Walking Tours in Rome
Rome — Ancient to Renaissance Walk
From the blood-soaked arena of the Colosseum to the flower market where a philosopher was burned alive, this walk covers two thousand years of history in a single morning. You'll stand where emperors lived, where the Roman Republic died, where Michelangelo redesigned a hilltop, and where Bernini trolled his rivals with a stone elephant. Ancient Rome, Renaissance Rome, and the living city — all in one epic walk.
Rome — Heart of Rome
A 16-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit A Walk Through the Heart of Rome, Palazzo Farnese, To Victor Emanuel II Boulevard , and Statue Called Pasquino — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — Jewish Ghetto
A 8-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit Jewish Ghetto, Santa Maria della Pieta, Synagogue, Jewish Museum, and Largo 16 Ottobre — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — Ostia Antica
A 13-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit Ostia Antica, Necropolis, Porta Romana Gate, and Republican Warehouses — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — Sistine Chapel
A 9-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit The Sistine Chapel, Entering the Chapel, Creation of Man, and Nine Scenes from Genesis — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — St. Peter's Basilica
A 17-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit St. Peter’s Basilica, St. Peter’s Square, The Pope’s World, and Vatican City — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — The Colosseum
A 11-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit Roman Colosseum, Circling the Colosseum's Exterior, View of the Arena, and Gladiator Games — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — The Pantheon
A 9-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit The Roman Pantheon, Portico, Interior: Under the Dome, and Main Altar — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — The Roman Forum
A 16-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit Roman Forum, Arch of Titus, Rome in a Nutshell, and Basilica of Constantine — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — Trastevere
A 7-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit A Trastevere Walk, Piazza in Piscinula, Trastevere's Back Lanes, and Church of Saint Cecilia — with narrated stories at every stop.
Rome — Vatican Museums
A guided tour of Rome — Vatican Museums in Italy with 14 stops. Highlights include The Vatican Museums, Apollo Belvedere, and Laocoön.
Rome — Vatican Pinacoteca
A 13-stop walking tour through the heart of Italy. Visit Vatican Pinacoteca , Niccolò: Last Judgment, Giotto: Stefaneschi Triptych, and Melozzo: Angel Musicians — with narrated stories at every stop.
30 Landmarks in Rome
Appian Way
Via Appia Antica, 00179 Roma
This road is twenty-three hundred years old, and you can still walk on the original stones. The Via Appia was begun in 312 BC by the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, and the Romans called it the Regina Viarum — the Queen of Roads. It ran from Rome to Brindisi, about five hundred and sixty-nine kilometres, connecting the capital to the southeastern coast and the shipping routes to Greece and Egypt. Sections of the original basalt paving are so precisely fitted that grass still cannot grow between them. The road was built to a standard that would make modern highway engineers envious. It was at least four metres wide — enough for two carts to pass — with gravel shoulders, drainage ditches on both sides, and milestones every Roman mile (about one thousand four hundred and eighty metres). The road surface was cambered to shed water. The foundations went down to a metre deep in some sections: rubble, then gravel, then cement, then fitted stone. This is essentially the same road-building method used today. In 71 BC, after the defeat of Spartacus's slave revolt, six thousand captured slaves were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome. The bodies were left to rot as a warning and were reportedly never taken down. That is over two hundred kilometres of crucifixions. It remains one of the most brutal acts of mass punishment in recorded history, and walking along the road today, past the crumbling tombs and cypress trees, it is impossible not to think about it. The section nearest Rome is now a regional park — the Parco dell'Appia Antica — and on Sundays, parts of it are closed to cars. This is one of the most peaceful walks in the city: ancient tombs lining both sides, umbrella pines overhead, wildflowers pushing through cracks in Roman engineering. The Tomb of Cecilia Metella, about three kilometres out, is a massive cylindrical monument from the first century BC that was converted into a castle in the Middle Ages.
Aventine Keyhole
Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, 00153 Roma
There is a green door on the Aventine Hill, at the top of a quiet, orange-tree-scented lane, and if you put your eye to the keyhole you will see one of the most perfectly composed views in the world. Through the keyhole, framed by a tunnel of precisely trimmed hedges, you see the dome of St Peter's Basilica floating at the end of a green corridor. It is the only place in Rome where you can see three sovereign states at once: Italy (where you are standing), the Priory of the Knights of Malta (the garden beyond the door), and Vatican City (the dome in the distance). The Priory belongs to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which is technically its own sovereign entity — it issues passports, has diplomatic relations with over a hundred countries, and has permanent observer status at the United Nations, despite having no actual territory beyond this compound and a palazzo elsewhere in Rome. It is the world's smallest sovereign entity by population, with about thirteen thousand five hundred members. The gate was designed by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the same artist famous for his etchings of fantastical prisons. The garden behind the door is not open to the public, but the keyhole view has been a Roman insiders' secret for centuries. Nobody is entirely sure if the alignment of the hedges to perfectly frame the dome was intentional from the start or a happy accident that was later cultivated. Either way, it has become one of those rare tourist attractions that actually exceeds expectations — the compression of the telephoto-like view through a tiny aperture makes the dome look impossibly close and impossibly perfect. There is usually a line. It moves fast, because everyone takes about five seconds — you look, you gasp, you step aside. The piazza itself, with its Renaissance walls decorated by Piranesi, is one of the quietest spots in central Rome. Come at sunset when the light hits the dome gold.
Basilica di San Clemente
Via Labicana, 95, 00184 Roma
This place is a layer cake of Roman history, and you can physically walk down through it. The top layer is a twelfth-century basilica with some of the finest medieval mosaics in Rome — a Tree of Life that fills the entire apse, with swirling vines, birds, deer, and tiny human figures, all in vivid gold and colour. It looks like something from an illuminated manuscript blown up to architectural scale. The Cosmatesque floor is original, and the light through the clerestory windows gives the whole space a honeyed warmth. Go down one level and you are in a fourth-century basilica — the original church, which was buried when the current one was built on top of it. The frescoes down here include some of the oldest surviving depictions of everyday medieval life, and they contain what may be the earliest example of written Italian (as opposed to Latin). In one scene, an angry nobleman yells at his servants using what scholars delicately describe as "colloquial language." The exact phrase translates roughly to "Sons of bitches, pull!" Go down another level and you are in a first-century Roman house and a Mithraic temple from the second century. Mithraism was a mystery religion popular with Roman soldiers, centred on the ritual slaughter of a bull. The altar stone is still here, carved with an image of Mithras killing the bull. The tricliniums — dining benches — line the walls where initiates would have reclined during ritual meals. You can hear underground water running — the Cloaca Maxima or a branch of it flows somewhere beneath your feet. Three layers, two thousand years, and the whole thing is run by Irish Dominican friars who have been here since 1667. The combination of medieval mosaics, buried churches, pagan temples, and running water beneath your feet makes this one of the most extraordinary archaeological experiences in Rome, and most tourists walk right past it on their way to the Colosseum, which is two hundred metres away.
Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore, 00100 Roma
Every August fifth, this basilica stages one of Rome's most theatrical annual events: artificial white petals drift down from the ceiling during Mass to commemorate the miraculous snowfall of 358 AD. According to tradition, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius in a dream and told him to build a church on the Esquiline Hill, on the exact spot where snow would fall the next morning — in August. Snow fell, the outline of a church appeared in white on the ground, and the basilica was built. The snow ceremony has been re-enacted every year since the fourteenth century. The ceiling is gilded with what is traditionally identified as the first gold brought back from the Americas — a gift from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to Pope Alexander VI (the Borgia pope) around 1494. Whether this is literally the very first gold from the New World is debated, but the timing is right and the Borgia connection to Spain is well documented. Either way, the coffered ceiling is dazzling and was designed by Giuliano da Sangallo. The mosaics here span over a thousand years. The fifth-century nave mosaics are among the oldest in any Roman church, depicting Old Testament scenes in a late Roman style that still shows classical influence — figures have weight and movement, landscapes have depth. The thirteenth-century apse mosaic by Jacopo Torriti shows the Coronation of the Virgin and is a masterpiece of medieval art, rivalling anything in Ravenna. Beneath the altar is a crystal reliquary containing what the Church claims are five pieces of wood from the manger in Bethlehem — the actual manger where Jesus was born. The relic, called the Sacra Culla, arrived in Rome from the Holy Land in the seventh century. Bernini designed the crypt chapel where it is displayed. Whether you believe the provenance or not, the fact that a strip of ancient wood has been venerated in this specific building for over thirteen hundred years is remarkable.
Baths of Caracalla
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 52, 00153 Roma
These were not baths. Not in any way you understand the word. The Baths of Caracalla were a leisure complex the size of six football fields, accommodating up to eight thousand people simultaneously, and admission was free or nearly free. Built between 212 and 216 AD, the complex included a swimming pool, hot rooms, warm rooms, cold rooms, two gymnasiums, a library with separate Greek and Latin sections, shops, gardens, and what may have been a art gallery. This was a Roman community centre with water features. The engineering is staggering. Heating the baths required burning ten tonnes of wood per day in underground furnaces. The hypocaust system circulated hot air beneath raised marble floors and through hollow walls. Water was supplied by a dedicated branch of the Aqua Marcia aqueduct, stored in a massive cistern that still exists behind the ruins. The main hall — the frigidarium — had cross-vaulted ceilings thirty-three metres high, held up by granite columns from Egypt. When the architects of Pennsylvania Station in New York designed their main hall in 1910, they explicitly modelled it on this room. The floor mosaics were extraordinary. The most famous — a series of muscular athletes in what appears to be boxing, wrestling, and ball-game scenes — were discovered in 1824 and now reside in the Vatican Museums. They are enormous, detailed, and strangely modern-looking. The athletes wear what look remarkably like modern bikinis, which has sparked decades of scholarly debate about Roman sportswear. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound while sitting among these ruins in 1819. The opera season is now held here every summer — La Scala's rival in atmosphere if not acoustics. Watching Aida performed against thirty-metre walls of ancient Roman brick, under a night sky, with bats wheeling overhead, is one of the great cultural experiences available in any European city.
Borghese Gallery
5 Piazzale Scipione Borghese, II Municipio, Rome, 00197, Italy
Cardinal Scipione Borghese was a collector the way a black hole is a collector — everything in the vicinity ended up in his possession, whether it wanted to or not. He had Raphael's Deposition stolen from a church in Perugia in 1608. Just straight up took it. The Pope — his uncle, Paul V — provided the legal cover. He had Cavaliere d'Arpino arrested on false weapons charges specifically so he could confiscate the artist's personal collection of over a hundred paintings. He was an art-loving gangster, and this villa was his treasure house. But the star of the collection is Bernini, and you need to understand that Bernini was twenty-three years old when he carved Apollo and Daphne. Twenty-three. Look at Daphne's fingers turning into laurel branches, bark creeping up her legs, her hair becoming leaves — in marble. Cold, hard, stone, and it looks like it is moving. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, his David, his Rape of Proserpina — all in this gallery — represent what may be the highest technical achievement in the history of sculpture. The fingertips pressing into Proserpina's thigh, where the marble actually looks like it gives way under pressure — no one has ever matched it. The gallery only admits three hundred and sixty people at a time, in two-hour timed slots. This is not just crowd control — it is about preservation. The building itself, the Casino Nobile, was designed as a suburban villa for entertaining, not as a public museum, and its frescoed ceilings and marble floors simply cannot handle unlimited foot traffic. Booking weeks in advance is essentially mandatory. Napoleon's sister, Pauline Borghese, married into the family and posed for Canova's famous reclining sculpture that sits in the entrance hall. When asked if she felt uncomfortable posing semi-nude, she reportedly said there was a fire in the studio to keep her warm. The sculpture is on a rotating wooden base that originally turned mechanically, so viewers could admire it from every angle.
Campo de' Fiori
Piazza Campo De’ Fiori, I Municipio, Rome, 00186, Italy
Every morning this piazza fills with market stalls selling tomatoes, artichokes, fresh pasta, dried chillies, and flowers — it has been a market since at least the 1800s, and the name Campo de' Fiori means "field of flowers." But the hooded bronze figure in the centre staring down at you is a reminder that this was also Rome's main execution ground for centuries, and the man that statue represents was burned alive on this exact spot. Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar, philosopher, and cosmologist who proposed that the stars were distant suns with their own planets, that the universe was infinite, and that other worlds might harbour life. For these and other heresies — including questioning the divinity of Christ and the virginity of Mary — the Roman Inquisition tried him for seven years, then burned him at the stake on February seventeenth, 1600. He reportedly told his judges: "Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it." The statue was erected in 1889, and the Vatican protested every stage of its construction. The market runs every morning except Sunday. The best stalls are the ones that have been there longest — you can tell because they have the prime positions in the centre of the piazza. The dried chilli stands are spectacular: braided ropes of peperoncini hanging from the canopy frames, ground espelette, and a dusty-sweet aroma that hits you from three metres away. By midday the market packs up, the cleaners come through, and the piazza transforms into a restaurant and bar zone that gets progressively louder as the night goes on. This was also a neighbourhood where you could get murdered fairly easily in Renaissance Rome. Caravaggio, who lived nearby, witnessed at least two killings in this piazza. Public executions were social events — spectators brought food and made a day of it. The juxtaposition of those cheerful vegetable stalls with the burned-philosopher vibe is peak Rome: beauty and horror, casually coexisting, for centuries.
Capitoline Museums
1 Piazza del Campidoglio, I Municipio, Rome, 00186, Italy
This is the oldest public museum in the world. In 1471, Pope Sixtus IV donated a collection of bronze statues to the people of Rome — not to the Church, to the people — and displayed them on the Capitoline Hill. The gesture was partly political (he wanted to be popular) and partly a genuine act of cultural generosity that effectively invented the concept of public museums. Every museum on Earth descends from this one. The most famous resident is the Capitoline Wolf — the bronze she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. For centuries, this was considered an Etruscan work from the fifth century BC, a genuine artefact from the founding myth of Rome. Then in 2006, radiocarbon dating revealed the wolf was actually cast in the twelfth or thirteenth century AD. The twin babies were always known to be later additions, from the late fifteenth century, but the wolf itself being medieval was a genuine shock to the art world. The foundational symbol of Rome is a medieval creation. Michelangelo designed the piazza outside, including the trapezoidal layout and the stunning geometric paving pattern based on a twelve-pointed star. He also designed the facades of the buildings on either side. The central equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius is a copy — the original is inside the museum, in a climate-controlled glass room. That original is the only surviving equestrian bronze statue from antiquity, and it survived only because medieval Christians mistakenly believed it depicted Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Every other imperial equestrian bronze was melted down. The underground gallery connecting the two museum buildings passes through the ancient Tabularium — the state archives of Republican Rome — and offers one of the most dramatic views of the Roman Forum through its massive arched windows. You look down from the hill that was the political heart of the Republic at the ruins of the commercial and legal heart below.
Castel Sant'Angelo
50 Lungotevere Castello, XVII Municipio, Rome, 00193, Italy
This building has had more career changes than any structure in Rome. It started as a mausoleum for Emperor Hadrian in 139 AD — the same Hadrian who built the Pantheon and the wall in Britain. It became a military fortress when the Aurelian Walls incorporated it in 401 AD. Then it became a papal castle, a prison, a treasury, and finally a museum. Its current name comes from a legend that the Archangel Michael appeared atop it in 590 AD, sheathing his sword to signal the end of a devastating plague. The bronze angel on top commemorates that vision. A secret elevated passageway — the Passetto di Borgo — connects the castle directly to the Vatican, about eight hundred metres away. It was built as a papal escape route, and it has been used exactly as intended. In 1527, when the army of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V sacked Rome, Pope Clement VII sprinted down the Passetto in his white robes while Swiss Guards died buying him time. One hundred and forty-seven of the one hundred and eighty-nine Swiss Guards were killed in the rearguard action. Clement survived, holed up in the castle for months, and eventually surrendered. The prison cells here held some notable inmates. Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance goldsmith and sculptor, was imprisoned here and later wrote about a spectacular escape in his autobiography — scaling the walls with knotted bedsheets, breaking his leg in the fall, and being recaptured. Beatrice Cenci was held here before her execution in 1599 for the murder of her abusive father — her case became one of the most famous legal dramas of the Renaissance, inspiring Shelley to write a play about her. The top terrace has one of the best three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views in Rome. You can see St Peter's dome directly ahead, the river below, and the entire historic centre spread out behind you. There is a cafe up there. Ordering an espresso on the roof of a building where emperors were entombed and popes hid from invaders is a very Roman experience.
Catacombs of San Callisto
110 Via Appia Antica, XI Municipio, Rome, 00179, Italy
Twenty metres below the Appian Way, there are twenty kilometres of tunnels carved from soft volcanic tufa rock, stacked four levels deep, containing the remains of an estimated half a million people. The Catacombs of San Callisto are the largest and most important of Rome's sixty-plus catacombs, and they served as the official cemetery of the Church of Rome in the third century. Sixteen popes are buried down here. The common misconception is that early Christians hid in the catacombs to escape persecution. They did not. Roman law considered burial places sacred and inviolable — even the authorities would not enter. The catacombs were not hiding places but legal burial grounds, chosen because Roman law prohibited burial within the city walls and land outside Rome was expensive. Underground burial solved the space problem. The tunnel walls were carved with shelf-like niches called loculi, each sealed with a marble slab or tiles, stacked five or six high. The art down here is some of the earliest Christian art in existence. You will see third-century frescoes of Jonah and the whale, the Good Shepherd, and fish symbols (ichthys) — visual codes that identified fellow believers when Christianity was still an underground (pun intended) movement. The fish symbol worked because the Greek word for fish, ichthys, is an acronym for "Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour." This was effectively an early encryption system. The temperature down here is a constant thirteen to sixteen degrees Celsius year-round, which is why the frescoes and inscriptions have survived so well. Guided tours are the only way in, and they last about thirty minutes. The tunnels are narrow, the ceilings low, and the deeper levels have a silence that is genuinely disorienting. You are walking through a city of the dead that makes the one above look temporary.
Circus Maximus
1 Via del Circo Massimo, I Municipio, Rome, 00153, Italy
This grassy depression was once the largest stadium in the world, and it was not even close. The Circus Maximus held an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand spectators — five times the Colosseum, more than any modern stadium on Earth. It was six hundred and twenty-one metres long and one hundred and eighteen metres wide. The Kentucky Derby, the Super Bowl, Wembley Stadium — they are all playing catch-up to a racetrack that was running at capacity before Christ was born. Chariot racing was the most popular sport in the Roman world, dwarfing gladiatorial combat in both attendance and cultural significance. The races were organized around four factions — the Reds, Whites, Blues, and Greens — and fan allegiance was fanatical. Riots broke out regularly. The Nika riots in Constantinople in 532 AD (inspired by the same faction system) killed thirty thousand people and nearly toppled an emperor. In Rome, charioteers were celebrities on a scale that makes modern athletes look modest. Gaius Appuleius Diocles, a second-century charioteer, earned thirty-five million eight hundred and sixty-three thousand one hundred and twenty sesterces over his career — which historians have calculated as the equivalent of approximately fifteen billion US dollars in modern terms. The track had a central barrier called the spina, decorated with obelisks, statues, and egg-shaped lap counters. The turns at either end — the metae — were the killing zones. Chariots took the corners at full speed, and crashes were spectacular and often fatal. The Romans had a word for it: naufragium, meaning shipwreck. Drivers wrapped the reins around their waists, which meant a crash could drag them under the horses and around the track. Today, it is a public park where people jog and walk their dogs. The shape is perfectly preserved in the terrain — you can see exactly where the track was, where the seating rose on both sides. Sometimes the city holds concerts and events here. The Rolling Stones played to seventy thousand people in 2014. That is less than a third of what it held two thousand years ago.
Colosseum
1 Piazza del Colosseo, I Municipio, Rome, 00184, Italy
Here is a number that should stop you in your tracks: fifty thousand. That is how many people could sit in this building — at the same time — nearly two thousand years ago. The Colosseum was not just big. It was operationally brilliant. The Romans invented a ticketing system using numbered pottery shards that matched numbered archways, so fifty thousand spectators could find their seats and be fully loaded in about fifteen minutes. Modern stadium designers have studied this and openly admitted they cannot do better. And it had a retractable awning. The velarium was a massive canvas shade system operated by a detachment of sailors from the imperial navy — about a thousand men — stationed permanently in Rome just to work the ropes. They were billeted in a nearby barracks called the Castra Misenatium. When you hear people say Rome was advanced, this is what they mean: a dedicated military unit whose sole job was sun protection for sports fans. The floor was wooden, covered in sand — the Latin word for sand is harena, which is where we get the word arena. Beneath it was the hypogeum, a network of tunnels, cages, and mechanical lifts that could raise animals and scenery directly into the arena through trapdoors. There were at least thirty-six of these lifts. Stagehands could flood the arena for mock naval battles in the early years, before the underground levels were built out. But the violence was real and staggering. Conservative modern estimates suggest four hundred thousand people and over a million animals died here over roughly four centuries of games. Entire species were hunted to regional extinction to supply the arena — North African elephants, Mesopotamian lions, Caspian tigers. The building you are looking at was an engine of ecological devastation dressed up as entertainment.
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna
131 Viale delle Belle Arti, II Municipio, Rome, 00197, Italy
Everyone comes to Rome for ancient art and Renaissance masterpieces, which means almost nobody visits the national gallery of modern and contemporary art, and that is a mistake. This museum, housed in a beautiful Belle Epoque building in the Villa Borghese park, holds the most important collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian art in existence, and it is routinely empty. You can stand alone in front of a Modigliani here. Try that at the Tate. The collection tells the story of Italy finding its artistic voice after unification in 1861. The Macchiaioli painters — Italy's answer to the Impressionists, who actually predated them — are represented in depth. Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini: these artists were painting light and everyday life with visible brushstrokes in the 1850s, before Monet picked up a brush. Art history has given the French credit for a revolution the Italians started, and this museum is the evidence. The twentieth-century collection includes major works by Giorgio de Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and the Italian Futurists — the art movement that celebrated speed, technology, and unfortunately, war. The Futurists' enthusiasm for Mussolini has complicated their legacy, but their art was genuinely revolutionary. Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space — the striding figure that appears on the Italian twenty-cent coin — has a plaster version here. The building itself is worth the visit. The entrance hall has a vaulted glass ceiling that floods the space with natural light, and the garden out front is scattered with sculptures. After the compressed intensity of the Vatican Museums or the Borghese, the space and silence here feel almost therapeutic. Admission is modest, and the cafe in the garden is one of the nicer museum cafes in Rome.
Jewish Ghetto
Via del Portico d'Ottavia, I Municipio, Rome, 00186, Italy
Rome's Jewish community is the oldest in Europe. Jews have lived continuously in this city for over twenty-two hundred years — since at least the second century BC, when Judean ambassadors came to negotiate with the Roman Republic. That means the Jewish community here predates Christianity by two centuries. They were here before Julius Caesar, before the Empire, before the Colosseum was built. This is not a transplanted community. This is Rome. In 1555, Pope Paul IV issued the papal bull Cum nimis absurdum, which confined all of Rome's Jews to a tiny walled area near the Tiber — three hectares for roughly four thousand people. The gates were locked at night. Jews were required to wear yellow badges. They could only work as rag dealers or moneylenders. They were forced to attend Christian sermons every Saturday. This ghetto — the word itself comes from the Venetian foundry district where Jews were confined in 1516 — existed in some form until 1870, when Italian unification finally tore down the walls. The food here is some of the most distinctive in Rome. Carciofi alla giudia — Jewish-style artichokes, deep-fried whole until the outer leaves shatter into salty chips and the heart melts — is the signature dish, and it was invented here out of necessity and ingenuity. The bakeries make ricotta and cherry crostata and almond pastries that owe nothing to the butter-heavy Roman Catholic baking tradition. The cuisine is a living document of a community that made art from restriction. On October sixteenth, 1943, the Nazis rounded up 1,024 Jews from this neighbourhood and deported them to Auschwitz. Sixteen survived. The Stolpersteine — small brass cobblestones engraved with names and dates — mark the doorsteps where victims lived. You will trip over them, literally, which is the point. The German artist Gunter Demnig designed them so you must bow your head to read them.
Mouth of Truth
I Municipio, Rome, Italy
The Bocca della Verita is a massive marble disc, about one point eight metres in diameter, depicting a river god or possibly Oceanus, with an open mouth that legend says will bite the hand off anyone who tells a lie while their fingers are inside. In reality, it is almost certainly a Roman manhole cover — a drain cover for the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer of ancient Rome that emptied into the Tiber nearby. So the most famous lie detector in the world is a sewer lid. Rome in a nutshell. The lie-detector legend dates to at least the Middle Ages. One popular medieval version involves a woman accused of adultery who was ordered to put her hand in the mouth to prove her innocence. She arranged for her lover to disguise himself as a madman and kiss her publicly before the test, then swore she had only ever been kissed by her husband and that madman — technically true. The mouth did not bite. The legend's real value was social: in a world without forensic science, the fear of the Bocca was enough to make people confess. Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn made this spot iconic in the 1953 film Roman Holiday. In the scene, Peck pretends the mouth has bitten his hand off, and Hepburn screams. The moment was improvised — Peck did not tell Hepburn he was going to do it, and her reaction is genuine. That single unscripted moment turned a little-known Roman curiosity into one of the most visited spots in the city. The disc sits in the portico of the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, a beautiful twelfth-century church that almost nobody enters because the queue for the mouth extends past the door. The church has a stunning Cosmatesque floor and a medieval crypt, and it is worth ducking inside after your photo. There is usually a long line, but it moves quickly — everyone just sticks their hand in, snaps a photo, and moves on.
Ostia Antica
717 Viale dei Romagnoli, XIII Municipio, Rome, 00119, Italy
If Pompeii had not been buried by a volcano and marketed by centuries of tourism, Ostia Antica would be the most famous Roman ruin in the world. It is equally well-preserved, significantly larger, and a fraction as crowded. This was Rome's port city, the gateway for everything that entered the capital by sea: grain from Egypt, olive oil from Spain, wine from Gaul, marble from Greece, wild animals from Africa for the arena. At its peak, about one hundred thousand people lived here. You can walk through complete apartment buildings — insulae — that still rise to two and three storeys. You can stand in taverns with their marble counters and built-in heating vessels. The latrines at the Forum Baths are communal, with stone seats arranged in a semicircle and a communal sponge-on-a-stick that served as Roman toilet paper (the stick was rinsed in a channel of running water — the origin of the phrase "getting the wrong end of the stick"). The mosaics on the Piazzale delle Corporazioni — the ancient business district — show advertisements for different trading companies, complete with images of their goods: elephants for the ivory traders, ships for the shipping companies. The theatre, originally built by Agrippa and expanded to seat four thousand, is still used for performances in summer. Behind it, the commercial district has over sixty identified shops and offices, each with mosaic "business cards" set into the pavement advertising their trade. It is the closest thing we have to walking through a functioning Roman city, because unlike Pompeii, this was not frozen in a moment of catastrophe — it was gradually abandoned as the harbour silted up and the coastline moved, leaving the city stranded three kilometres from the sea. Getting here takes about forty-five minutes by metro and local train from central Rome. It is the best half-day trip the city offers. Go early, bring water, and expect to be almost entirely alone with two thousand years of history.
Palatine Hill
30 Via di San Gregorio, I Municipio, Rome, 00184, Italy
This is where the word palace comes from. The Palatine — Palatium in Latin — was where Rome's emperors built their residences, and it was so synonymous with imperial power that palatium became the generic word for any grand residence in virtually every European language: palace, palazzo, palais, palast, palacio. You are standing on the etymological source of a concept. According to legend, this is also where it all began. Romulus and Remus were supposedly found here by the she-wolf, in a cave called the Lupercal. In 2007, archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar and endoscopic cameras found what they believe is the Lupercal — a vaulted chamber decorated with mosaics and seashells, buried sixteen metres below the hill. The discovery was announced with great fanfare, then immediately debated. Some archaeologists believe it is just a nymphaeum — a decorative grotto — from a later period. The cave has not been physically accessed and may never be. The Farnese Gardens at the top of the hill were among the first private botanical gardens in Europe, created in the sixteenth century by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese on the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius. The views from up here are extraordinary — you look directly down into the Roman Forum on one side and out over the Circus Maximus on the other. On a clear day, you can see the Alban Hills in the distance. Augustus was born on the Palatine and chose to live here rather than in the larger, flashier mansions available to him. His house — the Domus Augusti — has been partially excavated and opened to visitors. The wall paintings inside are vivid reds and blacks in what art historians call the Second Pompeian Style. The emperor who ruled the largest empire on Earth lived in rooms that a modern Roman would consider a nice apartment. The restraint was political — he wanted to be seen as first among equals, not a king.
Palazzo Doria Pamphilj
305 Via del Corso, I Municipio, Rome, 00186, Italy
There is a painting in this palace that terrified the man it depicts. When Pope Innocent X saw Velazquez's portrait of him, completed in 1650, he reportedly said "troppo vero" — too true. It is considered one of the greatest portraits ever painted, and when you stand in front of it you understand why: Velazquez captured not just Innocent's face but his entire personality. The suspicion, the intelligence, the barely contained aggression — it all comes through. Francis Bacon was so obsessed with this painting that he created over forty variations of it without ever seeing the original in person. The Doria Pamphilj family still owns this palace and still lives here. That is what makes this place extraordinary — it is not a state museum, it is someone's house that happens to contain works by Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael, and Bernini. The audio guide is narrated by Jonathan Doria Pamphilj, a member of the family, in a wonderfully dry English accent (his mother was English). He casually mentions "my ancestor" the way most people mention a neighbour. The Gallery of Mirrors was designed to rival Versailles, and in some ways it succeeds — the room is smaller but more intimate, and the light from the windows reflecting off the mirrors and gilded surfaces creates an almost liquid quality. The private apartments, opened to the public in recent years, include a chapel, a ballroom with a ceiling fresco by a student of Raphael, and intimate rooms with velvet walls. This is one of Rome's great under-visited treasures. While the Borghese Gallery requires advance booking and the Vatican Museums are a rugby scrum, this gallery sits right on Via del Corso — one of Rome's busiest shopping streets — and most people walk right past it. The entrance is an unremarkable doorway between shops. Inside is one of the finest private art collections in the world.
Pantheon
I Municipio, Rome, Italy
The dome above your head is still, after nearly nineteen hundred years, the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. That fact alone should make you furious at the concept of planned obsolescence. The Romans poured this thing around 125 AD under Emperor Hadrian, and it has never collapsed, never been significantly repaired structurally, and it still works exactly as designed. Meanwhile, the concrete in a modern parking garage starts crumbling after about fifty years. The secret is in the recipe. Roman concrete used volcanic ash — specifically pozzolana from the fields near Pozzuoli — mixed with lime and seawater. Recent research has shown that seawater, far from weakening the concrete, actually triggers a mineral growth process that makes it stronger over time. The crystals of aluminous toite that form in the matrix effectively heal cracks. The Romans stumbled onto a self-repairing building material and we forgot how to make it for sixteen centuries. The oculus — that nine-metre-wide hole in the top — is the only source of light. There is no glass. Rain falls straight in and hits the slightly convex marble floor, which has twenty-two nearly invisible drain holes. On April twenty-first, the traditional founding date of Rome, the noon sun hits the entrance doorway perfectly. Hadrian apparently used this alignment to make a dramatic imperial entrance, bathed in a shaft of sunlight. It is architectural theatre on a cosmic scale. Raphael is buried here. So are two Italian kings. When Michelangelo first saw it, he reportedly said it looked like the work of angels, not men. Every major dome built since — Florence Cathedral, St Peter's, the Capitol Building in Washington — has been measured against this one. They are all smaller.
Piazza del Popolo
Piazza del Popolo, I Municipio, Rome, 00187, Italy
For centuries, this was the first thing visitors saw when they arrived in Rome. The Via Flaminia — the great road from the north — entered the city through the Porta del Popolo, and this piazza was the welcome mat. Goethe arrived here in 1786 and wrote about the overwhelming impact of the view. Napoleon's troops marched in through this gate. Every Grand Tour traveller, every pilgrim from northern Europe, every invading army came through this space. The Egyptian obelisk in the centre is thirty-six metres tall, originally from Heliopolis, and was brought to Rome by Augustus in 10 BC. It is the second oldest obelisk in Rome and was originally used as a sundial in the Circus Maximus before being moved here in 1589 by Pope Sixtus V — the same pope who moved obelisks around Rome the way normal people rearrange furniture. Sixtus moved four obelisks in his five-year reign, a feat of engineering that required Domenico Fontana to design a massive system of winches, pulleys, and nine hundred men working in coordinated silence. The twin churches flanking the south end — Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto — look identical from the piazza, which was entirely the point. But they are not actually identical. The plots they sit on are different sizes, so architect Carlo Rainaldi cheated: one has a circular dome and the other has an oval dome, but from the viewer's perspective in the piazza, they look perfectly symmetrical. It is a Baroque optical illusion. Climb the steps to the Pincio terrace above the piazza for one of Rome's definitive sunset views. The entire piazza spreads below you, with the dome of St Peter's floating on the horizon. Caravaggio's first two public commissions — paintings of Saint Matthew — are in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo at the north end, alongside works by Raphael, Bernini, and Pinturicchio. This one piazza could fill an entire art history semester.
Piazza Navona
Piazza Navona, I Municipio, Rome, 00186, Italy
The reason this piazza is shaped like a racetrack is that it was a racetrack. The Emperor Domitian built his Stadium here around 80 AD — the Stadio di Domiziano — with seating for thirty thousand spectators who came to watch Greek-style athletic competitions. The exact footprint of that stadium defines the piazza you see today. If you go to the north end and look down through a modern building at Piazza Tor Sanguigna, you can actually see sections of the original arched seating preserved beneath street level. The centrepiece is Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, completed in 1651, showing the four great rivers of the known continents: the Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Rio de la Plata. Each river is personified by a massive figure. There is a famous story that the Rio de la Plata figure is shielding his eyes in horror at the facade of Sant'Agnese in Agone, designed by Bernini's rival Borromini. Beautiful story. Completely false. The fountain was finished before Borromini even started on the church. Bernini was a genius self-promoter, but he was not a time traveller. For two centuries, the piazza was deliberately flooded every August weekend. The drains were plugged, water filled the concave space to about a metre deep, and Romans would wade through it, drive carriages through it, and generally treat the whole piazza as a wading pool. Aristocrats sent their gilded coaches splashing through while commoners cooled off on foot. The practice was finally stopped in 1866. Caravaggio lived around the corner from here for most of his time in Rome, and the piazza's bars and restaurants were part of his territory. He got into a brawl in this neighbourhood in 1606 that ended with him killing a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni — possibly over a gambling debt, possibly over a woman, possibly both. He fled Rome that night and never came back.
Protestant Cemetery
6 Via Caio Cestio, I Municipio, Rome, 00153, Italy
Oscar Wilde called this "the holiest place in Rome." Shelley said it made him "in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." These are suspiciously similar endorsements from two men who knew what they were talking about, and they are both correct. The Non-Catholic Cemetery (its official name) is a walled garden at the foot of the Pyramid of Cestius, full of cypress trees, stray cats, and the graves of some of the most interesting people to die in Rome over the past three centuries. John Keats is here, buried under a tombstone that reads "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" — his own requested epitaph. He was twenty-five. His friend Joseph Severn, who nursed him through his final months, is buried next to him — but Severn died fifty-eight years later, at the age of eighty-five, having spent the rest of his long life basically trading on the association. Shelley is also here, though technically what is buried is his heart. His body was cremated on the beach at Viareggio in 1822, but his friend Edward Trelawny snatched the heart from the pyre. It was eventually given to Mary Shelley, who kept it wrapped in silk in her desk for decades. The cemetery also contains the grave of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist philosopher who wrote his most important works from a fascist prison. Mussolini's prosecutor had declared at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release from prison. His tomb is one of the most visited in the cemetery, often covered in fresh flowers and small red flags. The Pyramid of Cestius right next door is a thirty-six-metre marble pyramid built as a tomb for a Roman magistrate around 12 BC. It is one of the best-preserved ancient buildings in Rome, partly because it was incorporated into the Aurelian Walls in the third century. Yes, Rome has a pyramid. Most people do not know this.
Roman Forum
5 Largo della Salara Vecchia, I Municipio, Rome, 00186, Italy
For about five hundred years, this was the centre of the Western world. Every road really did lead here. The golden milestone — the Milliarium Aureum — stood near the Temple of Saturn, and every distance in the Roman Empire was measured from that single point. When someone in Roman Britain asked how far it was to Rome, they meant how far to this exact spot. What you see now is a jumble of columns, arches, and brick walls that can feel confusing, but imagine it at its peak: a dense urban canyon of marble temples, government buildings, law courts, and shops, all painted in vivid colours. Romans loved colour. Those white marble ruins were originally painted red, blue, gold, and green. The austere white classical aesthetic we associate with ancient Rome is basically a misunderstanding — the paint just wore off, and Renaissance artists assumed it was always bare stone. Julius Caesar was cremated here. You can still see the spot — the Temple of Divus Julius, where a small altar now sits. After his assassination on the Ides of March in 44 BC, Mark Antony gave his famous funeral speech right here, and the crowd became so enraged they built a spontaneous pyre from whatever they could grab — furniture, wooden stalls, even their own clothes — and burned his body on the spot. The temple was later built over the cremation site. For centuries after Rome fell, this place was literally buried. Medieval Romans called it the Campo Vaccino — the cow field — because cattle grazed on the soil that had accumulated over the ruins. It was not properly excavated until the nineteenth century. Eighteen hundred years of human history was just sitting under a pasture.
Sistine Chapel
Viale Vaticano, XVII Municipio, Rome, 00192, Italy
Michelangelo did not want this job. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and he was furious when Pope Julius II pulled him off the tomb project he was working on and told him to paint a ceiling instead. He suspected a rival — possibly Bramante, possibly Raphael — had suggested it specifically to set him up for failure. He wrote to his father complaining about the assignment. He wrote a poem about how miserable the work was, describing paint dripping into his eyes and his body bent into an agonising curve. And here is the thing everyone gets wrong: he did not paint it lying on his back. That image comes from the Charlton Heston film. He painted standing upright on a specially designed scaffold, head tilted backwards, arm extended above him, for four years. Four years of looking straight up. His eyesight was reportedly damaged by the end. The scaffold itself was an engineering achievement — Michelangelo designed it himself, a stepped wooden platform that bridged the chapel walls without touching the ceiling, so services could continue underneath. The ceiling contains over three hundred figures and took from 1508 to 1512. The famous central panel — the Creation of Adam, God reaching out to touch Adam's finger — is arguably the most reproduced image in art history. But look closer at the shape surrounding God. It is anatomically identical to a cross-section of a human brain, complete with the frontal lobe, brain stem, and vertebral artery. Neuroscientists have confirmed the match. Whether Michelangelo did this deliberately — embedding the idea that God's greatest gift to humanity was intelligence, not life — is one of art history's great debates. Twenty-three years later, he came back to paint The Last Judgment on the altar wall. He included a self-portrait — his own flayed skin, held by Saint Bartholomew. The face on the empty skin is unmistakably Michelangelo's. He was seventy years old and apparently had opinions about how life had treated him.
Spanish Steps
I Municipio, Rome, Italy
The name is a lie, or at least a misdirection. These steps are not Spanish. They were funded by a French diplomat, Etienne Gueffier, designed by Italian architects Francesco de Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi, and connect an Italian piazza to a French church — the Trinita dei Monti at the top. The "Spanish" part comes from the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See, which has been located in the piazza below since the seventeenth century. For a while, the Spanish government claimed the entire area as sovereign territory and would arrest non-Spaniards who wandered through. The French were furious about this, which is part of why they funded the steps — to assert their own presence. There are one hundred and thirty-five steps, built between 1723 and 1725, and they were designed to be theatrical. The Baroque staircase widens and narrows, splits and reunites, creating a sense of drama that makes simply walking up them feel like a performance. This was deliberate: Rome in the eighteenth century was a city obsessed with spectacle, and the steps were always intended as a stage for the passeggiata, the evening stroll. John Keats died in a small apartment at the base of these steps in 1821. He was twenty-five. The room is now a museum, preserved almost exactly as it was, though every piece of furniture in it is a reproduction — the originals were burned after his death, as was the standard practice for rooms where someone died of tuberculosis. His last words were reportedly "I can feel the flowers growing over me." The apartment next door is where Percy Bysshe Shelley once stayed. Since 2019, you can no longer sit on the steps. The Rome city council banned it, with fines of up to four hundred euros. This was a genuinely controversial decision — Romans and tourists had been sitting on these steps for three hundred years, and the passeggiata tradition kind of depends on pausing to people-watch. But the travertine was getting damaged, so now you walk up, you walk down, and you keep moving.
St. Peter's Basilica
120 Via Pietro Romani, XIII Municipio, Rome, 00124, Italy
This is the largest church in the world, and the Vatican will not let you forget it. On the floor of the nave, there are brass markers showing where every other major church in the world would end if you placed it inside this one. St Paul's Cathedral in London? It fits with room to spare. The building is two hundred and twenty metres long, covers twenty-three thousand square metres, and can hold over twenty thousand people. Bernini's colonnade out front has two hundred and eighty-four columns and eighty-eight pilasters arranged in four rows. It took eleven years. The building sits directly over what tradition — and modern archaeology — identifies as the burial site of Saint Peter, the first pope. In the 1940s, Pope Pius XII authorised excavations beneath the basilica, and archaeologists found a Roman necropolis that had been sealed since the fourth century. They found bones wrapped in purple and gold cloth in a niche marked with early Christian graffiti. Pope Paul VI later announced these were the bones of Saint Peter, though the identification remains debated. Michelangelo designed the dome when he was seventy-one years old. He never saw it finished — he died in 1564, and it was completed in 1590 by Giacomo della Porta. It is one hundred and thirty-six metres high from floor to lantern top, and climbing the five hundred and fifty-one steps to the viewing platform is one of those experiences that starts exciting and becomes progressively more claustrophobic as the walls curve inward. The dome weighs approximately fourteen thousand tonnes. The Pieta — Michelangelo's sculpture of Mary holding the dead Christ — is behind bulletproof glass now, ever since a man attacked it with a hammer in 1972, breaking off Mary's arm and nose. It is the only work Michelangelo ever signed. He did it across Mary's sash after overhearing visitors credit the sculpture to another artist. He was twenty-four when he carved it. He never signed another work again.
Testaccio
Piazza Testaccio, I Municipio, Rome, 00153, Italy
The neighbourhood of Testaccio is named after a hill that is not a hill. Monte Testaccio is a thirty-five-metre mound made entirely of broken olive oil amphorae — an estimated fifty-three million terracotta pots, discarded over about four hundred years as the Roman port on the Tiber processed olive oil shipments from Spain and North Africa. When an amphora was emptied, it could not be reused (the oil soaked into the clay and went rancid), so workers smashed them and stacked the shards. Layer by layer, over centuries, they built a mountain of garbage. It is the world's largest ancient rubbish dump, and it is now covered in grass and nightclubs. The slaughterhouse — the Mattatoio — operated on the riverbank from 1891 to 1975 and defined the neighbourhood's character. Workers were paid partly in offal — the "quinto quarto" or fifth quarter of the animal, meaning the parts the wealthy did not want: tripe, oxtail, sweetbreads, intestines. From this came some of Rome's most iconic dishes: coda alla vaccinara (braised oxtail), trippa alla romana (tripe in tomato sauce), and rigatoni con la pajata (pasta with veal intestines still containing the mother's milk). These are dishes born from poverty that are now served in expensive restaurants, and the irony is not lost on Testaccio locals. The Mercato Testaccio is the neighbourhood's covered market, rebuilt in 2012 and now one of the best food markets in Rome. The stalls run by Mordi e Vai serve some of the best sandwiches in the city — bollito (boiled beef) on a roll, dripping with salsa verde. The market has both traditional vendors (butchers, fishmongers, produce sellers who have been here for generations) and newer food stalls that cater to the lunch crowd. At night, the caves carved into Monte Testaccio become clubs and bars — the stable temperature inside the pottery mountain makes natural refrigeration. This is one of Rome's primary nightlife districts, and the contrast between the daytime market-and-grandma atmosphere and the weekend club scene is extreme. Testaccio is the most authentically Roman neighbourhood left in the centre, which is why Romans get nervous every time a new boutique hotel opens here.
Trastevere
I Municipio, Rome, Italy
Trastevere means "across the Tiber," and for most of Rome's history, that meant this was the wrong side of the river. In ancient times, it was where the immigrants lived — Syrian merchants, Jewish communities, sailors from every port in the Mediterranean. It was the Ellis Island of ancient Rome, dense and multilingual and slightly disreputable, and that identity has clung to it for two thousand years. Even now, Trasteverini consider themselves the "real Romans" and regard everyone on the other side of the river with benign suspicion. The Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere is arguably the most important church you have never heard of. It was the first church in Rome where Mass was openly celebrated — tradition says it was founded in the third century, before Christianity was even legal. The mosaics on the facade and in the apse are twelfth and thirteenth century and absolutely extraordinary, gleaming with gold leaf that catches the afternoon sun and turns the whole piazza warm. The piazza itself is one of the best people-watching spots in Rome: buskers, students, old men arguing, children kicking footballs. The neighbourhood still has a village feel, with narrow cobblestone streets barely wide enough for one car, laundry hanging between buildings, and small trattorias that have been run by the same families for generations. This is where you eat cacio e pepe made with three ingredients and no shortcuts, and supplì — fried rice balls with a molten mozzarella centre that pulls into strings when you bite them, which is why Romans call them supplì al telefono, because the cheese stretches like a telephone cord. But the gentrification clock is ticking. What was a working-class neighbourhood twenty years ago is now full of Airbnbs, cocktail bars, and tourists on food tours. Romans will tell you the real Trastevere is disappearing. They said the same thing thirty years ago, and probably thirty years before that. The neighbourhood has been absorbing outsiders for two millennia. That is kind of its whole thing.
Trevi Fountain
Piazza di Trevi, I Municipio, Rome, 00187, Italy
About three thousand euros in coins are thrown into this fountain every single day. That is roughly 1.5 million euros per year, and every last cent of it goes to Caritas, a Catholic charity that uses the money to run a supermarket for Rome's poor. Workers from the city vacuum the coins out every Monday night. In 2016, the city government briefly tried to redirect the funds to its own budget and the resulting public outcry was so fierce they backed down within days. The tradition of throwing a coin over your left shoulder with your right hand supposedly guarantees you will return to Rome. Two coins means you will fall in love with a Roman. Three coins means you will marry them. This custom only dates to the 1954 film Three Coins in the Fountain — before that, visitors drank the water. The fountain is fed by the Aqua Virgo aqueduct, originally built by Marcus Agrippa in 19 BC to supply his baths. The name Virgo comes from a legend about a young girl who showed thirsty Roman soldiers the water source. The fountain was designed by Nicola Salvi and took thirty years to build, from 1732 to 1762. Salvi did not live to see it finished — he died in 1751, possibly from illness contracted working in the damp conditions of the construction site. The central figure is Neptune, riding a shell chariot pulled by two sea horses guided by tritons. One horse is calm and one is wild, representing the two moods of the sea. Anita Ekberg's midnight swim scene in Fellini's La Dolce Vita turned this into the most famous fountain in cinema history. The scene was filmed in February and Ekberg, a former Miss Sweden, waded in without complaint. Marcello Mastroianni, her co-star, needed a wetsuit under his clothes and fortified himself with vodka. The fountain is only about sixty-five centimetres deep, which somehow makes the whole thing even more impressive on film.
Vatican Museums
Viale Vaticano, XVIII Municipio, Rome, 00165, Italy
The Vatican Museums contain roughly seventy thousand works of art, of which about twenty thousand are on display at any given time. The collection spans five hundred years of papal acquisition, donation, confiscation, and — let's be honest — looting. Laid end to end, the galleries would stretch about seven kilometres. Six million people visit each year, making this the fourth most visited museum in the world. On a peak day, you will be body-to-body with twenty-five thousand other people, and the experience is less "contemplating masterpieces" and more "being squeezed through a marble tube." The Gallery of Maps alone is worth the visit. Commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1580, it features forty fresco panels showing every region of Italy in extraordinary cartographic detail, painted on the walls of a one-hundred-and-twenty-metre corridor. The maps are oriented with west to the left (facing Rome), meaning the Adriatic coast faces one wall and the Tyrrhenian coast faces the other. They are not just beautiful — they are geographically accurate enough that modern cartographers have verified their precision. The Raphael Rooms were Raphael's greatest commission and his greatest curse. He was twenty-five when Julius II hired him to decorate the papal apartments — the same pope who was simultaneously torturing Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling. The School of Athens, in the Stanza della Segnatura, is probably the most famous fresco outside the Sistine Chapel. Raphael painted himself into it, looking out at the viewer from the lower right corner. He also painted a brooding figure in the centre foreground who is almost certainly Michelangelo — added late, after Raphael snuck in to see the Sistine ceiling before its unveiling. The Laocoon sculpture was discovered in a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo was one of the first people called to examine it. It was immediately recognized as the sculpture described by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD, making it the only ancient sculpture whose discovery can be matched to a specific ancient literary description. Pope Julius II bought it on the spot and built the Octagonal Court to house it.