‘Rome is not a pretty city’- it’s a sentiment I would agree with to an extent, but not what I expect to hear from Robert Adam - an architect well known for his appreciation of traditional and classical architectural styles. The villa Borghese gardens were particularly grim, he remembers, full of wooden fences which the sex workers would burn for warmth. He is clear though, Rome is not what you expect, but so much more.

Adam spent a year in Rome in 1972 as a British School at Rome scholar. It was a perhaps unexpected step for Adam, who had been struggling against his University of Westminster tutor to follow his passion for traditional architecture in the late 1960s. ‘They tried to fail me’. On the suggestion of his external examiner (who had insisted he pass), he applied for the BSR scholarship and made it to Rome, where he was introduced to full classical architecture for the first time, which ‘is a much less static style than people suggest’.

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