Rome rewards the traveller who reads it downward. This route trades the ticket queues for three-level basilicas, a Gestapo prison museum, a 62 BC bridge still carrying traffic, and Aventine cloisters where the Middle Ages never fully ended.
Caracalla's imperial baths opened in 216 AD and washed some 8,000 Romans a day across 25 hectares. Brick vaults still rise 30 metres above mosaic floors and the palaestra. Gates open 09:00, last entry 18:30 in summer.
Beneath the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo lie twenty rooms of 2nd–4th century Roman houses, frescoed with peacocks, cupids and a rare early-Christian orant figure. Entrance is on Clivo di Scauro, open 10:00–13:00 and 15:00–18:00.
Three cities in one stairwell: a 12th-century basilica with a golden apse mosaic sits on a 4th-century church, which sits on a 1st-century Mithraeum and an alley where you can still hear an underground stream running.
A fortified 12th-century monastery-castle that sheltered popes when Rome burned in 1084. The Oratory of San Silvestro holds 1246 frescoes of the Donation of Constantine — papal propaganda painted at the height of the investiture struggle.
The SS commandeered this apartment block in 1943 as its Rome prison. Cells are preserved with bricked-up windows and prisoners' scratched messages intact, alongside partisan documents from the 271 days of German occupation.
On 24 March 1944 the SS shot 335 men in these tufa quarries in reprisal for the Via Rasella attack. The 1949 mausoleum lays 335 identical tombs under a single vast concrete slab that appears to float in the darkness.
Mussolini's 1938 'Square Colosseum' anchors EUR, the district built for a 1942 world's fair that war cancelled. Its 216 arches and inscription about poets, artists and navigators make it the clearest surviving text of Fascist self-image.
Built 1885–1935 for Italy's first king, the Vittoriano cost a medieval quarter of the Capitoline hill its existence. Since 1921 an unknown soldier from the Isonzo front lies beneath the altar with a permanent honour guard.
Rome's Jewish community is the oldest continuous one in Europe, here since 161 BC. The 1555 ghetto walls stood until 1888; the museum under the 1904 synagogue documents that confinement and the 16 October 1943 deportation.
Built in 62 BC by Lucius Fabricius, this is the oldest Roman bridge still in original use anywhere. The island housed a temple of Aesculapius from 291 BC and has stayed a place of healing — Fatebenefratelli hospital occupies it today.
Built over the house of a 3rd-century martyr, with Maderno's 1600 statue of her body as it was found uncorrupted. Upstairs in the nuns' choir survives Pietro Cavallini's Last Judgement of 1293, painted a decade before Giotto's Assisi cycle.
Santa Sabina keeps its 432 AD proportions and a cypress-wood door carved around 430 showing one of the earliest known Crucifixions. Next door the Giardino degli Aranci occupies a Savelli family fortress of 1287.