Rome

The city that gave its name to an empire, a legal system, a church and a calendar, and the only one of those to outlast all of them. Rome was founded on hills above a ford on the Tiber, far enough inland to be safe from raiders and close enough to the sea to trade, and its own tradition dated that to 753 BC. It was ruled by kings, expelled the last of them around 509 BC, and spent the next four and a half centuries as a republic governed by annually elected magistrates and a senate. That constitution was designed for a city-state and broke under the strain of governing a Mediterranean empire: the civil wars of the first century BC ended with Augustus keeping republican forms while holding all real power. At its height the city held perhaps a million people, the largest in the world and not matched in Europe again until London in the nineteenth century. It fed them with grain shipped from Egypt and Africa and a public dole, and supplied them with water through eleven aqueducts. Its lasting export was not conquest but law: Roman civil law underlies most legal systems in continental Europe and Latin America today. The western empire ended in 476 but the city continued as the seat of the papacy, which inherited its administrative habits and its claim to universality. Rome was sacked in 410, 455 and 1527. It became capital of a united Italy only in 1870. Its historic centre is a World Heritage site. The modern city has around 2.8 million people. The city sits on the Tiber some 25 kilometres from the sea.

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