When it is your first time in Rome you can’t skip the regular hotspots:
On this page we also highlight a few lesser known to-do’s in Rome. Scroll down to discover more…
Everywhere in Rome, you can find masterpieces of the renaissance painter Caravaggio. They can be found easily in several churches in Rome. Google can be your best friend in finding the right locations.
Walk to the top of the Aventine hill and take a peek through the keyhole in the gates of the Sant’Anselmo complex. It provides you with a perfect view on the Saint Peter’s dome. Be prepared nowadays to queue for this site, as this little secret has been discovered by the larger crowd.
This palace is hidden just behind the busy Via Del Corso in the center of Rome. It is owned by an actual prince, who watches over an extensive art collection. You can visit the palace and have an audio tour, where the prince guides you through the enormous collection.
This church is located at the famous Via Veneto and houses the bones of over 400 Capucin monks. When they had to move their church they did not want to leave their dead brothers, so they decided to take their bones to their new church and show their respect by decorating the catacombes with the bones. Although somewhat lugubrious it is a fascinating site.
This church shows perfectly how Rome consists of multiple cities built on top of each other. You enter the nowadays church from the street level, but if you go down one level, you are in a church built in the fourth century A.D. After that you can go even further down and you find that this middle church was built half on a Mitraeum and half on a classic Roman villa.
Just east of Rome you find Tivoli, where Emperor Hadrianus has built an enormous villa, which would be better decribed as a village. It has a theater, bath houses, a hospital, great pools and squares. You can spend an entire day wondering through the villa estate and it is well worth it.
The perfect getaway for a hot summer day. Villa d’Este is a residency built by the ducal family of Ferrara, going by the name of Este in the 16th century. Highlight of the Villa is the garden with its numerous fountains all powered by simple gravity.