Berlitz Pocket Guide Rome

• Publisher: Berlitz Travel
• ISBN:
  9781785730344
• Edition: 18
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

From its awe-inspiring art, to its many gelaterias, to its rich and vibrant history, Rome has plenty to tempt the visitor. Berlitz Pocket Guide Rome is a concise, full-colour travel guide that combines lively text with vivid photography to highlight the best that the city has to offer.

Inside Rome Berlitz Pocket Guide:� Where To Go details all the key sights in the city, while handy maps on the cover flaps help you find your way around, and are cross-referenced to the text.� Top 10 Attractions gives a run-down of the best sights to take in on your trip.� Perfect Tour provides an itinerary of the country.� What To Do is a snapshot of ways to spend your spare time, from exploring the city's many museums, to immersing yourself in the caf� culture, to sampling the city's finest food.� Essential information on Rome's culture, including a brief history of the city.� Eating Out covers the city's best cuisine.� Curated listings of the best hotels and restaurants.� A-Z of all the practical information you'll need.

About Berlitz: Berlitz draws on years of travel and language expertise to bring you a wide range of travel and language products, including travel guides, maps, phrase books, language-learning courses, dictionaries and kids' language products.

Where To Go

Visitors to Rome soon discover that cultural residues from different eras are often interwoven: a pagan mausoleum is also a papal fortress, a medieval church has a Baroque facade, and a Renaissance palace overlooks a modern traffic junction. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve come to Rome for the grandeur of the ancient remains, the revered pilgrimage sites of the Catholic Church or the inspired works of Michelangelo, Raphael and Bernini – you’ll end up seeing a glorious hotchpotch of them all.

Rome’s main gathering point: the Spanish Steps

Ming Tang-Evans/Apa Publications

Although the municipality of Rome sprawls over a huge area, the principal sights are packed into a comparatively small zone. For the most part, the best way of getting about is on foot. Much of the historic centre has been closed to traffic and parking is generally impossible. Rome’s public transport has been improved and although crowded during rush hours, it will usually get you near enough to your destination.

Closed Mondays

Many museums are closed on Mondays (the Forum, Colosseum, Palatine and the Vatican museums are notable exceptions), 1 January and 25 December. In the majority of cases, last entry is one hour before closing.

Piazza Venezia and Capitoline Hill

The most convenient place to begin exploring is Piazza Venezia 1 [map]. The hub of the capital’s main traffic arteries, this is a principal stop on several major bus routes and close to a number of sites. As far as orientation is concerned, the Vittoriano (Vittorio Emanuele Monument; www.polomusealelazio.beniculturali.it; daily 9.30am–5.30pm, until 4.30pm in winter; free) is a landmark visible from all over the city, and provides one of the best views of central Rome. Romans wish the dazzling white marble monument were not quite so conspicuous, however, and heap upon it such derisive nicknames as ‘Rome’s False Teeth’ and ‘The Wedding Cake’. Built from 1885 to 1911 to celebrate the unification of Italy and dedicated to the new nation’s first king, the Vittoriano contains the Altare della Patria, the tomb of Italy’s Unknown Soldier of World War I. The monument also has a museum complex, with important temporary art exhibitions in its western wing (www.ilvittoriano.com). Once you have climbed to the Altare della Patria, a lift offers access to a panorama of the city (daily 9.30am–6.45pm).

The gleaming white Vittoriano Monument

Ming Tang-Evans/Apa Publications

A much more impressive work of architecture on the west side of the piazza Palazzo Venezia, is the first great Renaissance palace in Rome (www.museopalazzovenezia.beniculturali.it; Tue–Sun 8.30am–7.30pm, ticket office until 6.30pm). It was once the embassy of the Venetian Republic to the Holy See, and in the 20th century served as Mussolini’s headquarters. His desk stood at the far corner of the Sala del Mappamondo, positioned to intimidate visitors, who had to approach across 21 metres (70ft) of marble floor. From the balcony over the central door, Il Duce harangued crowds in the square below. The palace contains a museum of medieval and Renaissance furniture, arms, tapestries, ceramics and sculpture.

The First Capitol Hill

To the Romans, the Capitol was both citadel and sanctuary, the symbolic centre of government, where the consuls took their oath and the Republic’s coinage was minted. Its name originated when a human skull was unearthed during excavations for the Temple of Jupiter and interpreted as a sign that Rome would one day be head (caput) of the world.

When the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, the Capitol was saved by the timely cackling of the sanctuary’s sacred geese, warning that attackers were scaling the rocks. Later, victorious caesars ended their triumphal processions here. They rode up from the Forum in chariots drawn by white horses to pay homage at the magnificent gilded Temple of Jupiter, which dominated the southern tip of the Capitoline.

In the Middle Ages, the collapsed temples were pillaged and the hill was abandoned to goats until, in the 16th century, Pope Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to give the Campidoglio its new glory.

Capitoline Hill

Two flights of steps lead up behind the Vittorio Emanuele Monument. The more graceful, La Cordonata, takes you up between statues of Castor and Pollux (mythical twin sons of Leda and the Swan) to the tranquil elegance of the Piazza del Campidoglio on top of the Capitoline Hill.

This was once the Capitol, where the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus stood, ancient Rome’s most sacred site. Today the Campidoglio is a fine Renaissance square, designed by Michelangelo (who also designed La Cordonata) for the reception of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Michelangelo also remodelled the existing Palazzo Senatorio, Rome’s former town hall, and planned the two palaces that flank it, the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo, which were completed after his death. Michelangelo had the magnificent 2nd century AD bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius placed in the square. The statue is a copy: the original is the centrepiece of the glass-covered Sala Marco Aurelio in the Musei Capitolini. The statue survived destruction after the decline of Rome because it was mistaken for a likeness of the Christian emperor Constantine, rather than of the pagan Marcus Aurelius.

The Musei Capitolini 2 [map] (www.museicapitolini.org; daily 9.30am–7.30pm, last entry 6.30pm) in the palaces of the Campidoglio, have extensive collections of sculpture excavated from ancient Rome. Enter through the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, where you will encounter a giant marble head, hand and foot, fragments from a 12-metre (40ft) statue of Emperor Constantine II. The palace is also home to the Capitoline She-Wolf depicted suckling the infants Romulus and Remus. This Etruscan bronze has become the symbol of Rome. In the top-floor Pinacoteca Capitolina (Capitoline Picture Gallery) are fine works by Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Velázquez, Rubens and Titian.

An underground passageway lined with artefacts connects the Palazzo dei Conservatori with the Palazzo Nuovo. The latter contains rows of portrait busts of Roman emperors, although its highlights are the poignant statue of the Dying Gaul, the sensual Capitoline Venus, a Roman copy of a Greek original dating from the 2nd century BC, and the Marble Faun.

Bronze statue of Constantine, Palazzo dei Conservatori

Ming Tang-Evans/Apa Publications

Alongside the Palazzo Senatorio a cobbled road opens out onto a terrace, giving you the best view of the Roman Forum ruins (for more information, click here), stretching from the Arch of Septimius Severus to the Arch of Titus, with the Colosseum beyond. The steeper flight of steps up the Campidoglio climbs to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the site of the temple of Juno Moneta. The 13th-century church is the home of the much-revered Santo Bambino (Baby Jesus), kept in a separate chapel. The original statue, believed to have miraculous powers, was stolen in 1994 and has been replaced with a copy.

Ancient Rome

The heart of ancient Rome is around the Colosseum (for more information, click here), with the Imperial Fora and Roman Forum to the no...