Strolling down the high street

There are people everywhere: laughing, chatting, toting shopping bags with the names of international high-street brands emblazoned on them. and gesticulating as they hold shouting volume conversations on their Smart phones. Toy dogs in plaid coats tug at their leashes.  A bicycle whizzes past. A woman shrieks as a rat darts alongside the pavement past her Louboutins. Parents push strollers round the pot-holes and narrowly miss the ankles of love struck teens walking arm in arm. A group of loud American tourists push their way through the throng on their hired rickshaw. A police car slowly wends its way forwards, pauses, then continues. This is Via del Corso, Rome's high street. 

Its present name dates from the 15th century when, for the carnival, riderless horses would race down its length in a 'corsa dei barbari'. It was well suited for this being the only perfectly straight road in an area characterised by meandering tight alleys and small piazzas. 
  
 Before that (from circa 220AD) it was known as the 'Via Lata' (broad way) - and spanning 10 metres wide for the ancients this was indeed a wide road. It was part of a much longer road that stretched as far as the Adriatic. What remains today is 1.5kms long, from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo, and straight as a die. What was considered with awe in ancient times is considered with irritation in current times. 

 It takes little to block it. The road is part of the designated ZTL (zona traffico limitato) but not included in the limited traffic are the daily buses, taxis and parliamentary vehicles that run up and down it in continuation. 

I start my walk as I alight from the bus opposite the imposing facade of the Palazzo Doria- Pamphilj. Ten years ago,  I worked for a school which had its headquarters on the fifth floor of the building. I'd enter through an imposing door and start my long slow climb up. There was a lift. Its coffin-like dimensions and slowness made me imagine a bent old man somewhere in the cellars of the building cranking a rusty handle round and round a pulley which lifted the box up into the heights of the palazzo.

I always went up the stairs, two narrow flights past the entrance to a private university. Then out of nowhere a large, rather grand looking marble stairway appeared but the worn, shallow steps were slippery. I would pause at the top of them beside the entrance to a legal office and peer down into a splendid courtyard. The last leg involved a very narrow flight of fifteen steps past a private apartment where an elderly man would walk on the narrow landing with his zimmer frame up and down, up and down. Finally. a bit out of breathe I would climb the last steps to the locked glass door of the school where almost every time someone would ask, "but why didn't you use the lift?"

Today I notice that the courtyard is open so I go in and have a look at the orange and lemon trees and the famed renaissance colonnade before resuming my walk up the street past the church of Santa Maria in Via Lata which in the fifteenth century operated a soup kitchen for the needy and onwards past the church of San Marcello on its small piazza.  

 Down side alleys tables are set up, some are still occupied by a few late diners though this being the heart of touristic Rome most of the restaurants offer non-stop service from lunch through to dinner with low quality over-priced fare.

I came out early so as to avoid the passegiata - starting around 4pm when Italians come out to stretch their legs after lunch and walk off some of the pasta. The Corso is not well-designed for crowds of people. The pavements are narrow and the herds of bovine-like tourists clog it up. They move forward in clusters clad in their identical red T-shirts or sporting a baseball cap or following a yellow flag held aloft by their guide.

 Locals push around them or through them as they try to get on with their daily business: civil servants going from building to building, shop assistants on a break, waiters bearing aloft trays of food and swearing beneath their breathe in the best romanaccio as yet another careless tourist cuts in front of them...

If the street has a middle point it would be around the height of Piazza Colonna with the victory column of Marcus Aurelius standing proud with its depictions in relief of the Danubian or Marcomannic wars. Closer to the road is a fountain. Gulls often perch on it. 

Opposite the Piazza is the restored art nouveau Galleria Colonna. It was renamed Galleria Alberto Sordi after a famous Roman actor who died in 2003 the year the gallery was re-opened in its present incarnation as a shopping mall.

After a brief foray into the gallery, to a large book shop, I continue up the Corso towards Piazza del Popolo. I pass by Palazzo Chigi home of the Prime Minister.

It was bought by the Chigi family, from the Aldobrandini who had run out of money and left it unfinished. The Chigi finished the job. Pope Alexander VII (a Chigi) was  responsible for tidying up Piazza Colonna and much of the Corso which up until then had been semi-permanent building site. 

  Since  the 15th century the Corso had been a  fashionable place for new building projects funded by either the church or the nobility. Churches sprung up mushroom like and nobles erected palaces. Then as now, resources would run out and a once sprightly building site would be reduced to disuse and abandonment.

 As I walk down the road past the entrance to the upmarket Via Condotti with a distant glimpse of the Spanish Steps, past the impressive Fendi building adjacent to a vast H&M retailer, I notice the many signs affixed to facades telling people of illustrious guests, or the names of the palazzi, or old faint letters which describe a past occupation for the building. The history of the road is there for all to read.

The old Metropolitan cinema, where I used to see films in original version, is still there, all boarded up. Numerous shops have come and gone. 

The church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli is hidden under scaffolding but its 'twin' Santa Maria in MonteSanto has come out of wraps looking cleaner. They are both 17th century baroque churches.

I stand at the end of the street and look northwards just making out through the crowd which is growing by the minute, the white Victor Emmanuel monument, 1,5 kilometres away.