Perhaps this is the city which best deserves to be named ‘the cradle’ of Western civilisation due to the numerous influences, epochs and cultural trends, as well as the large number of learned men who have happened to pass through, occasionally leaving pieces of what would later be named ‘world heritage’. Its colossal structures, regardless of the era to which they date back, form a strangely heterogeneous setting, a reminder that the ‘Eternal City’ has been through centuries of continued heights. Rome’s most distant past, which was dominated by slaves, gladiators, the praise of citizenship, the emergence of law, high art and imported pagan deities, has long been a site where cultures have intermingled.

An even more grand chapter in the city’s history is the spiritual reign of the Vatican, which has, in a way, also created an architectural trend within Rome. Having cleared the ancient ruins and taking the precious marble off the Roman temples for their new projects, the Vatican authorities shaped the par excellence Renaissance splendour, meanwhile incorporating olden structures into new ones. Michelangelo was asked, for example, to transform the Baths of Diocletian into a Catholic temple. Still, the great Roman ruins, such as the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, have remained untouched by the ambitions of later architects, and recent guides even include reconstructions of these largely dismembered structures, thus enabling you to view them in their original splendour.