Ten walks that explain Italy: Rome and getting things done
Part 2 of a detour from explaining the Netherlands
As I’m now pretty busy writing my book on the Netherlands I’m posting an overview of the ten walks that I think go a long way to explaining the remarkable country where I live, Italy.
Ten Walks That Explain Italy: walk 2, Rome. Walk 1 was in Sardinia.
In 395 BC, during a war between the rising power of Rome and the Etruscan city state of Veii, the Romans built a drainage tunnel from the volcanic crater that housed Lake Albano, using the water to drive water mills nearly a mile away. They then defeated Veii and in (fairly) short order built one of the greatest civilisations ever to exist on the face of the earth. This was state capacity in action, a governing power getting things done. And that – getting things done – is broadly the theme of this walk, starting on the shores of Lake Albano and following one of the many roads that leads to Rome.
Few countries have the question of state capacity hanging over them as keenly as Italy. The Romans, for all their brutality, were particularly good at getting things done, and you will be walking along evidence of that on the Appian Way. Centuries later the Renaissance was a glorious exercise in getting things done, although those things tended to be artistic or made of marble rather than public projects. Much later on, the supporters of Benito Mussolini trumpeted that he made the trains run on time. More convincingly he did drain the Pontine Marshes, just south of where you will be walking (before this, the Italian Red Cross estimated that 80% of people who spent a single night in the marshes contracted malaria). But then the war that he inflicted upon his people and many others made Italians wary of grand designs; better the parochial campanilismo of the village bell tower than a drive for great power status.
Modern Italy is, of course, plagued by governments that have struggled to get things done. One study by the Confederazione Italiana Agricoltori suggests that every single Italian lost 20 days of each year to form-filling and wrestling with bureaucracy. Any resident of Italy has their own library of bureaucratic experiences to pepper a conversation with. My personal favourite concerns my citizenship application, which was held up for months and nearly rejected because the Interior Ministry computer keyboard did not have a hyphen key, preventing them from writing my full surname, Ida-Walton (until my wife stepped in with her patented Italian skillset of cajoling, threatening, perseverance and obsequious gratitude).
Even if my Italian was far better than it is, I would continue to struggle to complete routine tasks as I simply don’t have the right psychology. I feel like I’m being tested all the time and usually have no grasp of hard facts: did task A get completed? I believe so; so the official has all the right documents? I believe so; is this certificate all that we need? I believe so; are you certain that you are legally married, that you are official an Italian citizen, that you own your dogs and your house? I believe so. I’m never certain.
This affects Italy’s economy. The country is notoriously slow and difficult to navigate for those wanting to set up their thrusting new business, and its legal system is made of treacle. Note that Italy has well over twice as many policemen per head of population than England and Wales, and the second highest number of lawyers per head in the world (after the US).
From Lake Albano it is around 13 or so miles to the Colosseum, and the first chunk of this walk is straight and easy thanks to Roman state capacity. Along the way you will pass Rome’s Ciampino Airport, which is a neat reminder of the financial and operational disaster that is the Italian national airline Alitalia/ITA. (Few other airlines have clung on to life thanks to a topless demonstration by cabin crew.) After that you cut across to the Fascist theme park business district of EUR, before heading towards the heart of Rome itself.
The route goes past Monte Testaccio, just next to the Tiber and in its own way as much a testament to Roman state capacity as the Colosseum or the Pantheon. Monte Testaccio is an artificial hill, made of the collected fragments of 53 million smashed amphoras, carrying the olive oil that figuratively lubricated a transcontinental empire. That oil, in those amphoras, was used to preserve and transport the food that kept the Eternal City fed. Woe betide an emperor who failed to do this!
From there it’s a hop, skip and jump – depending on the state of your feet – through some of the glories of ancient Rome. Take a moment also to reflect on Italy’s post-Roman weakness, exemplified by the 1527 sack of Rome by German and other Lutheran soldiers, a ghastly orgy of rape, murder and pillaging that left a quarter of Rome’s residents dead. Within a year the population had collapsed from 55,000 to 10,000. After that sobering interlude, the walk ends up at the walls of the Palazzo del Quirinale, the presidential residence. That’s where you can ponder the effectiveness of modern Italy’s political system and where it might all go from here. Which other modern countries have had to create a Ministry for Simplification? (There is a law mandating that every house has a main bathroom containing a bidet, positioned a set distance from the toilet.) Is the fact that the church still runs a fifth of the health service a strength or a weakness? The walk ends at Piazza Venezia, where a single metro station is being built at a cost of €700 million, thanks to the challenges of digging underneath the Roman Forum, and perhaps a surfeit of bureaucratic wrangling.
Once you’re in Rome, frankly you’re in Rome and can indulge yourself in whatever way you wish. That is the beauty of walking into one of the world’s most extraordinary cities, especially if you have booked a table for dinner. But even then you are confronted with the challenge of the authorities simply failing to get things done, from uncollected rubbish and rough sleepers, to wild boars rooting around the suburbs and buses continually catching on fire. The Eternal City really was better at getting things done when it could crucify Spartacus and his rebellious friends along the Appian Way.