6 Te Travel Guide No place like Rome


From the Trevi Fountain to the Spanish Steps, the Italian capital’s historic centre is full of famed sights. Those looking for something different, however, needn’t veer too far off the tourist trail — intriguing tales reveal themselves at every turn. Words: Julia Buckley. Photographs: Francesco Lastrucci


Promotional Content • Saturday 29th January 2022


View towards St Peter’s Basilica from Ponte Sant’Angelo


Tadolini looks like any other. But Giuseppe gestures inside to a giant, white man sitting on a giant, white horse. Tey’re barrelling towards the door, with more spectral, white statues behind them, gathered like an army of wraiths. “Tis was the studio of Canova


I


and his star pupil, Tadolino,” says Giuseppe. Te man on horseback is a plaster cast, and so too are the figures behind him, including athletes and a nun. Te workshop belonged to Tadolino’s family until 1967, when it became a cafe. Tourists walk past, oblivious to the significance of what’s inside, often more interested in Il Babuino, a nearby fountain of a reclining Roman named Silenus. In centuries past, Romans would fix


Rome is so multi-levelled that to get off the beaten


track you don’t even need to leave the main streets, you just need to look a little deeper


n the middle of Via del Babuino, surrounded by designer shops, Giuseppe Albano stops at a cafe. From the outside, Canova


anonymous notes scandalising each other onto Il Babuino. “Te Twitter of its day,” laughs Giuseppe. Tat’s the thing about Rome. Te


city is so multi-levelled that to get off the beaten track you don’t even need to leave the main streets, you just need to look a little deeper. It’s a lesson I’m learning from


Giuseppe as we saunter along the Via del Babuino. What I’d dismissed as a stroll along a high-end shopping street is in fact an amble through history. Tis is the route British travellers used to take on the Grand Tour: they’d arrive at the swaggering Piazza del Popolo, then trot down Via del Babuino to their lodgings around the Piazza di Spagna. Fittingly, I’m with the right person


to follow in English footsteps around the Italian capital: Giuseppe is the director of the Keats-Shelley House, a museum devoted to the Romantic poets. It’s housed at the foot of the Spanish Steps, in the building where Keats died aged 25 in 1821. But today, Giuseppe is out and about, showing me his take on the Via del Babuino, which consists mainly of looking up. “People don’t notice the architecture,” he explains. Sure enough, above the shopfronts is a series of palazzi, each grander than the last. “If these were by themselves, they’d be marvelled at,” says Giuseppe. “But because they’re all


together, you don’t notice them.” Look closely at the other buildings,


instructs Giuseppe, and you’ll see Rome differently. Carved, florid dolphins and waves dance around the doorway of number 51, the scene resembling something from the Trevi Fountain. Opposite stands a brick Anglican church, its incongruous place on this palazzo- lined street testament to the fact that non-Catholic churches were banned in Rome until the city joined a newly unified Italy in 1870. I leave Giuseppe at the Spanish


Steps and delve deeper into the well- trodden Centro Storico, the city’s historic centre, by myself. Here, too, there are surprises at every turn. I already knew Piazza Navona’s distinctive lozenge shape was thanks to the site’s origins as a stadium, but this time, I take the steps down from the ticket office to walk beneath the mammoth travertine arches that flank its edge. Afterwards, fuelled by an organic


coffee at Sant’Eustachio Il Caffé, I step inside the San Luigi dei Francesi church and gaze at three paintings by Caravaggio: dark, swirling spotlit takes on the life of Saint Matthew. Tere’s more Caravaggio — along


with Titian, Bernini and Tintoretto — at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery. Te


Works by Caravaggio at San Luigi dei Francesi Church


showpiece here is the Versailles- like hall of mirrors. But most extraordinary of all is the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez. “It’s too real!” the subject was said to have yelled when he saw his mottled skin and jutting chin. Even now, centuries later, he seems so lifelike that I feel his beady eyes


following me around the gallery. Colossal and varied as it is, Rome truly does intimacy like nowhere else on earth.


First published in the November 2021


issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK). Read the feature in full online at nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel


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