The city on the Tiber that ruled an empire, became the seat of a universal Church, was sacked and rebuilt multiple times, and remains the most continuously symbolically contested location in the Western world — a place that every subsequent civilization has claimed, imitated, mourned, or defined itself against.
Rome is not a city that had an empire. Rome is an idea that has been using a city as its address for three thousand years. The Caesars, the Popes, Mussolini, and the European Union have all claimed Rome as their origin or their authority. The ruins are not ruins — they are arguments, still active.