La sciura: perhaps you’ve heard of her. Derived from an old Lombard word for “lady” or “ma’am”, a sciura is the embodiment of Milanese élan: tailored, understated, bourgeois-slim and usually of a certain age – “a woman whose elegant air and extensive designer closet propel her through daily life with unmistakable glamour”, as Harper’s Bazaar declared in an article titled “Here’s Why We’re in the Era of Sciura Style”.
Rome, a city that in its 2,778-year history has begotten a few notable eras, is not in its sciura one. That woman doesn’t have the purchase here that she does up in buttoned-up Lombardy. Milan is Milan; Rome is Eternal, and its history anchors and informs the way people live, and look, in very different ways. “When you look at the Forum, you can only understand it as a site that has been built over again and again,” says James Finnegan, one half of the photography duo Hill & Aubrey, who shot the images here. “You’re looking at 1,000 years of history built atop one another.” Take the voluptuous 17th-century San Lorenzo in Miranda, which rises up from the ruins of a 7th-century basilica, which was itself built on top of the 2nd-century BC Temple of Antonino and Faustina. Such practical palimpsests are the quintessence of Rome.
Dries Van Noten silk-mix shirt, €895, and textured jacquard trousers, €675. Loro Piana brass and enamel earrings, £585. Fendi brass belt, £810
The Porticus Octaviae