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Elizabeth Bowen, writing A Time in Rome (1960), describes the City of the Seven Hills in words that can be somewhat daunting.

"Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather.... When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence. Nothing is more real than the first wall you lean up against sobbing with exhaustion."

Ah, how I know that.

Every sore, aching muscle of me, every creaking joint of me knows that. I have not sobbed against a wall with exhaustion, but I have gratefully slipped off my shoes and dunked my screaming feet in the cool waters of the Fountain of the Moor. I have panted down the Spanish Steps to the boat-shaped fountain below, to guzzle water straight from the fountain. I have trailed my fingers in the Trevi fountain and offered up a prayer of thanks to the patron saint of gelati, whoever that may be. I have thanked God for Rome. For a city that can be exhausting but, perhaps paradoxically, extremely satisfying too.

Looking back at my trip to Rome, I realise that this is one of the few cities I've visited where I've not really needed to do intensive research to chart out a list of sights to see. Rome is just too famous, its piazzas and fontanas recognisable enough to be familiar to someone from halfway across the world. I count back across the years to all the places I've read and heard and seen Rome, and my head spins. Seneca. Quo Vadis. Angels and Demons. Roman Holiday. Gladiator. Even Asterix. I know this city, I think.

And there is a sense of deja vu. Really. The cobbled streets, the ochre-tinted four-storeyed buildings (all of them, by regulation, below the height of the Basilica di San Pietro); the boxes of flowers crimson, bright pink and white crowding each window: surely I've seen this all before? Even the Tiber, sluggish and grey, has an air of being a river I've perhaps glimpsed before.

The Colosseum is a stripped down shell of its glorious ancient self but, with a little bit of imagination, I can just about imagine the stands packed with cheering crowds. Beyond the Colosseum, past the ornate Arch of Titus, spread the ruins of the Roman Forum. I wander slowly along winding paths, past gnarled olive trees, accompanied by croaking ravens that hop about amidst fallen blocks of white marble. Around me rise the columns of legendary temples: The Temple of the Vestal Virgins, the Temple of Castor and Pollux (opposite which is an opening to the Cloaca

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