Diversely Global Rome - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 10

according to another index, elaborated by the Globalization and world Cities
study Group and Network at loughborough university, Rome is a beta+ city
(while milan is an alpha city, on a scale which is sorted into categories from al-
pha++, a label reserved for london and New York, to gamma-world cities). it is
not our aim here to criticize the methodology behind such measurements. They
make sense for certain purposes, and they certainly do indicate a degree of con-
nectedness within the economic, political, and infrastructural realms, the global
power flows in and out of cities. but there is at least one dimension or one vari-
able that such indexes do not consider and which has a huge pertinence for a city
like Rome: the degree to which a city is imagined and dreamed about by people
around the globe.
such imaginings can hardly be quantified, but they are certainly real enough
and they create their own realities which are both cultural and economic. They
become economic because the images of Rome are popularized via commercials
and, especially, films, many of which are american produced and feed into tour-
ism and various forms of consumption.
The global image of Rome is so pervasive in the social history of the west
(and not only) that it has been equated to a template: “in its many historical
incarnations, Rome more than any other single city has provided models and
templates—architecturally, urbanistically, ideologically, and narratively—for the
design and form of capital cities in the west” (atkinson and Cosgrove 1998, 30).
Rome was a global brand long before anybody was aware of globalization. suf-
fice to recall how many times an emerging political power named itself “the new
Rome,” from Constantinople, to moscow, to berlin under Nazism, not to men-
tion the self-mimicry of Rome under fascism. The worldwide presence of Roman
political heritage is evident in common terminology such as senate, parliament,
or capitol (hill), words that refer to political institutions and even localities of
classical Rome.
Thanks to movements like the beaux-arts style, Rome has had a central role
in a process of enduring aesthetic uniformity that started with the Renaissance.
by imitating the late eighteenth-century neoclassicism, which mimicked the
Renaissance, that in turn was copying classic Roman style, beaux-arts domi-
nated most official construction from the second half of the nineteenth century
to the first half of the twentieth, making Roman architecture visible and known
throughout the western (and westernized) world (atkinson and Cosgrove 1998).
with religious institutions as pilgrimage sites since early Christian times
and their social and economic harnessing by political power since the fourteenth
century through the invention of the Jubilee tradition, Rome (alongside other
religious centers with a comparable artistic history) has been crucial to the devel-
opment of modern tourism, which is now considered one of the main side effects
of (economic) globalization.