The centro storico is the only piece of any major city where you can walk past the best Roman building still standing, the best Baroque square, two of the world's most famous paintings, a 2,000-year-old cat sanctuary and Rome's most-loved daily market - all in twelve minutes, all free or nearly so. The compression is the point. The Pantheon (127 AD) and Bernini's Four Rivers Fountain (1651) sit 350 metres apart, 1,500 years apart, and continue to talk to each other across the gap. Imperial Rome built the bones; Baroque Rome painted them. Modern Rome has the keys but only repaints occasionally. The result is the densest concentration of major historical monuments in any walkable area of any European city.
The Pantheon: 127 AD, still working
The Pantheon you see today is the second Pantheon on this site. The first was built by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (Augustus's son-in-law) in 27 BC - hence the inscription on the pediment still reads "M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIVM.FECIT" ("M. Agrippa, son of Lucius, made this in his third consulship"). That first Pantheon burned down in 80 AD; Hadrian rebuilt it 118-128 AD using the most ambitious concrete-and-brick construction the Empire ever attempted. The 43.3-metre dome (45 metres of cast Roman concrete with progressively lighter aggregate towards the top - basalt at the base, scoria and pumice near the oculus) is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. Eighteen centuries later. The 8.8-metre oculus at the top is the only source of natural light; when it rains, the rain falls through the oculus onto the slightly convex floor where it drains via slotted holes. Inside: Raphael's tomb (1520), Vittorio Emanuele II (the first King of unified Italy, 1878), Umberto I (1900), Margherita of Savoy (1926). Free to attend Mass; €5 entry otherwise (since July 2023). The Pantheon survived in continuous use because it was converted to a Christian church in 609 AD - Sancta Maria ad Martyres - and never abandoned.
Piazza Navona: a Baroque stadium
Piazza Navona looks the way it does - that long, slightly-curving oval - because it stands directly on top of the 1st-century AD Stadium of Domitian. Built in 86 AD as a venue for Greek-style athletic competitions, the stadium held 15,000 spectators and was used for foot races, javelin, wrestling and the early Roman experiments in Greek-style games. It fell out of use in the 4th century; the stones were robbed and the arena became open ground; by the medieval period houses had been built on the stadium's foundations along the perimeter. The piazza's shape is the stadium's footprint.
The Baroque transformation came in the 17th century. The Pamphili Pope Innocent X (1644-1655) made the piazza his family piazza - the Palazzo Pamphili on the west side (built 1644-1650 by Girolamo Rainaldi and Borromini) was the family residence; the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone next door (built 1652-1672 by Borromini after Rainaldi began it) was the family church. Innocent X commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to redesign the central fountain in 1651; the result - the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi - is one of the great Baroque sculptures of Europe: four river gods (representing the Ganges, the Nile, the Danube, and the Río de la Plata - the four corners of the known world) supporting an Egyptian obelisk that Bernini's workshop excavated from the Circus of Maxentius. The Fontana del Moro at the south end (1576, Giacomo della Porta; the central Moor figure is Bernini, 1654) and the Fontana del Nettuno at the north end (1574, finished with Neptune-and-sea-monsters in 1878) complete the three-fountain composition.
Bernini and Borromini, rivals in plain sight
The two greatest sculptor-architects of 17th-century Rome - Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) - both worked in this quarter and hated each other. The legend is that Bernini's Río de la Plata figure on the Four Rivers fountain shields its eyes in horror at Borromini's nearby Sant'Agnese church. The legend is wrong (Bernini finished the fountain in 1651, three years before Borromini took over Sant'Agnese) but it captures the rivalry. Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza (1660, on Corso del Rinascimento) has a spiral lantern based on a six-pointed Star-of-David ground plan - one of the most original Baroque designs in Europe. The two architects are buried at opposite ends of the city - Bernini in Santa Maria Maggiore, Borromini in San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (after committing suicide in 1667).
Caravaggio's Rome
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) painted his career-defining works in this quarter. The Contarelli Chapel commission at San Luigi dei Francesi (1599-1600) - three large paintings of the life of Saint Matthew - made him famous. The Calling of Saint Matthew (the painting where Christ points across the gloomy tavern table to Matthew the tax collector) is the most-quoted of the three; the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting that became Caravaggio's signature is fully present here. The Madonna dei Pellegrini at Sant'Agostino (1604) shocked contemporaries because the Virgin Mary's model was a real Roman streetwoman with dirty feet. The Madonna of Loreto at the same church is calmer but similarly direct. All these paintings are still in their original locations - the chapels Caravaggio painted for - and entry is free.
Campo de' Fiori and the burning of Bruno
Campo de' Fiori - the "field of flowers", named for the open meadow that was here in medieval Rome before the houses arrived - is the third great square of this quarter. The 1869 daily morning market is still the largest of Rome's covered-market-free working markets (Mon-Sat 07:00-14:00). The 1889 statue in the centre by Ettore Ferrari shows Giordano Bruno - the Dominican friar burned at the stake on this exact spot on 17 February 1600. Bruno was a heretic by the Inquisition's standards: he had argued for heliocentrism (defending Copernicus against the church's geocentric position), for the existence of multiple inhabited worlds, and against the doctrine of the Trinity. His statue faces the Vatican deliberately - a 19th-century anti-clerical liberal gesture. The Bruno statue is the most political monument in central Rome.
Largo Argentina, where Caesar died
The 4 Republican-era temples (3rd-2nd century BC) at the bottom of Largo Argentina were discovered in 1929 when Mussolini ordered a new road through the area; the demolition exposed the temple bases 5m below the modern street level. Temple A (now identified as a temple of Jupiter), Temple B (Fortune of the Day), Temple C (Feronia), Temple D (the Lares Permarini). The northern boundary of the square includes the rear of the Curia of Pompey - the meeting place where the Senate had gathered on 15 March 44 BC ("the Ides of March"), the day Caesar was assassinated. The exact spot of the killing is in the still-unexcavated portion now beneath the modern Sant'Andrea della Valle. About 150 stray cats live among the temples - the Torre Argentina cat sanctuary, run by volunteers since 1993, is the kind of Roman fact that delights tourists exactly as much as the murder.
The walk you take
Done right, this quarter is a 3-hour walk that compresses 2,200 years of European history. Start at Largo Argentina (Caesar, cats, Republican temples). Walk north 200m to Sant'Ivo (Borromini's spiral lantern, Sundays only). Continue north to the Pantheon (Hadrian, the dome, Raphael's tomb). West to Piazza Navona (Bernini, Borromini, the Stadium of Domitian's shape). South-west to Campo de' Fiori (the Bruno statue, the morning market). Detour to San Luigi dei Francesi for the three Caravaggios. Detour to Sant'Agostino for the Madonna dei Pellegrini. End with a gelato at Giolitti. By the end you have walked through every major moment of Roman history.
