The Architecture of Rome

»Now, at last, I have arrived in the First City of the world! ... Across the mountains of the Tirol I fled rather than travelled. ... My desire to reach Rome quickly was growing stronger every minute ... Now I have arrived, I have calmed down and feel as if I had found a peace that will last for my whole life. ... As I rush about Rome looking at the major monuments, the immensity of the place has a quietening effect. In other places one has to search for the important points of interest, here they crowd in on one in profusion. Wherever you turn your eyes, every kind of vista, near and distant, confronts you – palaces, ruins, gardens, wildernesses, small houses, stables, triumphal arches, columns – all of them often so close together that they could be sketched on a single sheet of paper. ... No one who has not been here can have any conception of what an education Rome is. One is, so to speak, reborn and one’s former ideas seem like a child’s swaddling clothes. Here the most ordinary person becomes somebody, for his mind is enormously enlarged even if his character remains unchanged.« (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey)