The best attractions, monuments, museums, archaeological sites, neighborhoods and experiences to enjoy in Rome.
Centrale Montemartini is one of Rome’s most distinctive museums: ancient marble statues stand beside turbines, engines and industrial machinery inside a former power station. The contrast is not a gimmick added for tourists. The museum grew from a temporary transfer of Capitoline collections during renovation work and proved so successful that the arrangement became permanent….
MAXXI offers a completely different Rome from the one built around ruins, basilicas and Baroque piazzas. The National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Flaminio focuses on contemporary art and architecture inside a dynamic building designed by Zaha Hadid. It is the right museum when you want to understand Rome as a living cultural city…
The Ara Pacis is one of the clearest places in Rome to understand how art, religion and political messaging worked under Augustus. The ancient altar is displayed inside a modern museum on the Lungotevere, close to the Mausoleum of Augustus. Unlike a ruin that requires you to reconstruct missing walls in your imagination, the monument…
Santa Maria del Popolo is one of Rome’s richest churches for art, yet it is easy to walk past it while crossing Piazza del Popolo. Inside a relatively compact basilica you can see two of Caravaggio’s most dramatic paintings, a chapel designed by Raphael and later reshaped by Bernini, Renaissance frescoes linked to Pinturicchio, important…
The Capuchin Crypt is one of Rome’s most unusual religious sites: a sequence of small chapels decorated with the bones of Capuchin friars, preceded by a museum explaining the order’s history and spirituality. It can look macabre in photographs, but the intended message is closer to a Christian meditation on mortality than a horror attraction….
Santa Cecilia in Trastevere is one of the richest churches in the neighborhood, combining medieval mosaics, a celebrated Baroque statue, rare frescoes by Pietro Cavallini and archaeological spaces beneath the basilica. It sits away from the busiest restaurant streets, so the atmosphere can feel unexpectedly calm even when Trastevere itself is crowded. The church is…
The Baths of Diocletian are one of Rome’s most impressive reminders that ancient monuments often survive by being reused rather than preserved as isolated ruins. Built at the end of the third and beginning of the fourth century, the enormous bathing complex once occupied roughly 13 hectares and could accommodate thousands of people. Today its…
St John Lateran is the cathedral of Rome and one of the city’s four papal basilicas, yet many visitors know far less about it than St. Peter’s. That makes it a valuable stop: the church has enormous religious importance, a monumental interior, a medieval cloister, an ancient baptistery nearby and the Holy Stairs complex across…
Santa Maria Maggiore is one of the most rewarding churches in Rome because it combines early Christian Rome, medieval mosaics, Renaissance chapels and Baroque interventions in a single building that still functions as a major place of worship. It is also unusually convenient: the basilica stands on the Esquiline, within walking distance of Termini, yet…
The National Etruscan Museum at Villa Giulia is the best place in Rome to understand the civilization that shaped central Italy before Rome became an imperial power. The museum is housed in a Renaissance villa near Villa Borghese and displays funerary objects, jewelry, terracottas, temple decoration and some of the most famous Etruscan works in…