Rome Stories: European leaders' homage to Rome is built in less than a day

In less than two weeks the entire continent of Europe, or as many of its leaders as you can cram into one large Roman room (28 heads of state or government at the last count), arrives in Rome to pay one of its perennial acts of homage to the mother of European cities.

In less than two weeks the entire continent of Europe, or as many of its leaders as you can cram into one large Roman room (28 heads of state or government at the last count), arrives in Rome to pay one of its perennial acts of homage to the mother of European cities.

They arrive on the morning of 29 October, they depart en masse after lunch the same day, the new European Constitution signed by all, the somewhat perfunctory act of filial piety duly performed.

It's a bit sad, really, the perfunctory aspect. They might at least stay overnight. After all, this is the stuff of history if anything is. For it was exactly in this place in Rome, in this very same overpowering room in Michelangelo's Campidoglio, the most fabulous Town Hall in the world, that the first Treaty of Rome was signed on 25 March 1956, setting the European project in motion.

So there should have been a party. A proper beano, so Silvio Berlusconi and his rival in political exhibitionism, Rome's Mayor, Walter Veltroni, a former Communist, could strut their stuff and battle for the limelight. Instead there will just be lunch, then it's straight back on the plane.

And Romans of the gloomier sort will wag their heads and say, well, we deserve no better. Some of the national delegations will eat lunch on the balcony of the Hotel Forum, which looks out over the ancient forum's ruins. "It looks like Ground Zero", enthused a friend recently after a tour of those ruins, all that was left of the great city after the sack of Rome in 1527. And so it does - only they never got around to asking the contemporary equivalent of Daniel Libeskind to do something about it. They've been padding about in the ruins ever since.

It's probably just as well the heads of state don't linger. They could get gloomy, too.

¿ The countryside north of Rome is Italy's secret. Thank God it's not already full of Brits, but why isn't it? Unspoiled and within easy reach of the capital, for centuries the jealously protected back garden of the Popes, it's as nice as Tuscany. It even has its own fox hunt.

Of course, no real foxes are involved. It's a transported Irish drag hunt. Almost extinct in Ireland, this simulated hunt was introduced seven years ago and the season started last Saturday. But it turns out that Lord Chesterfield first brought the sport to these hills in 1836.

¿ Italy is one of those countries, like Japan but unlike Britain, where they pay attention to the things foreigners say about them. Tobias Jones found this out when he wrote an article in the Financial Times last year detailing the mediocrity of Italian television, where, as he charged, "soft porn has replaced hard news". Jones had already touched nerves with his book The Dark Heart of Italy, but this article hurt. Maurizio Gasparri, the Communications Minister, spat back that it was "a mixture of sanctimony and Marxism, worthy of a country where there is still a section of parliament where men wear wigs".

But now Italy has given Jones his very own slot on its benighted small screen. He is hosting a series on Rai 3, the left-wing corner of the national broadcaster, called The Rich of Italy. He said of his success in obtaining food from the hand he had recently bitten: "When you're a freelance you get work where you can find it."