Landmarks in Rome
23 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in Rome.
Campo de' Fiori
You're in Campo de' Fiori — Field of Flowers. In the mornings it's a market, all produce and cut flowers and fish on ice, and in the evenings it fills up with people drinking. It's one of the most pleasant squares in Rome.
Capitoline Hill
You've walked up onto the Capitoline Hill, into a beautiful open square with matching palaces on three sides and a swirling star pattern set into the pavement. This is the Piazza del Campidoglio, and Michelangelo designed the whole thing.
Castel Sant'Angelo
That massive round fortress by the river is Castel Sant'Angelo, and it has had more careers than anyone you know. It started as a tomb — the emperor Hadrian built it as a giant mausoleum for himself around nineteen hundred years ago.
Circus Maximus
You're looking at a long grassy field where people walk their dogs. This was the Circus Maximus, the chariot-racing track that held around a quarter of a million Romans — and the emperors were its most embarrassing superfans.
Largo di Torre Argentina
You're looking down into a sunken square full of broken columns and temple ruins, a few meters below the modern street. And if you watch for a moment, you'll notice the residents. Cats.
Palatine Hill
You're up on the Palatine Hill, surrounded by the ruins of the imperial palaces. This is the ground the word "palace" comes from — and it's also a perfect chart of how fast absolute power rots a person.
Pasquino
On the corner in front of you is a battered lump of ancient marble on a pedestal — worn almost featureless, missing arms, barely recognizable as a human figure. Tourists walk past it constantly.
Piazza della Minerva — The Elephant
In the middle of this small square stands one of the most charming things in Rome — a little marble elephant with a full-size ancient Egyptian obelisk balanced on its back. It's a Bernini design, and Romans adore it.
Piazza Navona
Piazza Navona. Long, oval, gorgeous, three fountains down the middle, cafés all around. Notice the shape — that stretched racetrack outline is not an accident. You're standing inside the footprint of an ancient stadium.
Piazza Venezia and the Vittoriano
You cannot miss the enormous white marble monument in front of you. Blinding, tiered, covered in columns and bronze horses, roughly the size of a small mountain.
Ponte Sant'Angelo
You're on the bridge leading away from the castle — Ponte Sant'Angelo, lined on both sides by ten marble angels, each one carrying an instrument of Christ's suffering. A crown of thorns, a cross, a whip, the nails.
St. Peter's Basilica
The basilica in front of you is the largest church in the world, and to build it, they had to destroy the last one.
St. Peter's Square
Look at the two great curving arms of columns sweeping around this square. Bernini designed them, and he said out loud what they're meant to be: the arms of Mother Church, reaching out to gather the whole world into an embrace.
The Arch of Constantine
Right beside the Colosseum stands the Arch of Constantine — the biggest, grandest triumphal arch in Rome, built to celebrate the emperor Constantine winning a civil war. It's covered top to bottom in beautiful sculpture.
The Colosseum
The Colosseum. And yes — the emperor from the movie Gladiator was a real man. His name was Commodus, and he genuinely did come down into this arena and fight, dressed as Hercules, in front of the whole city.
The Dome and the Pietà
Look up at the dome. That's Michelangelo. And he shouldn't have been able to build it. By the time the Pope handed him the job, Michelangelo was seventy-one years old.
The Domus Aurea (Nero's Golden House)
You're on the Oppian Hill, in a quiet park with pine trees and joggers. Underneath your feet, buried in the hillside, is what's left of the single most extravagant private home ever built by a Roman — the Domus Aurea, the Golden House of…
The House of the Vestals (Roman Forum)
Down in the Forum, look for a long courtyard lined with statues of women, with the remains of a large house behind it. This was the home of the Vestal Virgins, and their story is the strangest kind of power the Roman world produced.
The Pantheon
The Pantheon. Look at that portico — those columns are single pieces of Egyptian granite, each one quarried in one block, floated down the Nile and shipped across the Mediterranean around nineteen centuries ago.
The Roman Forum
You're looking down into the Roman Forum. Broken columns, arches, temple platforms, the whole spread of it sitting in a pit below street level. This was the center of the known world.
The Spanish Steps
In front of you sweep the Spanish Steps — a hundred and thirty-five stone steps climbing in grand curves up to a church at the top. It's one of the most photographed staircases in the world. And almost nothing about the name is accurate.
The Trevi Fountain
You hear it before you see it. Then you turn the corner and the whole thing hits you at once — a Baroque explosion of gods and horses and crashing water, built straight into the back wall of a palace, far too big for the little square…
Via della Conciliazione
You're on the wide, straight boulevard that runs from the basilica down toward the river. It gives you that famous, uninterrupted view of the dome. And it was a mistake — or at least, it undid something Bernini designed on purpose.
Rome Audio Experiences
Visit these landmarks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Ancient Rome Greatest Hits
The Colosseum, the Forum, and a cow pasture that ran the world. Walk the ancient core of Rome and hear what actually happened at each icon, from the giant missing statue that named the Colosseum to the square where Caesar was really killed, now run by cats.
Centro Storico Greatest Hits
The dome, the fountain, and the philosopher they burned in the vegetable market. A walk through Rome's Baroque heart, where a self-healing ancient dome is still a working church, a broken statue was anonymous Twitter for five hundred years, and every coin in the Trevi feeds the poor.
Emperors Behaving Badly
The most powerful men on Earth, and also the pettiest. Nero didn't fiddle, the Gladiator emperor died in his bathtub, and Caligula's horse got a marble bedroom. A tour of imperial Rome's worst behavior, where the truth is always pettier than the legend.
God's Architects
The biggest church on Earth, and the escape hatch next door. A tour of the Vatican's building saga, where a church was funded by selling shortcuts to heaven, a seventy-one-year-old built the dome for free, and a pope once sprinted down a secret corridor while Rome burned.
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