When you grow up in Rome, your relationship with the city is a little different from that of a tourist. There are places you never visit because you already know them. You cross certain piazzas simply because you are on your way somewhere else. You can walk past a fountain that people have travelled from all over the world to see simply because you are on your way to buy bread.

I grew up in Ostiense. I spent much of my early youth in Monti and today I live around Via Vittorio Veneto. These three neighbourhoods have become three different windows onto three different eras of Rome for me. Ostiense was the Rome of my childhood: more industrial, a little rough around the edges, but with its own rhythm. Monti was where, as a teenager, I began to find my way into the city. And Via Veneto, where I live now, is the closest I have come to the Rome my grandmother used to describe.

My grandmother's Rome was the Rome of la dolce vita. But the Dolce Vita she remembered was not the version we see on postcards today. She spoke far less about Anita Ekberg, the paparazzi or the Trevi Fountain. In her memory, Rome was made up of well-dressed women, long lunches, tailors and the fashion houses around Via Veneto.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rome really was an international stage. Cinecittà was hosting Hollywood productions, while Via Veneto became a meeting place for the film world, aristocracy and the newly wealthy. At the same time, names such as the Fontana sisters, Schuberth, Ferdinandi and Litrico were helping to establish Rome's couture identity.

My grandmother remembered the clothes, not the people. The cut of a jacket. A woman's hat. A man's shoes. I suppose that is the difference between truly remembering a city and simply watching it.

As Monti changed

When I was young, Monti was not the “cool neighbourhood” it is today. There were workshops, mechanics, old apartment buildings and bars where people had known one another for years. It was remarkably close to the centre, yet it managed to preserve a world of its own.

Today, Monti has galleries, natural-wine bars, design shops and good restaurants. Many of them have brought a new energy to the neighbourhood. But it is still slightly strange to watch the area being marketed as “authentic Rome”. Because authenticity is usually what exists before anyone gives it a name.

Even so, the best parts of Monti have not disappeared completely. Go early enough and you can still see shutters being opened and shopkeepers putting chairs out on the pavement. Take a side street and keep walking, and you may still come across a shop that the new Rome has not quite reached yet.

That is part of Rome's beauty. The city is never entirely old. But it is never entirely new either.

Why does a Roman go to the historic centre?

For tourists, the historic centre is a destination. For Romans, it is often simply somewhere to pass through. You have a meeting. You are meeting a friend. You need to buy a book. You have to pick up a shirt. Or perhaps you want to stop by a shop you have known for years.

So a Roman might walk past the Pantheon without looking at it. It is not indifference. It is familiarity. Passing one of the world's most beautiful buildings on your way to work inevitably gives you a different relationship with it.

But Sunday mornings are different. I like walking into the historic centre when the city has not quite woken up. Not to visit the Trevi Fountain, but to wander through the streets behind the Pantheon, have a coffee in a small café and look into shop windows.

A tourist comes to Rome to see it. A Roman is in Rome because they have somewhere to go. The difference may seem small, but it completely changes the way the city feels.

The little shop beside the Pantheon

One of the places I never like to pass without stopping is Cartoleria Pantheon, on Via della Maddalena. This small stationery shop has been here for more than 110 years, selling notebooks, paper, diaries and leather accessories.

Usually, I do not need anything when I walk in. That is rather the point. It is one of those places where you can still pick up a notebook, feel the paper between your fingers and choose a blank page for something you might want to write. In a world of phones, apps and digital calendars, it feels slightly old-fashioned. That is why I like it.

Tourists stop to look at the Pantheon. Sometimes I stop to go into the stationery shop. Perhaps this is one way of understanding Rome: the important things are not always the grand ones.

La Bottega del Marmoraro, on Via Margutta, carries much the same feeling. It is a marble workshop that has been run by generations of the same family, filled with hand-carved inscriptions, stone plaques and fragments of Rome's everyday visual language.

Sometimes Rome's real character reveals itself more clearly in places like these than it does at the Colosseum. Because Rome has never only built monuments. It has always repaired things, reused them, restored them and transformed them.

That small culture of craftsmanship — the person who repairs a pair of shoes instead of throwing them away, reuses an old frame or works a piece of marble again — is still alive in the city.

Where did my grandmother's Rome go?

La Dolce Vita is gone. The old crowds of Via Veneto have changed. Some of the fashion houses of that era disappeared; others became part of an international luxury industry. Cinecittà is still there, but Rome no longer occupies quite the same position as the capital of world cinema.

And perhaps that is a good thing. Because cities do not live in the past.

One of the most beautiful things about Rome is that it has never been completely overwhelmed by its own mythology. Walking along Via Veneto today, I do not see the women my grandmother described. But sometimes the jacket of an elderly man sitting at a café, a woman's shoes or the bag she carries on her way to lunch will remind me of that Rome.

And for a moment, the two cities — hers and mine — seem to occupy the same street.