Rome is so full of treasures that I have decided to create two pages of photos to show off its highlights. See the map just below.

In this first page of photos, I will concentrate on the Tiber itself and on the sites to the West of the river. These include the Vatican City, with Saint Peter's Cathedral and the Vatican Museums; the Castel Sant'Angelo, and the Trastevere District near the Isola Tiberina (which you can see just above the letters "Trastevere-Mastai").

On page 2 we will visit the best sites East of the Tiber, in a circle around Roma Termini, the main railway station of Rome.

In this photo we are facing South.

You can get here by bus from Roma Termini, or catch a tram from Piazza Venezia.

I took a photo of this same house barge nine years ago and I notice that it has since become a floating garden.

The building itself is the Palace of Justice, Rome.

(This photo was actually taken in 2009. I took over 2000 photos of Rome on that particular trip and have only published a few them before. The Palace of Justice hasn't changed much in that time.)

The fortifications around the cylinder were erected in 401 AD when the area was converted into a military fortress.

This "City within a City", or "State within a State", came into existence in 1929, when the Italian Government, led by Benito Mussolini, and the Catholic Church signed the Lateran Treaty.

For more than a thousand years, until the 19th Century, the Popes were secular rulers of a large chunk of land in the centre of what we now call Italy.

After Garibaldi led the movement to unify Italy, and after some resistance by the Papal Forces, the Popes finally lost control of all their Papal States and were virtually confined within the walls of the Vatican, until the Lateran Treaty was signed in 1929.

The modern Catholic Church now concentrates solely on spiritual matters.

The facade was designed by Maderno and completed in 1612. The massive dome was first designed by Bramante and then redesigned by Michelangelo.

The present building replaced a much older Basilica which was constructed on this site in about 400 AD.

Since the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, they have been trained in unarmed combat and the use of small arms.

Recruits to the guards must be unmarried Swiss Catholics between the ages of 19 and 30, and they must have completed basic military training in the Swiss Armed Forces.

It is a prefiguration, employing the familiar subject of the Madonna and Child.

It was supposed to sit over the tomb of Saint Peter, who was said to have been crucified upside down in Rome during the reign of the Emperor Nero.

However, I stayed in a Convent "Hotel" right next to the Museum entrance in 2009, and I spent almost two whole days in the Vatican Museum itself. I haven't shown the following photos from the Museum publically since then. I trust that the images I am showing now are still relevant today!

A fire broke out here in 847 and legend has it that Pope Leo IV contained it with his benediction. One can just make out the miracle-working Pope below the arch at the very top of the painting.

This subject was very popular in the Middle Ages. Byzantine Art at that time avoided the notion of "scientific perspective". When Islam was on the rise, it maintained the Jewish tradition of not depicting God or indeed all humans in art.

By that time, Christianity had become largely Greek and Roman, and the Christians then were not too keen to abandon their use of the human figure in church decorations. Christianity was bitterly divided by the Iconoclastic Controversy. A compromise was reached whereby depictions of God and humans was permitted, but there would not be the use of the kind of perspective which had been invented by the Pagan Greeks. The images would be flat, and the relative size of figures would be determined by the religious importance of the persons depicted, rather than by their position in 3 dimensional space.

God would be shown as the largest figure, and generally placed at the top of the image; followed by the Saints and Angels. The sinners being forced into hell would be depicted as the tiniest figures, usually at the bottom right of the painting or mosaic, at the left hand of God.

On the one hand he pays homage to the Byzantine tradition so that the sinners at the bottom right of the painting are slightly smaller than the Judgemental Christ, even though they may be closer to the spectator. There is also a hint of "scientific perspective" in the figures floating behind Jesus.

All the figures floating in the sky are conveniently standing on clouds, hinting at the notion of physical gravity. There are a couple of figures who are actually slightly larger than the Christ. Of course, the figures themselves are not flat, and are shown as 3 dimensional objects, with the kind of vigorous controposto which is the hallmark of Michelangelo's painting.

The image of the Last Judgement is so powerful that we take for granted all the painterly contradictions inherent in the composition.

Jesus Christ, the Judge of Last Resort, is depicted as a muscular and powerful figure.

I was amazed at the difference in the brightness and vivacity of the colours in contrast to the time when I arrived in Europe in the early 1960s, and saw the actual paintings for the very first time. They were then dull and dirty with age. They are now bursting with life.

If Caravaggio is considered the quintessential Baroque artist, I strongly suspect that Raphael's Transfiguration was the painting which was the very beginning of the Baroque style in painting. My hypothesis is that Raphael fused two great ideas which he borrowed from Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. From Michelangelo he took the dynamism of controposto, and from Leonardo he took the idea of "sfumato", which in Italian is derived from "fumo" or smoke. This became known as chiaroscuro. The lower half of the Transfiguration is pure Baroque.

There is a story that Raphael bribed a nightwatchman to let him sneak into the Sistine Chapel to see what the highly secretive Michelangelo was painting.

Legend has it that Michelangelo got rid of his assistants and worked on the Sistine frescoes on his own, which would have been a very laborious thing to do, given the nature of fresco painting. In those days, artists jealously guarded their ideas and techniques from their rivals.

Incidentally, there is a copy of the Transfiguration in Saint Peter's Basilica.