Rome — Ancient to Renaissance Walk

The construction itself is staggering. The building was finished in just eight years, largely by Jewish slaves brought to Rome after the sack of Jerusalem in seventy AD. Estimates suggest sixty thousand to a hundred thousand enslaved people hauled the stone. The Colosseum used roughly a hundred thousand cubic metres of travertine limestone, held together not by mortar but by three hundred tons of iron clamps.

And what happened inside? Gladiatorial combat, wild animal hunts, and public executions. The arena floor hid a two-level underground network called the hypogeum, with thirty-two animal pens and eighty vertical lifts. Animals and fighters could appear from the floor as if by magic. Over four centuries, an estimated four hundred thousand people died here, along with over a million animals. Lions, elephants, hippos, ostriches. The Romans drove the North African elephant to extinction for this place.

By the way, you know the word fornication? It comes from the Latin fornix, meaning arch. The arches of the Colosseum were a favourite meeting point for prostitutes after the games, when passions ran high. The arches literally gave us the word.

Now, look to your left, toward the large triumphal arch between the Colosseum and the hill beyond. That's the Arch of Constantine, built in three fifteen AD to celebrate Constantine's victory at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. It's the largest surviving Roman triumphal arch. But here's the thing: most of the sculptures on it were stolen from earlier monuments to Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius. The Romans were recycling long before it was fashionable.

When you're ready, walk past the Arch of Constantine and bear right toward the entrance to Palatine Hill. It's about a hundred and fifty metres.

Look up at those ruins. The most powerful people in the ancient world lived up there, starting with Augustus, Rome's first emperor. And here's what's wonderful about Augustus: he lived in a surprisingly modest house. The historian Suetonius wrote that Augustus slept in the same bedroom for forty years, summer and winter. No heated floors, no gold leaf. Just a simple room in a simple house on the fanciest hill in the world. His successors were not so restrained. Domitian built a palace so enormous in ninety-two AD that it covered most of the hilltop. Tiberius, Caligula, and Septimius Severus all added their own sprawling complexes. By the second century, the entire hill was one massive imperial compound.

Imagine standing here in the first century. You'd look up at marble facades gleaming in the sun, gardens cascading down the slopes, fountains catching the light. The emperors could look down from their terraces and see the Forum below, the Colosseum rising, the entire city at their feet. This was the most exclusive address on earth.

Today, the Palatine is one of Rome's most peaceful spots. Pine trees, wildflowers, lizards sunning themselves on two-thousand-year-old walls. It's a beautiful contrast to the chaos below.

Now, let's walk downhill. Head northwest, and in about four hundred metres you'll reach the Roman Forum. As you walk, notice how the path descends. You're literally walking from the world of emperors down into the world of the people.

Once drained, the valley became a marketplace, then a civic centre, then the symbolic heart of an empire that stretched from Britain to Iraq. Look at the columns still standing. Those eight columns on your right belong to the Temple of Saturn, one of the oldest temples in Rome, first dedicated around four ninety-seven BC. The Romans kept their treasury here. Imagine a temple that doubled as a bank.

Now, see that small circular mound near the centre? That's the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated on the seventeenth of March, forty-four BC, two days after his assassination. The crowd was so grief-stricken that they tore apart wooden benches and market stalls to build a funeral pyre right there in the Forum, against all religious law. To this day, people leave flowers on the spot. Two thousand years on, and Caesar still gets flowers.

After Rome fell, this entire area was buried under metres of earth and rubble. For nearly a thousand years, Romans called it the Campo Vaccino, the cow field, because that's literally what it had become. Cattle grazed over the Senate house. Farmers plowed over temples. It wasn't until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that excavation began to reveal what lay beneath.

When you're ready, climb the path leading up to your left, toward the Capitoline Hill. It's about three hundred and fifty metres, and the climb is worth it.

His design was radical. He turned the piazza to face not the old Roman Forum behind you but Saint Peter's Basilica in the distance, the new centre of power. He designed a trapezoidal space flanked by three palazzi with matching facades, connected by a grand ramp staircase called the Cordonata. And in fifteen forty-six, he drew an oval pavement pattern with a twelve-pointed star at its centre. It's stunning geometry. Here's the thing, though: Michelangelo never saw it finished. He died in fifteen sixty-four, and the square wasn't completed until the seventeenth century. The star-pattern pavement? That wasn't actually laid until nineteen forty, when Mussolini ordered it done to Michelangelo's original design. Nearly four hundred years after it was drawn.

The bronze statue in the centre is a copy of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, one of the most famous equestrian statues in the world. The original, from around a hundred and seventy-five AD, survived the Middle Ages only because people thought it was Constantine, the first Christian emperor. Had they known it depicted a pagan, they'd have melted it down. It's now safely inside the Capitoline Museums, in the building on your left.

Those museums, by the way, are the oldest public museums in the world, founded in fourteen seventy-one when Pope Sixtus the Fourth donated a collection of ancient bronzes to the people of Rome. If you have time, go in. The original She-Wolf of Rome is in there, along with the Dying Gaul and the colossal head and hand of Emperor Constantine.

Now, walk down the Cordonata staircase, the wide ramp ahead of you. At the bottom, you'll reach Piazza Venezia. You can't miss it: the enormous white marble building ahead is impossible to ignore.

But here's what redeems it. Beneath the equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel, there's a tomb. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, with an eternal flame that has burned since nineteen twenty-one. The body was chosen by a grieving mother named Maria Bergamas, who had lost her only son in World War One. She was asked to select one coffin from eleven unidentified Italian soldiers. The one she chose was brought here and interred beneath the statue of the goddess Roma. Two military guards stand watch around the clock.

Say what you will about the architecture, but that tomb gives this place a gravity that the building itself doesn't quite earn.

By the way, if you want the best free view in Rome, take the glass elevator inside the Vittoriano to the rooftop terrace. It costs seven euros, but the three-hundred-sixty-degree panorama is better than anything you'll pay twenty euros for elsewhere.

Piazza Venezia itself is the chaotic traffic roundabout below. Mussolini used to give speeches from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, the dark Renaissance palace on your right. He'd stand up there, chin jutting out, shouting at a hundred thousand people packed into the square below. Hard to imagine that now, watching the Fiats and scooters whirl around.

When you're ready, walk north from the piazza along Via del Corso. It's the long, straight shopping street directly ahead. After about two hundred metres, look for the entrance to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj on your left.

But the star of the show is one painting: Diego Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent the Tenth, painted around sixteen fifty. The English painter Joshua Reynolds called it simply the finest picture in Rome. And when the Pope first saw it, his reaction was reportedly a nervous laugh and the words: troppo vero. Too true. Velazquez had captured something the Pope didn't want seen: the shrewd, calculating intelligence behind the papal robes. The painting is so psychologically intense that three centuries later, the Irish painter Francis Bacon became obsessed with it, painting dozens of screaming variations. You can see the Velazquez original in a small room at the back of the gallery, hung alone on a red wall, exactly where it's been for three hundred and seventy years.

The palazzo is still owned by the Doria Pamphilj family. When you take the audio guide, it's narrated by a family member. You're literally walking through someone's home, and they're showing you around. It's one of Rome's great hidden gems, and the ticket costs about twelve euros.

When you're ready, continue north on Via del Corso for about fifty metres, then turn left and follow the signs toward the Pantheon. The streets get narrower and more charming as you leave the main road. You're entering the heart of Renaissance Rome.

And that hole at the top. The oculus. It's nine metres across and completely open to the sky. When it rains, it rains inside. You can see the water falling through the light. There are barely visible drains in the floor. And every year on April the twenty-first, the traditional founding day of Rome, the midday sun passes through the oculus and sends a shaft of light through the entrance, as if the building were designed for that exact moment. It probably was.

The Pantheon has been in continuous use for nearly two thousand years, which is why it survived. It was converted to a Christian church in six oh nine AD, which saved it from being quarried for stone. Walk to the left wall and look for the tomb of Raphael. He died in fifteen twenty at the age of thirty-seven, and his dying wish was to be buried here. The inscription reads: here lies Raphael, by whom Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared that she herself would die.

By the way, if you need gelato, walk about two hundred metres northeast to Giolitti on Via degli Uffici del Vicario. They've been making gelato since nineteen hundred, and their fruit flavours are spectacular. Pay at the register first, then take your receipt to the counter.

When you're ready, exit the Pantheon and look for the small piazza directly behind it. That's where we're headed next.

Pope Alexander the Seventh wanted the obelisk re-erected, and he turned to Bernini for the design. Bernini, ever the showman, proposed something nobody had seen before: an elephant carrying the obelisk on its back. The idea came from a strange fifteenth-century novel called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an erotic romance by a Dominican monk, which contained a woodcut of exactly this image. The Pope, a fan of the book, loved it.

But here's where it gets petty. A Dominican friar named Father Paglia thought the design was structurally unsound and insisted Bernini add a stone support block under the elephant's belly. Bernini was furious. He complied, hiding the block under an elaborate saddlecloth. But then he got his revenge. He angled the elephant's rear end directly toward the Dominican convent next door, with its tail slightly to one side, as if the animal were about to relieve itself. The friars had to stare at an elephant's backside for eternity. Romans loved it. They nicknamed the elephant il Porcino della Minerva: Minerva's little piggy.

The inscription on the base, chosen by the Pope, reads: a strong mind is needed to support solid knowledge. It's the most passive-aggressive monument in Rome.

From here, head west through the narrow streets toward Piazza Navona. It's about a four-hundred-metre walk. As you go, notice the ochre and sienna buildings closing in around you, laundry hanging overhead, scooters squeezing past. This is the Rome that no amount of ancient ruins can capture: the living, breathing, beautifully chaotic city.

The centrepiece is Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, built between sixteen forty-seven and sixteen fifty-one. Four massive marble figures represent the four great rivers of the known world: the Danube for Europe, the Ganges for Asia, the Nile for Africa, and the Rio de la Plata for the Americas. The Nile's head is covered because, at the time, nobody knew where the Nile's source was. The whole thing is topped by an Egyptian obelisk that was originally in the Circus of Maxentius on the Via Appia.

Now, look at the church facing the fountain. That's Sant'Agnese in Agone, designed by Bernini's great rival, Francesco Borromini. There's a famous legend that the Danube figure on Bernini's fountain has its hand raised as if to shield itself from the church facade, as if Bernini were saying: don't worry, it won't fall on you. It's a great story, but it's not true. The fountain was finished before Borromini even started on the church. Still, Romans love the rivalry so much they keep telling it.

Piazza Navona has been a public gathering space for nearly two thousand years. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the square was deliberately flooded on summer weekends so that Roman aristocrats could drive their carriages through the shallow water. Imagine that. A Baroque water park.

If you want coffee, Caffe Domiziano on the northwest corner is named after the emperor who built the original stadium. Sit outside, watch the piazza, and you're doing exactly what Romans have done on this spot for twenty centuries.

When you're ready, exit the piazza at the southern end and head south toward Campo de' Fiori. It's about a four-hundred-metre walk through some of Rome's most atmospheric streets.

The statue was erected in eighteen eighty-nine, funded largely by student donations, and the Catholic Church fought bitterly against it. At the unveiling, around a hundred Masonic flags surrounded the monument, and the radical politician Giovanni Bovio gave a speech declaring Bruno a martyr for free thought. The statue faces the Vatican, and it's no accident. Bruno's cowled figure stares toward Saint Peter's dome with an expression that seems to say: I was right.

This square embodies something essential about Rome. The city doesn't hide its darkness. It puts a statue on it and sells tomatoes around it every morning. The blood and the beauty, the sacred and the profane, all mixed together in the same square, the same city, the same two thousand years.

Our walk is over. You've just crossed two millennia on foot, from the Colosseum to the Campo. If you're hungry, the neighbourhood around here is packed with trattorias. Roscioli, on Via dei Giubbonari about a hundred metres east, is legendary for its carbonara and its wine cellar. For pizza by the slice, try Forno Campo de' Fiori, right on the square. Their pizza bianca, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, is perfect.

Sit in the square for a while. Watch the market wind down. Have a coffee or an aperitivo. You've earned it. Rome has been doing this for two thousand years, and it's not going to stop for anyone.

Thanks for walking with me. Enjoy the Eternal City.