Rome

If you love to travel or at most aspire to, you’ve no doubt at least heard or know about the beautiful city of Rome. In this great city of Italy, modern and old, past and present go side by side all the time. If you’ve ever had the luxury to travel to Rome, Italy, you’ve successfully ventured into the world’s largest open air museum. The alluring city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula and is the most populated city in the nation with over 2.7 million residents. Rome remains as one of the most photogenic cities cities considering the exquisite sites it presents including: The Vatican, the Trevi Fountain, St. Peter’s Square and the Colosseum just to name a few. Let’s examine the underlying framework of this seemingly statuesque city.

Education

Rest assured that Rome is not lacking in the department of higher education both nation-wide and in the major international centre — containing numerous academies, colleges and universities for its citizens. In fact, according to the City Brands Index, Rome is considered the world’s second most historically, educationally and culturally interesting and beautiful city. The city proudly boasts a large variety of academies and colleges and has remained to this day a major worldwide intellectual and educational center.

La Sapienza University in Rome (it’s first university) is Europe’s largest, educating approximately 140,000 students — ranking as Europe’s 33rd best university back in 2005 and now stands among the top 50 in Europe and the world’s 150 best colleges. It doesn’t stop there, Rome also provides its citizens and tourists access to a variety of specialized libraries and not to mention the Vatican Library, one of the oldest and most important libraries in the world — containing more than 75,000 codices from throughout history.

Climate

The people of Rome, Italy enjoy a typical Mediterranean climate, typical of the coasts of Italy. The spring and autumn in the city are mild to warm, and their ottobrate as they’d like to call it (“beautiful October days”) are widely known as being sunny and warm. In general however, the summer season lasts for roughly 6 months (from May to October). The months of April and November are considered transitional although they do experience occasional temperatures above 20 °C (68 °F). Naturally, winter lasts between December to March and are the coldest months in the city — with average temperatures of 13.1 °C (55.6 °F) during the day and 4.7 °C (40.5 °F) at night.

Main Attractions

From one look at the majestic city, it is clearly visible that Rome is neither lacking in beauty nor in its presentation of fabulous historical landmarks. It’s no wonder that this ancient city of age 2700 years, is rated the 28th most important global city and is the 11th most visited city in the world and the most popular tourist attraction in Italy. Some of the top tourist rated highlights include:

Colosseum: Probably the most famous building of the Roman Empire which accommodated more than 55,000 spectators and played host countless games featuring gladiators and wild animals.

Trevi Fountain: Rome’s most spectacular fountain — the large 18th century fountain occupies a small square which is usually packed with tourists.

Circus Maximus: An arena specifically built for wildly popular chariot races. It is the largest stadium in ancient Rome, with a seating capacity of over 250,000 people.

St. Peter’s Basilica: The largest church in the world and the center of Christianity. The evident luxury of its interior bears testimony to the wealth of the catholic church in the 16th century.

Demographics

Rome was at its height during the rule of Emperor Augustus, where it was the largest city in the world with a population of about one million people. After the fall of the Roman Empire however, the population started to steadily decrease until the Renaissance. In regards to the ethnic distribution in the city, the latest statistics by ISTAT report that approximately 9.5% of the population consists of non-Italians. The bulk of immigrants are from various other European nations (including but not limited to Romanians, Polish, Turkish and Albanians).

Similar to the rest of Italy, the city of Rome is predominantly Roman Catholic but in recent years, there has been a slight rise in Islam due to the migration of immigrants from North Africa and other Middle Eastern countries.