As the fringe of the Eternal City undergoes a building boom, all roads are leading from the ancient center. Mimi Murphy shows the way to Rome's emerging outskirts

I returned to the city to live in 1980, and what a difference the two and a half decades since that time have made. For better or for worse, those typical trattorias with red-and-white-checked tablecloths, historic cafés with red-velvet banquettes, and Baroque hotels with rich damask drapes appear to be on the endangered list, supplanted by hip eateries serving haute Italian and by ultramodern boutique accommodations. To be sure, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and Trevi Fountain will always be there, protected by the conservationists of the city and the world, but the spirit of Rome is changing. The Eternal City is waking up to the twenty-first century. When I hear that song now, I think that it's Rome saying good-bye—not me.

The catalyst for the current modernization was the Vatican's millennial-year Grand Jubilee, which was expected to attract some thirty million pilgrims and tourists. Not much had been done to improve the city's infrastructure since the 1960 Olympic Games, so a citywide planning scheme, the first in more than forty years, began to take shape. This being Rome, some of the more ambitious structures weren't ready until recently. The discovery of an ancient villa during the excavation for Renzo Piano's Parco della Musica, for instance, set the project back a year, and it took two years just to develop the materials to realize Richard Meier's soaring Jubilee Church. But the momentum had begun.

Then in May 2001, Walter Veltroni, Italy's former deputy prime minister and minister of culture, was elected mayor. His can-do attitude when it came to cutting through the stultifying bureaucracy rocked the sleepy city to its classical core. "Our plan is to make the most of the historic character of the city, safeguarding it and making it live together with the city's modernity," proclaimed the mayor. "There is no conflict between the two."

Despite Rome's budget-breaking obligation to maintain the world's richest concentration of historic art treasures, Veltroni aggressively commissioned contemporary architectural icons to complement the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque monuments. The most notable result has been an explosion of contemporary cultural sites, with four music venues in Piano's Parco della Musica alone, along with new outlets for architecture, cinema, theater, and jazz. Then, too, this movement toward the contemporary has trickled down to the world of commerce. The latest and hottest hotels, restaurants, and cafés, in newly trendy neighborhoods, prefer cutting-edge design to picturesque traditional. This is great news for those who live in Rome or visit often, but can be disconcerting for visitors whose reference remains TV replays of Three Coins in a Fountain and Roman Holiday.