In Rutelli’s book the key to understanding (and loving) Rome

In “Rome, the city of secrets – Mysteries, enigmas and wonders of a thousand-year-old capital” Francesco Rutelli offers readers an adventure. Turn off your cell phone for once, the city that the author describes is not that of selfies, of clichés, of cult images that have now become impervious to emotions. Rutelli’s book goes “in search of a largely unknown Rome”. Nineteen destinations that in just over 250 pages the author explores according to a principle that belonged to Calvino: “You don’t enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders of a city, but the answer it gives to your question.” And there are many answers here, sometimes without ever having asked the questions.

That Francesco Rutelli knows and loves Rome is obvious, banal; he was the mayor. But more than thirty years after his first election to the Capitol, it can be argued with all due respect to his successors that the eternal city we see now first took shape in his head.
It is not just a question of the transition from the ‘Capital of bureaucracy’ to a modern metropolis in balance between past and future, what will be renamed the ‘Rome model’ in the Veltroni era. In Rutelli’s commitment there was above all the rethinking of the entire city, starting from that “planning by doing”, which became the principle and engine of change.

To make a long story short, almost everything that exists in Rome today – for better or for worse, everyone will have their own idea – comes from the imagination of the ‘mayor on a moped’ and his team, who is mentioned several times in the book: from Renzo Piano’s Auditorium to the arrangement of the Ara Pacis with Richard Meier’s display case, Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi, the Nuvola dei Fuksas (Massimiliano and Doriana), the Ponte della Musica, the underpasses and tunnels, the new Fair on the road to Fiumicino. The last season of the starchitects. For Rutelli it was probably also a ‘personal’ issue, which pertains to his (incomplete, at the time) architectural studies, concluded a few years ago.

Reading the book you understand that the former mayor is not just a passionate connoisseur of Rome, like many others. He has the ‘codes’, the keys. And then it is worth accepting the journey proposed in the text published by Newton Compton, enriched with period photographs and reproductions.
We start from the twin churches in Piazza del Popolo and arrive at Eur, passing through the towers and the ancient crafts to which many streets are dedicated. You are free to accept his advice – such as visiting San Lorenzo in Miranda – or not, but no one will be bored.

In the book the author retraces anecdotes, recalls Belli and Alberto Sordi, the stories of the courtesans in the city of the Popes and the origins of many words that have returned to common use. There is no shortage of the path of war, including arquebus, cannon fire and machine gun fire, then arriving at the Circus Maximus, the Tiber with its bridges, the enigmas of the Pantheon up to the Quirinale. One chapter is dedicated to Latin inscriptions, another to Pasquino, the most famous ‘talking statue’ in the world.
There is also the Capitoline Hill, with the imposing Marcus Aurelius on horseback in gilded bronze, of which Queen Elizabeth asked him when he was mayor: “But why doesn’t he have the reins?”.