rome in pictures

Beautiful cobbled backstreet in a quiet corner of Rome's bohemian Trastevere district.

Highlife - The famous Via Veneto, spiritual home of La Dolce Vita. The road is featured strongly in the film of the same name, and in the 1950's and early 60's was the haunt of movie stars, artists, writers or anyone who wanted to see or be seen. Although pleasantly and conveniently situated between the American Embassy and the Villa Borghese Gardens, much of the glitter on this street has now faded - Venues such as Harry's Bar are now patronised chiefly by pretenders. Few real stars light up the place these days, though it's still a very smart part of town, home to some of the grandest hotels and restaurants in Rome.

Lowlife - Baglady outside a bookstore near Rome's Piazza della Repubblica cleans herself up after an embarrasing accident. I have a sneaking and uncomfortable suspicion that this poor woman is actually American or English. Her clothes are totally unlike the traditional dark dresses and leather sandals almost universally worn by widows and female beggars in Italy. This woman is wearing trousers and athletic pumps in the New York style of bagperson, and she's blonde and fair-skinned.

Moral? - Don't get stuck in Italy without a job, a family or a pension, because Italian state aid for the poor and homeless is almost non-existent. There's nothing here to catch you when you fall.

Unless you speak good Italian, have good qualifications, or have good family, business or political connections and are under thirty years of age, Romebuddy does not recommend you move to Italy to live and work. We know of older expatriates here who, because of bad breaks and failure to qualify in any of the critiera listed above, lived just one step away from the street.

Don't get caught out like them and find yourself broke and a long way from home. Emigration is a serious business. Rome is a beautiful city, but increasingly, it's tailored to suit the needs of the young and the well-heeled. Come and enjoy it, be a part of it, but don't get stuck here, or you will discover that for all its fashionable and prosperous Western modernity, it is in fact, geographically and demographically, the last great European city on the exteme south-eastern borders of modern European civilisation, and Rome's true cultural underbelly is actually more akin to Middle-Eastern cultures. And it is precisely that Middle-Eastern primitivism that you will unfortunately descend into if you are unlucky enough to somehow miss your foothold on the modern industrial/commercial superstructure built only precariously above Roman street-level.

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