Explore Rome and Lazio
Immediately north of Piazza Venezia is the real heart of Rome – the centro storico or historic centre, which makes up most of the triangular knob of land that bulges into a bend in the Tiber. This area, known in ancient Roman times as the Campus Martius, was outside the city centre, a low-lying area that was mostly given over to barracks and sporting arenas, together with several temples, including the Pantheon. Later it became the heart of the Renaissance city, and nowadays it’s the part of the town that is densest in interest, an unruly knot of narrow streets and alleys that holds some of the best of Rome’s classical and Baroque heritage and its most vivacious street- and nightlife. It’s here that most people find the Rome they’ve been looking for – a city of crumbling piazzas, Renaissance churches and fountains, blind alleys and streets humming with scooters and foot-traffic. Whichever direction you wander in there’s something to see; indeed it’s part of the appeal of the centre of Rome that even the most aimless ambling leads you past some breathlessly beautiful and historic spots.
Just south of the centro storico proper, Campo de’ Fiori and the Ghetto are Rome’s old centre part two, a similar neighbourhood of cramped, wanderable streets opening out into small squares flanked by churches. However, it’s less monumental and more of a working quarter, as evidenced by its main focus, Campo de’ Fiori, whose fruit and veg stalls are a marked contrast to the pavement artists of Piazza Navona. Close by are the dark alleys of the old Jewish Ghetto, and the busy traffic junction of Largo di Torre Argentina.
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Galleria Doria Pamphilj
Galleria Doria Pamphilj
North of Piazza Venezia, the first building on the left is the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, one of the city’s finest Rococo palaces, and inside, the Galleria Doria Pamphilj is perhaps the best of Rome’s private art collections. The Doria Pamphilj family still lives in part of the building, and you’re guided through the gallery and the state apartments beyond by way of a free audio-tour narrated by the urbane Jonathan Pamphilj.
The picture gallery extends around the main courtyard, the paintings displayed in old-fashioned style, crammed in frame-to-frame, floor-to-ceiling. It has perhaps Rome’s best concentration of Dutch and Flemish paintings, with a rare Italian work by Brueghel the Elder showing a naval battle being fought outside Naples, a highly realistic portrait of two old men by Quinten Metsys and a Hans Memling Deposition, in the furthest rooms off the main gallery, as well as a further Metsys painting – the fabulously ugly Moneylenders and their Clients – in the main gallery, close by Annibale Carracci’s bucolic Flight into Egypt. Also in the rooms off the courtyard are three paintings by Caravaggio – Repentant Magdalene and John the Baptist, and his wonderful Rest on the Flight into Egypt – hanging near Salome with the head of St John, by Titian. The gallery’s most prized treasures, however, are in a small room on their own – a Bernini bust of the Pamphilj pope Innocent X and Velázquez’s famous, penetrating painting of the same man. All in all it’s a marvellous collection of work, displayed in a wonderfully appropriate setting.
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The Pantheon
The Pantheon
From Sant’Ignazio, Via del Seminario leads down to Piazza della Rotonda, where the main focus of interest is the Pantheon, easily the most complete ancient Roman structure in the city and, along with the Colosseum, visually the most impressive. Though originally a temple that formed part of Marcus Agrippa’s redesign of the Campus Martius in around 27 BC – hence the inscription – it’s since been proved that the building was entirely rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian and finished around the year 125 AD. It’s a formidable architectural achievement even now: the diameter is precisely equal to its height (43m), the hole in the centre of the dome – from which shafts of sunlight descend to illuminate the musty interior – a full 9m across. Most impressively, there are no visible arches or vaults to hold the whole thing up; instead they’re sunk into the concrete of the walls of the building. It would have been richly decorated, the coffered ceiling heavily stuccoed and the niches filled with the statues of gods, but now, apart from its sheer size, the main things of interest are the tombs of two Italian kings, and the tomb of Raphael, between the second and third chapel on the left, with an inscription by the humanist bishop Pietro Bembo: “Living, great Nature feared he might outvie Her works, and dying, fears herself may die.” The same kind of sentiments might well have been reserved for the Pantheon itself.
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Piazza Navona
Piazza Navona
Just west of San Luigi dei Francesi lies Piazza Navona, Rome’s most famous square. Lined with cafés and restaurants, and often thronged with tourists, street artists and pigeons, it is as picturesque – and as vibrant, day and night – as any piazza in Italy. It takes its shape from the first-century-AD Stadium of Domitian, the principal venue of the athletic events and later chariot races that took place in the Campus Martius. Until the mid-fifteenth century the ruins of the arena were still here, overgrown and disused, but the square was given a facelift in the mid-seventeenth century by Pope Innocent X, who built most of the grandiose palaces that surround it and commissioned Borromini to design the facade of the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone on the piazza’s western side. The story goes that the 13-year-old St Agnes was stripped naked before the crowds in the stadium as punishment for refusing to marry, whereupon she miraculously grew hair to cover herself. The church, typically squeezed into the tightest of spaces by Borromini, is supposedly built on the spot where it all happened.Opposite, the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, one of three that punctuate the square, is a masterpiece by Bernini, Borromini’s arch-rival, and it’s said that all the figures are shielding their eyes in horror from Borromini’s church facade (Bernini was disdainful of the less successful Borromini, and their rivalry is well documented), but the fountain had actually been completed before the facade was begun. The grand complexity of rock, which represents the four great rivers of the world, is topped with an Egyptian obelisk, brought here by Pope Innocent X from the Circus of Maxentius.
