Katherine Read’s English Gentlemen in Rome c 1750 [Yale Center for Brit]

PLATO, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius – the world’s greatest orators walked the floor of the Roman forum, but by the 1700s, its hallowed halls were home to a “foul cow market”.

The decline of the Roman empire was mimicked by the decline of its capital – a city of almost unparalleled historical importance, reduced through the centuries to a slovenly wreck of half-forgotten antique treasures.

Historian Ronald Ridley’s three-volume study of Rome uses the words of visitors from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period to show through eyewitness accounts just the state places like the forum were in.

Botanist James Smith, visiting from London, described the forum as “a dirty desolate place”.

Other classical sights had been partly lost by the 1700s: Physician John Moore attempted to guess where ancient monuments could be found between the Palatine and Capitol but struggled, while lawyer Friedrich Meyer added the contemporary residents paid little heed to the histories they lived cheek by jowl with.

“It is in vain that the imagination tries to enjoy these monuments – it is at every moment troubled by the sound of the bells, the lowing of herds, the cries of merchants, the tumult and riot of the populace incessantly occupied in games,” he noted.

Ronald, whose work is published by Archway-based publisher Pallas Athene, has written widely on Rome and has been fascinated by the accounts of those who were drawn to the Eternal City. He was inspired by research he had done on the French occupation during the Napoleonic period.

“I had been gathering travellers’ accounts beginning from the Middle Ages, having realised their value,” he writes.

He says the accounts were fascinating but neglected.

“We do not need another book on the Grand Tour: based on a small selection of the best-known writers. Equally certain: there will be many more such. Rome deserves better.”

He aims to reproduce “authentic responses by real visitors”.

Seeking “acute observation”, he turns to writers and artists.

Joseph Severn’s posthumous portrait of Shelley composing Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla, 1845 [Keats-Severn House, Rome]

“Rome has had two primary roles, first as the head of the most influential political organisation the world has ever seen, second as the centre of one of the world’s most powerful religions,” writes the author.

An empire that stretched from the Euphrates to Britain and the Danube to the Sahara has inspired governance ever since, while the provinces Rome ruled 2,000 years ago are now the nations of modern Europe.

He asks: “How did the travellers arrive? Where did they stay? Did they employ guides? What were their expenses? What did they see of churches, palaces, villas, antiquities? What did they like or dislike of what they saw? What did they think of Rome in all its contemporary facets? What events did they witness? What portraits do they provide of the people of Rome at the time of their visit?”

Ronald found accounts in archives: he scoured writings in the British Library and also in Rome, searching for tales to cast light on a city so central to the development of the modern West.

An early traveller Ronald discovered was Gregory, who set out from Britain in around 1200.

“He may have been an envoy,” writes Ronald.

Gregory wrote extensively on what he saw, though he mis-identified many of the statues he commented on: “The famous boy removing a thorn from his foot, the Spinario, was identified as Priapus. This was because, according to Gregory, ‘if you lean forward and look up to see what he is doing, you discover genitals of extraordinary size’.”

Two centuries later, Margery Kempe, from Norfolk, made the journey.

“This was a pilgrimage after she had been married for 20 years and borne 14 children,” adds Ronald.

She had been to the Holy Land and was making her way back to England. She spent her visit “in religious devotions”, which was not altogether welcomed: “She stayed at the English hospice, the Hospital of St Thomas of Canterbury. From here she was ejected on account of her ‘great weeping, violent sobbing and loud crying’.”

The greatest journal written in the 1500s came from the pen of Michel de Montaigne. A humanist and Stoic, he drew on ancient texts in libraries by the great Roman philosophers.

“Montaigne was a keen observer of, even participant in, Roman life,” writes Ronald. “It is a fitting tribute to him that during his stay he was granted citizenship.”

Israel Silvestre’s Colosseum, ink on paper, c 1650

He was given access to the Vatican library. “There are many manuscripts, notably a Seneca and minor works of Plutarch,” he notes.

“I saw a book of St Thomas of Aquinas with corrections by the author himself. He writes badly, small writing worse than mine.”

Montaigne noted the city felt two-thirds empty, with vacant buildings and run-down plots.

But he compared it favourably to the much bigger Paris: “In number and grandeur of the public squares, the beauty of the streets, the beauty of the houses, Rome is far superior.”

As well as exploring ruins, diarists include the mundanity of daily life.

The English naturalist Ray, who visited in 1663, was shocked at their diets: “They eat such birds no man in England touches, viz. kites, buzzards, sparrow hawks, kestrels, jays, magpies and woodpeckers. The spare not the least and most innocent birds, viz. Robin Red Breasts, finches of all kinds, wagtails, wrens…”

Much has been written of the 19th century visitors: the Romantic movement saw Rome as a bucket-list must-do. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – who lived in Pond Square, Highgate – made the journey, as did Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. Other eminent Victorians included William Hazlitt, Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, Oscar Wilde and George Trevelyan.
Political upheavals did not put off a constant stream of visitors, nor did the city’s squalor.

Roman peasants made homes among the ruins of grand palaces, stone once holding up mighty pillars reused for humble dwellings.

Shelley made a point of the invasive plants that had claimed the stonework of the Colosseum.

“It has been changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle and the fig tree, and threaded by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries. The copse wood over shadows you as you wander through its labyrinths…”

Florence Nightingale was less pleased, complaining historical buildings were “all blocked up with rubbish, so that you poke about them in the dark, by the light of one torch and feel almost glad the darkness should shroud the memory”.

Visitors today remark how much history Rome contains, tucked away in dilapidated side streets and passed without comment, familiarity breeding a lack of recognition.

Ronald’s detailed and thoroughly enjoyable collection shows how it can take a visitor to appreciate what the residents are so used to they take for granted.

• Magick City: Travellers to Rome from the Middle Ages to 1900. By Ronald T Ridley. Volume I: The Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century; Volume II: The Eighteenth Century; Volume III: The Nineteenth Century. Pallas Athene, £19.99 each