much as it has done for years. But there are museums, churches and other buildings that have been “in restoration” as long as anyone can remember that have reopened, and some of the city’s historic collections have been rehoused, making it all the more easy to get the most out of Rome.
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Tag: rome