ROME by Robert Hughes

ROME

This history of Rome is as much about the glory that is Robert Hughes as the wonders of the Colosseum, St Peter's or the Piazza Navona.

Hughes, with Barry Humphries, is the most significant of the fêted group of media-ravenous Australians who colonised Sixties England; and as the art critic with the fiercest stare in the business it is Hughes and not Sir Les Paterson who is Australia's pre-eminent cultural attaché. It has taken this national monument, the façade a little weatherbeaten now, more than 50 years but he has turned at last to the city that made him what he is.

Hughes arrived in Rome in 1959 aged 20, "nuts" about the idea of it: he had never seen classical architecture, public statuary or, outside the pages of a book, many paintings. For him, as for all first-time visitors, the city was a daunting entity - a dense accretion of history, art and symbolism - but it was also a chance to see "the real thing in the real place". It is this pared-down definition that underlies his approach to Rome's past.

Hughes is what the milordi of the 18th century on their Grand Tour would call a bear leader; a guide and chaperone who shows his wide-eyed charges not just the expected sights but also the hidden and quirky spots, with a bit of moral guidance added too. A great city, he notes, "is not mere raw size but the amount of care, detail, observation and love precipitated in its contents" and, in one long, smooth chronological sweep, he sets about describing each element and the men and forces that brought them about.

Hughes begins his informative and entertainingly opinionated tour with Rome's mythical founders Romulus and Remus and he works his way briskly through the Roman kings and the republic before himself following Suetonius for his punchy account of the deeds and misdeeds of the emperors.

Augustus, who famously "found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble", is something of a hero figure. Like all good historians Hughes is not afraid to let his admiration show: the Pantheon, built around AD125 by Hadrian, which still has the largest unreinforced dome in the world, is a thing of wonder; the Roman road system which spread 120,000 kilometres is another.

With Christian Rome, at least after the papacy's economically disastrous sojourn in Avignon from 1305 to 1376 - the effect of which he likens to Los Angeles losing the entertainment business - he is even more spoilt for choice. There are, of course, Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, Borromini's churches, Caravaggio's transformative paintings (an artist who "thrashed about in Seicento Rome like a shark in a net"), Canova's sculptures and, above all, Bernini, "the marble megaphone of papal orthodoxy".

If there is one object that sums up the whole city and its distinctive genius it is the baldacchino, that extraordinary bronze fantasy wrought by Bernini from 1623-34 to stand over the tomb of St Peter at the heart of the greatest church in Christendom. Neither fully architecture nor sculpture, this towering metal canopy, commissioned by Urban VIII, is quintessential Rome: it reuses the past (its bronze was stripped from the roof of the Pantheon); it is a monument to ambition; it inspires awe; it is overwhelmingly theatrical; it is a physical statement of the power of the Catholic Church and even more so a statement of the power of art. It sets Hughes buzzing.

He is witheringly frank about the artistic sterility that struck the once virile city in the 19th and 20th centuries and which shows no sign of ending. Silvio Berlusconi's TV stations with their "cushion-lipped, big-breasted" presenters are the bread and circuses of modern Italy. Indeed, there is something of the toga-clad republican about Hughes as he fires out bracing polemics on everything from why there will never be another Rubens to the horror of visiting the Sistine Chapel ("the most trying conditions under which I have ever looked at art"). An honorary citizen he may be but Hughes has a claim to be the noblest (modern) Roman of them all.