t The cutting-edge MAXXI
t The cutting-edge MAXXI
Along with the nearby Parco della Musica, MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Art, has put Rome on the contemporary arts map. Completed in 2009, it is located in a stunning building designed by the late architect Zaha Hadid. The museum showcases emerging Italian and international artists. An impressive amount of space is also given over to architecture. Some of the biggest names represented include Renzo Piano, Gilbert and George, and Paolo Portoghesi.
t Auditorium Parco della Musica, designed by Renzo Piano
Designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 2002, the Auditorium Parco della Musica is not merely a beautiful concert venue but a multi-functional space with an outdoor amphitheatre, shops, restaurants and play area – and an ice rink in winter, a popular leisure space with Romans. Renzo Piano studied acoustics with contemporary composers Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono; guided tours of the auditoriums reveal how he applied the technology of musical instruments to architecture with the extensive use of complex geometries and fine wood.
Rome’s second-largest park (after Villa Doria Pamphilj), Villa Ada cuts a green swathe through the north of Rome and features land-scaped gardens, ornamental lakes and umbrella-pine-shaded lawns that lead the way to wilder wooded hills.
A royal hunting ground and residence belonging to the House of Savoy, the properties were sold in 1878 to a Swiss count who named them after his wife. The villa is now the Egyptian embassy. From late June to August, Villa Ada hosts the free world-music festival Roma Incontra il Mondo, with concerts staged on the lakeside.
Tunnelling for 15 km (9 miles) on three different levels below the extensive estate of an aristocratic 1st-century AD Roman woman known only as Priscilla, these catacombs – rarely visited by tourists – are run by a small community of Benedictine sisters. They hold the tombs of more than 40,000 Christians. The sisters give personal guided tours, during which they point out tiny, telling details. The tours take in both the humble burial places of the poor and the more elaborate frescoed tombs of the wealthy. The catacombs also contain the oldest-known image of the Madonna and Child, dating back to the late 1st or early 2nd century AD.
The Coppedè neighbourhood was created by Art Nouveau Florentine architect Gino Coppedè between 1913 and 1927 as a prestigious residential enclave for wealthy Ligurian bankers. Coppedè’s imagination was given free rein, and the result is an architectural fantasia, a fairytale world that features Tuscan turrets, Venetian pinnacles, Moorish arches, Gothic gargoyles, medieval frescoes and gingerbread-house aesthetics. Start your visit on Via Tagliamento, entering via a mighty arch-way hung with an elaborate wrought-iron lamp. This emerges onto a piazza dominated by the Fontana delle Rane, which is adorned with a dozen stone frogs. In all, there are around 40 villas and apartment buildings around the square, the highlight of which is the Villini delle Fate, a complex of three villas, embellished with everything from the signs of the zodiac and a lion of St Mark to falconers and Franciscan monks.
hidden gem
Truly unique and unlike any other architectural style, the quirky Quartiere Coppedè provides quite a contrast to the classic Renaissance and Baroque styles in most of the rest of the city.
t The interior of Rome’s contemporary art museum, MACRO, on Via Nizza
The historic Peroni beer factory is home to the MACRO gallery of contemporary art. It has cutting-edge architecture featuring coloured lights, glass and exposed steel. As well as a permanent collection of late 20th-century art, with works by artists such as Carla Accardi and Mario Schifano, there are frequent interesting temporary exhibitions showcasing the latest on the local and national scene. Free screenings of oddball, experimental and arthouse short films are held in a niche just off the atrium.
The round church of Santa Costanza was first built as a mausoleum for Emperor Constantine’s daughters, Constantia and Helena, in the early 4th century. The dome and its drum are supported by a circular arcade resting on 12 magnificent pairs of granite columns. The ambulatory that runs around the outside of the central arcade has a barrel- vaulted ceiling decorated with wonderful 4th-century mosaics of flora and fauna and charming scenes of a Roman grape harvest. In a niche on the far side of the church from the entrance is a replica of Constantia’s ornately carved porphyry sarcophagus. The original was moved to the Vatican Museums in 1790.
Constantia was described by the historian Marcellinus as fury incarnate and guilty of goading her equally unpleasant husband Hannibalianus to violence. Her canonization was probably the result of some confusion with a saintly nun of the same name.
The church of Sant’Agnese stands among a group of early Christian buildings which includes the ruins of a covered cemetery, some extensive catacombs and the crypt where the 13-year-old martyr St Agnes was buried in AD 304. Agnes was exposed naked by order of Emperor Diocletian, furious that she should have rejected the advances of a young man at his court, but her hair miraculously grew to protect her modesty. Though considerably altered over the centuries, the form and much of the structure of the 4th-century basilica remain intact. In the 7th-century apse mosaic St Agnes appears as a bejewelled Byzantine empress. According to tradition she appeared like this eight days after her death, holding a white lamb. Every year on 21 January two lambs are blessed on the church altar and a vestment called the pallium is woven from their wool. Every newly appointed archbishop is sent a pallium by the pope.
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# 9am–noon & 3–5pm daily ¢ Nov
The first part of the Via Appia was built in 312 BC by the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus. When it was extended to the ports of Benevento, Taranto and Brindisi in 190 BC, the road became Rome’s link with its empire in the East. It was the route taken by the funeral processions of the dictator Sulla (78 BC) and Emperor Augustus (AD 14) and it was along this road that St Paul was led as a prisoner to Rome in AD 56. Abandoned in the Middle Ages, the road was restored by Pope Pius IV in the mid-16th century. It is lined with ruined family tombs and collective burial places. Beneath the fields on each side is a vast maze of catacombs. You can still walk along the Via Appia Antica in the footsteps of many ancient Romans. Today the road starts at Porta San Sebastiano. Major Christian sights include the church of Domine Quo Vadis, built where St Peter is said to have met Christ while fleeing from Rome, and the Catacombs of San Callisto and San Sebastiano. The tombs lining the road include those of Cecilia Metella and Romulus (son of Emperor Maxentius) who died in 309. The remains of an ancient sumptuous private residence and baths, Villa dei Quintili, are 4 km (2.5 miles) away. It has some impressive mosaic floors, and the guided tour of the archaeological site includes entry to a small museum.
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⌂ Via Appia Nuova 1092 § 06-3996 7700 # Tue–Sun
t Ruins of the Villa dei Quintili, a luxurious private residence in the 2nd century
In burying their dead in underground cemeteries outside the city walls, the early Christians were simply obeying the laws of the time rather than doing so because of persecution. So many saints were buried in the various catacombs that they went on to become shrines and places of pilgrimage.
The vast Catacombs of San Callisto are laid out over four different levels, and only certain parts may be explored by visitors. The rooms and connecting passageways are hewn out of volcanic tufa. The dead were placed in niches known as loculi, which were able to hold two or three bodies. The most important rooms were decorated with stucco and frescoes.
The area that can be visited includes the Crypt of the Popes, where many of the early popes were buried (16 pontiffs in all), and the Crypt of Santa Cecilia, where the saint’s body was discovered in 820 before being moved to her church in Trastevere. Dozens of martyrs were also buried in these catacombs.
The 17th-century church of San Sebastiano, situated above the catacombs, occupies the site of a basilica. Preserved at the entrance to the catacombs is the triclia, a building that once stood above ground and was used by mourners for taking funeral refreshments. Its walls are covered with graffiti that invokes St Peter and St Paul, whose remains may have been moved here during one of the periods of persecution.
t Ancient frescoes in the Catacombs of Domitilla, the largest catacombs in Rome
This network of catacombs is the largest in Rome. Many of the tombs from the 1st and 2nd centuries AD have no Christian connection. In the burial chambers there are frescoes depicting both Classical and Christian scenes, including one of the earliest depictions of Christ as the Good Shepherd. Above the catacombs stands the basilica of Santi Nereo e Achilleo. After centuries of rebuilding and restoration, little remains of the original 4th-century church.
On the evening of 24 March 1944, Nazi forces took 335 prisoners to this abandoned quarry south of Rome and shot them at point blank range. The execution was in reprisal for a bomb attack that had killed 32 German soldiers. The victims included various political prisoners, 73 Jews and ten other civilians, among them a priest and a 14-year-old boy. The Germans blew up the tunnels where the massacre had taken place, but a local peasant had witnessed the scene and later helped find the corpses. The site is now a memorial to the values of the Resistance against the Nazi occupation, which gave birth to the modern Italian Republic. A forbidding bunker-like monument houses the rows of identical tombs containing the victims.
Beside it is a museum of the Resistance with interest-ing works of modern sculpture including The Martyrs, by Francesco Coccia, and the gates shaped like a wall of thorns by Mirko Basaldella.
Experience Beyond the centre
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EAT Eataly This cathedral to gastronomy is a must for anyone who loves to eat or cook. As well as a huge number of niche producers of everything from handmade pasta to biodynamic wine, there are bars, restaurants, tastings and a packed calendar of events. ⌂ Piazzale 12 Ottobre 1492 ∑ eataly.net |
One of the most famous landmarks on the Via Appia Antica is the huge tomb built for the noblewoman Cecilia Metella. Her father and husband were rich patricians and successful generals of late Republican Rome, but hardly anything is known about the woman herself.
In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII donated the tomb to his family, the Caetani. They incorporated it in a fortified castle that blocked the Via Appia, allowing them to control the traffic on the road and exact tolls.
Across the road are the remains of the early 14th-century church of San Nicola.
The Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR), a suburb south of the city, was built for an international exhibition, a kind of “Work Olympics”, that was planned by Mussolini for 1942 to celebrate Fascist Italy but never took place because of World War II. The architecture was intended to glorify Fascism and the style of the buildings is very over-blown and rhetorical. The eerie Palazzo della Civiltà del Lavoro (The Palace of the Civilization of Work) is an unmistakable landmark.
The scheme was completed in the 1950s. In terms of town planning, EUR has been quite successful and people are still keen to live here owing to its modern amenities. Many businesses have offices in the area. The great marble halls and large austere buildings inspired by ancient Imperial Roman architecture house government offices and a number of museums.
The library of the SIAE building houses the Burcardo Theatre Museum, featuring theatre literature, Chinese masks and puppets from all over Italy. The fascinating Museo della Civiltà museum complex brings together the collections of several different museums: the Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography “Luigi Pigorini” features exhibits from different cultures and some important prehistoric remains, such as a Neanderthal cranium, prehistoric fauna and some well-preserved Neolithic boats; the Museum of Traditional and Folk Art explores Italian regional culture; while the National Museum of the Early Middle Ages presents a wealth of early medieval Italian objects and houses a spectacular reconstruction of a marble-clad room from Ostia Antica. The National Museum of Oriental Art “Giuseppe Tucci” displays objects from Italian archaeological findings in Iran, India, Pakistan, China and elsewhere in the Far East.
In the southern part of the district is a lake and park, and the huge domed Palazzo dello Sport built for the 1960 Olympics.
t The Marconi Obelisk, towering over the central square of EUR district
⌂ Viale della Letteratura 24 § 06-5990 3814 # 9:15am–1:15pm Mon–Fri
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⌂ Piazza G. Marconi 14 # 8am–7pm Tue–Sun ∑ museocivilta.beniculturali.it
Cinecittà Si Mostra (literally translated as “Cinecittà Shows Off”) offers the chance to step behind the scenes of Italy’s most famous film studio. Props and costumes are exhibited, including the dress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). Tours include film sets, such as a replica Broadway created for the Martin Scorsese film Gangs of New York (2002) and a mock ancient Rome (which stood in for ancient Pompeii in a 2008 episode of Doctor Who), along with the working film studio.
t Mosaics adorning the walls of the swimming pool in the Foro Italico
The Foro Italico sports complex was created by Mussolini (and originally named the Foro Mussolini) between 1928 and 1938 in the hope of securing the 1944 Olympic Games for the city; in the event, that year’s Games were cancelled due to World War II. Inspired by the Fora of Imperial Rome, it still features a huge obelisk inscribed with the words “Mussolini Dux” (dux being the Latin for leader). The swimming pool is pure marble, with stone mosaic decorations. The Stadio dei Marmi is ringed by 60 colossal marble statues of idealized male athletes, each one sculpted by a young, unknown artist and donated by one of the 60 provinces of Italy. Overlooking it is a building that once housed the Fascist Male Academy of Physical Education, now the headquarters of the Italian Olympic Committee. Also within the complex is the Stadio Olimpico; rebuilt for the 1990 FIFA World Cup, it is the home stadium of both the Roma and Lazio football teams and is also used for international rugby and athletics and occasional big rock concerts. The Italian Open tennis tournament is staged at the complex’s Campo Centrale.
t Detail of one of the marble figures around the Stadio dei Marmi
An enormous old industrial site was restored in 1997 to house part of the collections of the Capitoline Museums. Originally, the building was used as Rome’s first thermo-electric power station and its two huge generators still occupy the central machine room, creating quite an intriguing contrast to the exhibits of Classical ancient Roman statuary and artifacts. Many of the statues were discovered during excavations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and include finds from the Area Sacra di Largo Argentina.
Today’s church is a faithful reconstruction of the great 4th-century basilica destroyed by fire on 15 July 1823. Few fragments of the original church survived. The triumphal arch over the nave is decorated on one side with restored 5th-century mosaics. On the other side are mosaics by Pietro Cavallini, originally on the façade. The splendid Venetian apse mosaics (1220) depict the figures of Christ with St Peter, St Andrew, St Paul and St Luke. The fine marble canopy over the high altar is signed by the sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio (1285) “together with his partner Pietro”, who may have been Pietro Cavallini. Below the altar is the confessio, the tomb of St Paul. To the right is an impressive Paschal candle-stick by Nicolò di Angelo and Pietro Vassalletto.
The cloister of San Paolo, with its pairs of colourful inlaid columns supporting the arcade, was spared completely by the fire. Completed around 1214, it is considered one of the most beautiful in Rome.
One of Rome’s largest public parks, the Villa Doria Pamphilj was laid out in the mid-17th century for Prince Camillo Pamphilj. His uncle, Pope Innocent X, paid for the magnificent summer residence, the Casino del Bel Respiro, and the fountains and summerhouses, some of which still survive.
t The 17th-century Villa Doria Pamphilj with its tranquil formal gardens
Tivoli has been a popular summer resort since the days of the Roman Republic. Among the famous men who owned villas here were the poets Catullus and Horace, Caesar’s assassins Brutus and Cassius, and the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Tivoli’s main attractions were its clean air and beautiful situation on the slopes of the Tiburtini hills, its healthy sulphur springs and the waterfalls of the Aniene. The Romans’ luxurious lifestyle was revived in Renaissance times by the owners of the Villa d’Este, the town’s most famous sight.
In the Middle Ages Tivoli suffered frequent invasions as its position made it an ideal base for an advance on Rome.
The town’s cobbled streets are still lined with medieval houses. The cathedral contains a lovely 13th-century life-size wooden group representing the Deposition from the Cross.
The Villa d’Este occupies the site of an old Benedictine convent. In the 16th century the estate was developed by Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, son of Lucrezia Borgia. A palace was designed by Pirro Ligorio to make the most of its hill-top situation, but the villa’s fame rests more on the terraced gardens and fountains laid out by Ligorio and Giacomo della Porta.
The grottoes and fountains still give a vivid impression of the luxury enjoyed by the princes of the church. From the loggia of the palace you descend to the Grotto of Diana and Bernini’s Fontana del Bicchierone. Below to the right is the Rometta (little Rome), a model of Tiber Island with allegorical figures and the legendary she-wolf. The Fontana dell’Organo is a water-organ, in which the force of the water pumps air through the pipes. The garden’s lowest level has flower beds and fountains and splendid views.
t Picturesque ruins in Hadrian's Villa
Built as a private summer retreat between AD 118 and 134, Hadrian’s Villa was a vast open-air museum of the finest architecture of the Roman world. The grounds of the Imperial Palace were filled with full-scale reproductions of the emperor’s favourite buildings from Greece and Egypt. Although excavations on this site began in the 16th century, many of the ruins scattered in the surrounding fields have yet to be identified with any certainty. The grounds make a very picturesque site for a picnic. The most notable buildings are signposted and several have been partially restored or reconstructed. One of the most impressive is the so-called Maritime Theatre. This is a round pool with an island in the middle, surrounded by columns. The island, reached by means of a swing bridge, was probably Hadrian’s private studio, where he withdrew from the cares of the Empire to indulge in his two favourite pastimes, paint-ing and architecture. There were also theatres, Greek and Latin libraries, two bath-houses, extensive housing for guests and the palace staff, and formal gardens with fountains, statues and pools. Hadrian also loved Greek philosophy. One part of the gardens is thought to have been Hadrian’s reproduction of the Grove of Academe, where Plato lectured to his students. He also had a replica made of the Stoà Poikile, a beautiful painted colonnade in Athens, from which the Stoic philosophers took their name. The so-called Hall of the Philosophers, close to the Poikile, was probably a library.
The most ambitious of Hadrian’s replicas was the Canopus, a sanctuary of the god Serapis near Alexandria. For this a canal 119 metres (130 yards) long was dug and Egyptian statues were imported to decorate the temple and its grounds.
Below ground the emperor even built a fanciful re-creation of the underworld, Hades, reached through under-ground tunnels, of which there were many linking the various parts of the villa.
Plundered by barbarians, who camped here in the 6th and 8th centuries, the villa fell into disrepair and Renaissance antiquarians contributed even further to its destruction. Statues unearthed in the grounds are on display in museums around Europe. The Vatican’s Egyptian Collection has many fine works that were found here.
Experience Beyond the centre
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eat Sibilla The view of the Temple of Vesta from Sibilla's terrace can hardly be beaten, and the refined take on traditional Italian fare is also pretty special. ⌂ Via della Sibilla 50, Tivoli ∑ ristorantesibilla.com ¡¡¡ |
The main attractions of this steeply sloping park are the waterfalls and grottoes created by the River Aniene. The park is named after Pope Gregory XVI, who in the 1830s ordered the building of a tunnel to ward against flood- ing. This tunnel created a new waterfall, the Grande Cascata, plunging 160 m (525 ft) into the valley behind the town.
Lake Bracciano
V From Ostiense (c.70 min) @ From Saxa Rubra, reached by train from Roma Nord (then bus, c.90 min)
This volcanic lake is popular for sailing and for swimming .
Pompeii
V From Termini to Naples, then change to local train (c.130 min) @ Special tours from tourist agents
Visit the excavations of the bustling Roman city where daily life was put to a sudden end by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79.
Viterbo
V From Ostiense (c.115 min) or train from Roma Nord, Piazzale Flaminio, on Metro line A (c.150 min) @ From Saxa Rubra, reached by train from Roma Nord (then bus, c.90 min)
As well as a medieval quarter, this city has great thermal spas.
Castelli Romani
V from Termini (c.20 min)
About 20 km (12 miles) south of Rome lie 16 hill towns known as the “Roman Castles”, set amidst lush greenery. They are popular for wine-tasting tours.