City · Italy
Rome
Roma
Capital of an empire, seat of the popes & a city built on 2,700 years of its own ruins.
Rome has been continuously inhabited for over 2,500 years, capital of the Roman Empire, centre of the Catholic Church & since 1871 the capital of Italy. Its centre layers ancient, medieval, Renaissance and Baroque construction so densely that new building work routinely halts for archaeology.
The Place
The Pantheon settles the question of how old this city is. Its concrete dome, 43 metres across, has stood since around 125 CE and remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built, lit by a single nine-metre opening at its crown that lets the rain fall straight onto the marble floor. A few minutes away the Colosseum could seat some 50,000 for a day of games. Between the monuments, ancient columns turn up built sideways into medieval walls & churches sit on the foundations of temples. Rome does not preserve its past in a museum; it lives on top of it.
Why It Matters
For centuries Rome ran the Mediterranean world & the machinery it built outlasted the empire: the alphabet much of the West writes in, the legal concepts its courts still use, the road network whose routes modern highways follow. The Romans called it the Eternal City & the claim has roughly held. After the empire fell, Rome reinvented itself as the seat of the popes, which kept money, artists and power flowing in. Few cities have been the capital of so much for so long.
The Story
Legend dates the founding to 753 BC and the twins Romulus and Remus, raised by a wolf. The history is murkier but the trajectory is clear: a cluster of hill villages became a republic, the republic became an empire stretching from Britain to the Euphrates & the empire eventually split and shrank until Rome was a half-ruined town of grazing cattle among the Forum's columns. The popes rebuilt it through the Renaissance and Baroque. Only in 1871 did it become the capital of a unified Italy, the last role it took on.
What to See
The ancient core clusters together: the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, where the republic governed itself, the Colosseum at one end & the Pantheon a short walk north. Baroque Rome is a matter of stumbling onto it, the Trevi Fountain filling a small piazza, the Spanish Steps climbing to a church above. Across the river lies Vatican City, a sovereign state of 44 hectares holding St Peter's Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. Trastevere, the old working-class quarter, keeps the best of the evening street life.
Knowing Before You Go
The Vatican is a separate country, with its own post office and police & its churches enforce a dress code that covers shoulders and knees, which catches out summer visitors in shorts. Book the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums online ahead; the walk-up queues run for hours in season. Much of Rome shuts down in mid-August, when the city empties for the Ferragosto holiday and the heat is at its worst.
- Country
- Italy
- Region
- Roma
- Coordinates
- 41°53′35″N 12°28′58″E
- Filmed here
- Spectre (2015)
Heritage · Colosseum The largest amphitheatre Rome ever built, finished on the drained lake where Nero once kept his private grounds.
What You're Looking At
The outer wall, where it survives, rises 48 metres and once ran the full 189 by 156 metre ellipse of the building. Travertine limestone, tuff, brick and Roman concrete were combined without mortar in the outer ring, held instead by roughly 300 tons of iron clamps. The arena floor measured 83 by 48 metres. Modern estimates put seating capacity at around 50,000, well below the 87,000 given in a 4th-century calendar, distributed across tiers that followed Roman social rank from senators at the bottom to the poor and enslaved at the top.
The Story
Construction began under Vespasian around AD 72 and reached the third storey by his death in 79. Titus finished the upper levels and opened the building in AD 80 with games that, by ancient accounts, killed over 9,000 animals. Domitian later added a gallery to increase capacity and built the hypogeum, a two-level network of tunnels and cages beneath the arena for gladiators, animals and stage machinery. A 1349 earthquake brought down the south wall & its stone was carted off for palaces and churches across the city.
Details to Notice
Look for the eighty numbered entrances, 76 of them originally for ordinary ticket-holders directed by pottery-shard tokens to a specific section and row. The hypogeum's eighty vertical shafts, once used to hoist caged animals straight into the arena, are visible from the upper walkways where the arena floor has been left open. The uneven, patched profile of the outer wall marks where the 1349 collapse and centuries of stone-robbing removed entire sections.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Heritage · Roman Forum A burial ground turned marketplace turned the political and religious centre of ancient Rome for over a thousand years.
What You're Looking At
The site preserves layers from a thousand years of building. The Temple of Saturn (497 BC) and Temple of Castor and Pollux (484 BC) mark the early Republic; the Basilica Julia and Basilica Aemilia, rebuilt repeatedly, framed the plaza's long sides during the Empire. The Arch of Septimius Severus, dedicated in AD 203, still stands near where the Senate House, the Curia, was rebuilt by Julius Caesar. The Basilica of Maxentius, finished around AD 312, was the last major structure added before the Western Empire's collapse.
The Story
Roman tradition traces the Forum's founding to a peace pact between Romulus and the Sabine king Titus Tatius. Archaeology instead shows a burial ground giving way, in the 8th century BC, to a paved public space, drained by the Cloaca Maxima sewer and built up through the Republic with temples, basilicas and the Rostra speakers' platform. Mark Antony delivered his funeral oration for Caesar here in 44 BC. As the Empire's business shifted to newer imperial forums, the old Forum declined; by the Middle Ages Romans grazed cattle on it and called it Campo Vaccino.
Details to Notice
Watch for the Rostra, the platform from which speakers addressed the crowd, its orientation changed over time to face the people rather than the Senate House behind it. The House of the Vestals and the Temple of Vesta sit near the Forum's southeastern edge. Excavation only began in earnest in 1898 under Giacomo Boni & work has continued since 2009, with finds of pottery and food scraps pushing the dating of some structures earlier than the traditional chronology allowed.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Heritage · Palatine Hill The hill where Rome's foundation myth is set, later claimed entirely by emperors as their private address.
What You're Looking At
The hill today is largely an open-air museum, with the Palatine Museum holding finds from its excavations and from other ancient Italian sites. Remains span from Iron Age huts to the sprawling imperial palaces built by Augustus, Tiberius and Domitian, plus the 16th-century Farnese Gardens laid out above Tiberius's palace foundations. Augustus's temple to Apollo and the ruins of Nero's Domus Aurea, later built over by Domitian, are part of the same layered complex.
The Story
Legend places the Lupercal cave, where a she-wolf found Romulus and Remus, on the Palatine & it was here that Romulus supposedly marked out Rome's first walls and killed his brother. Excavations in 1907 and 1948 found funerary huts from the 9th to 7th centuries BC, consistent with the traditional founding period. Before the Empire the hill held wealthy private houses; Augustus's decision to build his palace here set the pattern that made it an imperial monopoly for the rest of Roman history.
Details to Notice
A structure identified in 2006 as the Palatine House, possibly Augustus's birthplace, preserves a frescoed atrium and mosaic flooring overlooking the Colosseum, with shops opening onto the Via Sacra below. In 2007 archaeologists found a sixteen-metre-deep vault beneath the House of Livia, decorated with mosaics and seashells; some identify it as the legendary Lupercal, though others argue for a Neronian nymphaeum or dining grotto instead.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Heritage · Circus Maximus Rome's first and largest stadium, built for chariot races that could pack in over 150,000 spectators at a time.
What You're Looking At
The site is now a long public park tracing the outline of the ancient track. Little of the stone superstructure survives above ground, since Trajan's rebuilding in stone was itself later stripped for materials, but the elongated valley shape and the curved end where the turning posts stood are still legible in the landscape. An Egyptian obelisk that Augustus erected on the central barrier was removed in the 16th century and now stands in Piazza del Popolo.
The Story
Racing here began informally, with little more than turning posts and earth banks, until Rome's early kings added wooden seating for aristocrats and later commoners. The Republic formalised the venue with permanent wooden starting stalls built in 329 BC, which by the late Republic numbered twelve, launching both four-horse and two-horse chariots at once. Julius Caesar rebuilt the Circus around 50 BC, extending seating nearly around the whole track. Trajan gave it its definitive stone form in the early 2nd century AD. Chariot racing continued for centuries after Christianity became Rome's official religion, with the last recorded beast hunt in AD 523 and the final race under Totila in AD 549.
Details to Notice
Races were seven laps, tracked first with large stone eggs from around 174 BC and later with bronze dolphins added in 33 BC, mounted on the central barrier for visibility. Two chariot teams, the Blues and Greens, dominated late Roman racing. Beneath the outer stands sat workshops and shops that made the Circus a busy, disreputable district even when no games were running & it doubled as a livestock corral for the nearby cattle market.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Heritage · St. Peter's Basilica A 120-year Renaissance rebuilding project over the believed tomb of Saint Peter, crowned by the tallest dome in the world.
What You're Looking At
The dome, 41.47 metres across internally, slightly exceeds the Pantheon and Florence Cathedral in diameter and dominates the Rome skyline. Inside, the nave runs in three bays under the highest barrel vault of any church, opening onto an interior of 15,160 square metres, one of the largest of any church building. Bernini's bronze baldachin over the high altar stands 28.74 metres tall on twisted columns & his elliptical colonnaded piazza in front of the basilica was laid out between 1656 and 1667 around an Egyptian obelisk brought to Rome in AD 37.
The Story
Pope Nicholas V first planned to replace the failing 4th-century basilica in the 15th century, but the project stalled after his death. Julius II restarted it by ordering the old building demolished outright & Donato Bramante's Greek-cross design was chosen in 1506. Responsibility passed through several architects until Michelangelo took over in 1547, in his seventies, saying he worked only for the love of God. He fixed the dome's design before his death in 1564; Giacomo della Porta completed it & Carlo Maderno, from 1602, added the nave that gave the church its final Latin-cross plan.
Details to Notice
Michelangelo's Pietà sits in the first chapel of the north aisle. Bernini's Cathedra Petri, a bronze throne enclosing the ancient Chair of Saint Peter, is held aloft by statues of four Doctors of the Church beneath an alabaster window lit to show the Dove of the Holy Spirit. Four piers supporting the dome hold statues tied to major relics: Longinus with his spear, Helena with the True Cross, Veronica with her veil & Andrew. Pope Pius XII announced in 1950 that excavations beneath the altar had located an ancient tomb, though he stopped short of confirming any bones as Peter's own; that identification followed only in 1968, under Paul VI.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Film & TV · Fast Furious Fast X
Fast X (2023) stages its loudest set piece in Rome: a massive spherical bomb breaks loose and rolls through the streets of the historic centre while Dom Toretto tries to steer it away from the crowds, the chase sweeping past the Vatican before the device ends up in the Tiber. The production filmed in Rome and Turin, dressing real streets for the sequence. It was the franchise's first major shoot in the Italian capital, chosen for exactly the postcard backdrops the runaway bomb then threatens to flatten.
Film & TV · Mission Impossible Mission: Impossible III
Mission: Impossible III (2006) stages its most elaborate heist at the Vatican. Posing as guests at a formal reception, Ethan Hunt and his team breach the walls to capture the arms dealer Davian, complete with a mask-swap and a rooftop escape. The Vatican did not permit filming inside its grounds, so the production recreated the exteriors elsewhere and shot establishing plates in Rome, intercutting them to sell the illusion that the IMF team had walked straight into the heart of the Holy See.
Film & TV · James Bond Spectre
In Spectre (2015), James Bond follows a lead to Rome, attending the funeral of the assassin Sciarra and then infiltrating a midnight meeting of the SPECTRE organisation in a darkened palazzo. The sequence ends in a car chase along the Tiber embankments, Bond's Aston Martin DB10 against a Jaguar C-X75, weaving through the deserted night-time city beside the river. The DB10 was built specially for the film, only ten were made & the chase was shot on location on the real Lungotevere roads.