Notes on…Rome

Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is the destination. The eternal city is endlessly glorious, chaotic, stylish and funny: where else do you see nuns listening to iPods? Or medieval churches with condom machines by the doors?

You can barely walk ten feet without coming across something that might change your life: obelisks, piazzas, churches, gardens and statues. All that antiquity makes Roman Catholicism seem distinctly modern. And there’s the hotels. I spent a Friday night in Rocco Forte’s Hotel de Russie on the Via del Babuino, near the Spanish steps, slap-bang in the best part of town. The room was more of a suite, or what a London estate agent would call a spacious nine-bedroom apartment. Out back, you could sit and drink in the Secret Garden, surrounded by trees and birds and surgically enhanced septuagenarians, and feel like an emperor — or a mafia don.