The streets of Rome were overcrowded on 29 June 2026, as if the entire city had taken to the streets to celebrate Saints Peter and Paul, the city’s patron saints and founders of the new Christian Rome. Despite the hot and humid weather, Rome breathed with youthful energy, hosting social and spiritual gatherings both day and night to commemorate the martyrdom of Saints Peter and Paul. Emperor Nero crucified Saint Peter in the Vatican, while Saint Paul was beheaded with a sword. Nero also persecuted many others during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 CE, in an effort to control the growing Christian population. Numerous stories and mythologies surround these events—the persecution, the martyrdom, and the subsequent celebrations.
Many people were also out in the streets to witness the famous fireworks display, known as the Girandola, which lit up the sky above Castel Sant’Angelo. A sea of people flooded the Paul’s Route and Peter’s Route, both leading toward St. Peter’s Square, where the two saints were buried “Outside the Walls.” This annual public ritual is said to date back to ancient Christian times. The public holidays, religious ceremonies, fireworks, infiorata floral displays, and leisure-seeking holidaymakers together create a magnificent day and a magical night out in Rome.
Everything ancient defines Rome, and the pleasures found among its old ruins and poignant remains bring smiles to the city’s visitors. Rome carries within it both the grandeur and ingenuity of human achievements, as well as the ravages of rulers and the destructive power of human evil. The monuments of lost civilisations, the fall of empires, and the fates of emperors reveal the rich cultural, social, political, and economic history and heritage of Rome as a city. The ruins and remains of the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hills, the piazzas, the museums, the Pantheon, the many churches, and the grandeur of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City are not merely landmarks of the city or monuments of the past—they are depositories of human creativity and labour in the making of Rome, both past and present.
The preservation of Rome and its present is crucial for future generations to understand the different lessons drawn from history—the innovations of the working class, the limits of empires, the fragility of emperors, and the legacies of timeless civilisations. The decay of all powers of history documented in the ruins and remains of Rome offers profound lessons on continuity and change in the graveyards of the city. It also reveals that adaptability, multiculturalism, human unity, and cultural integration are the four pillars of survival and sustainability.
However, these lessons of history are buried under the ruinous and reactionary propaganda of white supremacist ruling classes and their rent-seeking approach to Rome and its tourist economy. In this context, the market, religion, and the state collaborate to create legitimacy while undermining the democratic spirit of the people in Rome and across the country. Contemporary Italy is under siege by the religious and capitalist forces and people are suffering from various forms of marginalisaiton and exploitation from local to national level.
Christian democracy is destroying the deepening of democracy in Italy while upholding the interests of all kinds of capitalisms within its Italian, European and international forms. Religion and its stories of sacrifice, emancipation, and martyrdom are used as weapons to domesticate the masses, delaying the revolutionary forces to share shape that seek to lead working people in a revolutionary path of peace and progress. However, the success of the antifascist movement by the working people serves as a reminder that Italians are going to defeat all reactionary, religious, and capitalist forces in order to reclaim their democracy, state, and government. Rome amidst all its ruins and remnants, offers hope for a progressive politics that can reclaim peace, homes, human happiness, and human innovation—the socialist, secular and democratic politics that can defeat the religious capitalist politics that breeds hunger, homelessness, unemployment, and poverty in this city of plenty. The future of Italy and Italians depends on their ability to defeat entrenched troika of religious, fascist and capitalist forces. This reactionary alliance is dangerous for people and their country.
