Ultimate Travel Guide to Rome

Brief history of the city

All the roads in the world, including the one where your home is located now, lead neither to Brussels, nor to Vienna, nor to Tokyo or Moscow, but directly to Rome. Why do the Romans deserve to be loved? What have they done that is so important in this world?

Why are Italy, along with France, Spain, and Greece, the four great tourist destinations of the world? Because they fully deserve it! If the Roman Empire, with its good and bad, had not existed, today we would still be painstakingly learning our lessons in Cyrillic in primary school in the village by the light of an oil lamp or a candle.

The Romans pushed the civilization of the world forward by at least 2 millennia! It took Lucy, the "ancestor" of modern humans, discovered by Dr. Leakey in Kenya in the Olduvai Gorge, two million years to transform from a chimpanzee that decided to come down from the trees into "Homo sapiens," meaning us, we, the almost8 billion people of today, and this is after Mother Nature took a few billion years to create the first living cells.

After the emergence of the Egyptian, Arab, Chinese, Greek, Roman, and then Anglo-Saxon civilizations, the latter responsible for 70% of scientific and technical discoveries, man has become the happiest of all animals on earth! Each generation inherits the benefits of the thinking and work of previous generations, so we have no reason to be upset at all.

The Romans passed on to us their culture, art, their way of thinking, organization of society, and even their legislation. Elements from "Roman law" are still taught today in law universities. The Romans managed to adopt and improve Greek "democracy" by issuing new laws. They perfected the system of salaries and pensions, introduced hygiene as a mandatory element in their daily lives, and developed baths and saunas.

They advanced medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, and even established an emergency medical service (akin to today's ambulance services). They conquered the world not only by the sword but also through democracy and equality among the city's inhabitants, known as "citizens," applying a form of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" that appeared 17 centuries before the fall of the Bastille.

In the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, now in ruins, you could see in the heated pools, through an ingenious system of underground pipes, both ordinary citizens and soldiers as well as patricians. At that time, special "VIP zones" had not yet appeared in the world, nor the VIPs themselves.

Rome was one of the first cities in the world to have apartment buildings with multiple floors, including communal kitchens on each floor. Many patricians walked through Rome in complete safety without four bodyguards or in armored vehicles because they were considered equals among other "citizens" and were admired and loved.

The Romans invented the seven layers of building material essential for constructing a Roman road. On the "Via Appia," the Roman cobblestone road that connects Rome to Capua, where a famous gladiator school that trained the well-known Spartacus once stood, one can still travel today, often better than on some national roads where the asphalt composition is not up to standards.

The cobblestone is rough, especially when your horse is running fast and your litter wheels are just wood covered with a thin iron strip, so the road needed to be perfectly smooth.

The Romans discovered the "crivac," a bi-functional wooden drum operated by ropes and pulled by oxen, which extracted gold, silver, salt, or ferrous and non-ferrous ore from the depths of the earth, materials crucial for societal evolution. They invented the sewage system and water ducts that brought water from distances sometimes over 100 kilometers by constructing aqueducts.

Mountain crevasses were overcome by building viaducts, resembling long bridges suspended in the sky, where only eagles flew. Romans also brought military engineering to a peak. During their long military campaigns, Romans consumed grains non-stop, and their medics surmised that it contained an element that gave them resistance—vitamins from the B complex. Even today, sprouted wheat is considered a good revitalizer.

How did the Romans manage to build aqueducts, viaducts, bridges, and churches covered with huge domes without cement or mortar? Simply by the perfect joining of granite blocks. The Romans invented the most stable suspended structures—the ogive and the arch, similar to how the Egyptians, Mayans, and Aztecs invented the most resistant ground-level structures—pyramids.

The Romans were the ones who prevented the walls of their great civil or military constructions (fortresses) from collapsing by inventing buttresses. On some viaducts still standing today, heavy tanks can still pass, whereas many modern concrete bridges are swept away by waters. Why? Are we not also descendants of Rome?

And then let’s not forget that, unlike other empires such as the Turkish, Mongol, Spanish, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, or Chinese, the Romans brought with them, along with their conquests and the inevitable bloodshed which we cannot praise, their writing, their language, their culture, their art, and... Roman citizenship, for those who deserved it.

So today, if you, dear reader, manage to earn your living not by pulling ropes to roll a huge block of stone in the Egyptian desert, not by toiling the land from morning till night with a plow drawn by a mare, not by digging for coal in the depths of a dusty mine, but... by merely flexing the muscles of 2-3 fingers on one hand when you "click" on a computer mouse, spare a thought for Rome!...