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'3000 years in 15 minutes' was the title of a booklet issued to American and British Forces (illustrated above). I hoped to take a little longer. I suspect the booklet was a bit of propaganda for the American 'folks back home' That GI admires the Castel St. Angelo and ignores the advances of a pretty Italian lass? Oh yeah! The British soldier in battledress concentrates on another Italian lass whose skirt is two sizes too small. Believable.

Rome was just a tramcar ride from No.8 Command Pay Office - entered through the Porta Maggiore, a crumbling Roman arch. On my first visit I had expected a city of grey stone. It was ochre-yellow. I wandered through long straight streets where almost every building proclaimed how little I knew about architecture. I stood in quiet old cobbled squares where antique churches drowsed in the sunlight.

Calm everywhere, apart from the fluttering of pigeons. Romans had no petrol; only Army trucks traversed the city. Mellowness enveloped me - a mellowness of the kind I had sometimes met in an English cathedral city. And everywhere, even in unlikely places, the marks of that earlier Rome. At one street-corner a huge sandalled foot of stone - fragment of some colossus. Sixteen Corinthian columns embedded in the walls of a church. An aqueduct with electric trams running through its ancient arches. I fell in love with a city of beauty and dignity, of an ineffable serenity that blessed me.

lIlusion. The Rome of 1944, virtually free of traffic, free of tourists - unless we fellows were such - will never be seen again. From the buildings I turned to the people I met.

Disillusion. The 'Romans' had one fixed idea - to separate me from my money and my cigarettes. They pleaded with me to sell them the latter - the real currency. They offered me strange liquors with such labels as 'Real Scoth Wisky'. The smallest service performed was followed by the automatic request for cigarettes.

The great basilicas - particularly St. Peter's - were the hunting-ground for seedy rogues who thrust their unwanted service upon me. In St. Peter's I was confronted by a phalanx of 'guides, their trump card being that they alone had the keys to all the notable side-chapels. The clergy exploited their own dead: in one church (for a fee) I descended to a crypt where hung the semi-mummified bodies of hundreds of monks, piles of skulls and bones - a raree-show for the gothic-minded. The Colosseum was a warren of touts. The Forum and the Palatine were open-air brothels.

In a bookshop I discovered postcard-sized reproductions of another Rome - the Rome of the eighteenth-century artist Piranesi - he as fascinated as I by the conjunction of ancient Rome and his own century. His engravings so affected me that I mentally superimposed his images upon what I saw. He had walked in the shadow of a shadow - the powerful,-pitiful remains of a vanished imperial past. I walked within the shadow of Piranesi's shadow. Some impulse made me borrow a magnifying glass and examine the people in these small reproductions - and there they were! The same villainous-looking rogues, often deformed, gesticulating, begging, fawning, threatening. The eighteenth-century Roman mob. The Roman mob I now lived among.

I had thought hard things about my English folk but never had I seen such stupid brutality as here, among the 'populi Romani'. A minor instance: trams were unbelievably crowded. No-one attempted to form a queue. Conflict raged between those trying to get in and those trying to get out. People scrambled in through windows, shouting, screaming, gesticulating. A solid wedge of people within, others hanging on the sides, astride the windows or the fenders. At stops, no-one would give way for those wishing to descend. Blows and abuse were commonplace. I lost three buttons from my great-coat - simply torn off by the pressure of the crowd.

I saw a blind man vainly attempting to make his way through the press, his cries of 'Permesso! Permesso!' ignored. Cripples suffered. I saw people running after hunchbacks to touch them 'for luck' (some of the afflicted ones retaliated by charging a fee for this service) while animals... I learned not to see. These people, I concluded, had no sense of discipline or citizenship. Swayed as they seemed to be by the trashiest sentiments in religion, newspapers and magazines, they had been ripe for exploitation by Mussolini, the 'Sawdust Caesar.' The Roman mob is always the Roman mob, eternal as the 'Eternal City.'

Such was the light and dark of my first visit to Rome. I had a lot to learn - see ‘Roman Realities in 1944’ on this site.

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