Rome  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
This page Rome is part of the Ancient Rome series.Illustration: The Appian Way as it appeared in Piranesi's imagination (1756), from Le Antichità Romane
Enlarge
This page Rome is part of the Ancient Rome series.
Illustration: The Appian Way as it appeared in Piranesi's imagination (1756), from Le Antichità Romane

"Near the ancient Porta Capena stands to this day a little chapel with the inscription, somewhat worn: Quo Vadis, Domine?"--Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero (1896) by Henryk Sienkiewicz


"Venetia stands with endless Beauties crown'd, And as a World within herself is found. Hail Queen of Italy! for Years to come The mighty Rival of immortal Rome." --Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) by Joseph Addison

Elagabalus (ca. 203 – March 11, 222), also known as Heliogabalus or Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, was a Roman emperor. He was known for perverse and decadent behavior with regard especially to sex, religion, and food. Due to these associations with Roman decadence, Elagabalus became something of a hero to the Decadent movement in the late 19th century.
Enlarge
Elagabalus (ca. 203 – March 11, 222), also known as Heliogabalus or Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, was a Roman emperor. He was known for perverse and decadent behavior with regard especially to sex, religion, and food. Due to these associations with Roman decadence, Elagabalus became something of a hero to the Decadent movement in the late 19th century.
Capriccio With the Colosseum by Bernardo Bellotto
Enlarge
Capriccio With the Colosseum by Bernardo Bellotto
Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme
Enlarge
Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Rome is a city, the capital of Italy.

Rome's history as a city spans over two and a half thousand years, as one of the founding cities of Western Civilisation. It was the centre of the Roman Empire, which dominated Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for four hundred years from the 1st Century BC till the 4th Century AD. Rome has a significant place in Christianity and is the present day home of the Roman Catholic Church and the site of the Vatican City, an independent city-state run by the Catholic Church as an enclave of Rome.

Contents

Tourism

Tourism is one of Rome's chief industries, with numerous notable museums including the Vatican Museum, the Borghese Gallery, and the Musei Capitolini: in 2005 the city registered 19.5 million visitors, up of 22.1% from 2001. Rome is also the 3rd most visited city in the EU, and its historic centre along with "the Properties of the Holy See in that City Enjoying Extraterritorial Rights and San Paolo Fuori le Mura" listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. The World Heritage site was extended in 1990 to the walls of Urban VIII, to include the Forums, the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Mausoleum of Hadrian, the Pantheon, Trajan’s Column and the Column of Marcus Aurelius, as well as the religious and public buildings of papal Rome. The city's international branding has proved to be successful; in terms of marketing, the city ranks 9th worldwide, yet in terms of attractions and touristic assets, it ranks 6th. According to the particular study, Rome has several touristic sights, monuments and an attractive atmosphere which makes it one of the top cities cities in terms of branding, yet its communication is less effective than other cities such as Berlin, whilst still remaining in the top ten most commercially successful cities.

Public monuments and buildings, such as the Vatican Museums and the Colosseum are amongst the world's 50 most visited tourist destinations (the Vatican Museums receiving 4.2 million tourists and the Colosseum receiving 4 million tourists every year).

Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Roman Republic period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterized by government headed by emperors and large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, Africa and Asia. The city of Rome was the largest city in the world c. 100 BC - c. AD 400, with Constantinople (New Rome) becoming the largest around AD 500, and the Empire's populace grew to an estimated 50 to 90 million inhabitants (roughly 20% of the world's population at the time). The 500-year-old republic which preceded it was severely destabilized in a series of civil wars and political conflict, during which Julius Caesar was appointed as perpetual dictator and then assassinated in 44 BC. Civil wars and executions continued, culminating in the victory of Octavian, Caesar's adopted son, over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and the annexation of Egypt. Octavian's power was then unassailable and in 27 BC the Roman Senate formally granted him overarching power and the new title Augustus, effectively marking the end of the Roman Republic.

The term 'Romantic'

The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as romance, romantic and Romanesque, has a complicated history, but by the middle of the 18th century "romantic" in English and romantique in French were both in common use as adjectives of praise for natural phenomena such as views and sunsets, in a sense close to modern English usage but without the implied sexual element. The application of the term to literature first became common in Germany, where the circle around the Schlegel brothers, critics August and Friedrich, began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), "I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived." In both French and German the closeness of the adjective to roman, meaning the fairly new literary form of the novel, had some effect on the sense of the word in those languages. The use of the word did not become general very quickly, and was probably spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Madame de Staël in her De L'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature.


See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Rome" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools