Rome: which exerts the most compelling fascination is the perfect capital for a country like Italy; a great empire, and later the home  of the papacy, which ruled its dominions from here with a distant and autocratic hand.
For the traveller, all of this is much less evident than the sheer weight of history that the city supports. There are of course the city's classical features, most visibly the Colosseum, and the Forum and Palatine Hill; but from here there's an almost uninterrupted sequence of monuments - from early Christian basilicas, Romanesque churches, Renaissance palaces, right up to the fountains and churches of the Baroque period, which perhaps more than any other era has determined the look of the city today. There is the modern epoch too in the "eternal" City.
Embedded in centuries of history and culture, it is Italy's capital and largest city, offering far too much to see in one visit. In this city a phenomenal concentration of history, legend, and monuments coexists with an equally phenomenal concentration of people busily going about their everyday life.  You can't see everything on your first visit to Rome.
Rome means history—Etruscan tombs, Republican meeting rooms, imperial temples, early Christian churches, medieval bell towers, Renaissance palaces, and baroque basilicas. As you stroll through this remarkable city you are walking in the footsteps of the Caesars, St. Peter, Charlemagne, the Popes, Michelangelo and more....