Rome

Rome is not a museum, though it is often mistaken for one. It is a functioning capital where buses idle beside triumphal arches and washing lines hang above two-thousand-year-old brickwork. The Roman Forum and Colosseum are not the backdrop to daily life here; they are woven into its commute.

The city's shape is the result of never quite starting over. Successive centuries built on the ruins of the last rather than clearing them away, so a Renaissance palazzo might sit on a medieval tower that sits on a Roman temple. This vertical layering is Rome's real subject, more than any single monument.

Two Romes overlap. There is papal Rome, radiating from the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel, all ceremony and closed courtyards. And there is republican, imperial Rome — the Forum, the piazzas, the markets — which answers to older, rowdier instincts. Both are still active; neither has retired.

What holds it together is an unbothered confidence. Romans are not trying to impress you with the Colosseum any more than Londoners are trying to impress you with the Thames. It is simply there, and so are they, and the two have long since stopped noticing each other.