Olga Golubeva

Frascati is, for most travellers, a wine town — and the wine, the Frascati Superiore, is sufficient justification for a day. But behind the vineyards, on the slope above the village, rises one of the most extraordinary patrician villas of late-Renaissance Italy: the Villa Aldobrandini, built between 1598 and 1602 by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini (nephew … Read more

For the traveller who has already visited the Papal Summer Palace at Castel Gandolfo — the Apostolic Palace, the Barberini Gardens, the panorama from the loggia — there is a second Castel Gandolfo that escapes the tourist itinerary almost completely: the medieval village itself, the lake at its feet, and the slow Roman lunch on … Read more

The Russian presence in Rome is older and deeper than most travellers suspect. The first significant Russian community arrived in the 1820s — aristocratic émigrés on the European Grand Tour, painters from the Saint Petersburg Academy who came to study antiquity directly, Russian princes wintering in palazzi rented for the season. By the late 19th … Read more

A traveller who has stood beneath the Sistine ceiling, or who has looked closely at Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican apartments, has almost certainly wondered the same thing: how, technically, were those frescoes made? The question is not trivial. Buon fresco — the «true fresco» of the Italian Renaissance, painted directly into the … Read more

Sixty kilometres east of Rome, in the hills above the small town of Olevano Romano, a quiet renaissance has been underway for fifteen years. The Cesanese — the indigenous red grape of southern Lazio, almost extinct in the 1980s — is being recovered by a small constellation of family producers who have, in less than … Read more

Forty-five minutes north-west of Rome, the via Cassia descends into the Sabatini volcanic crater, and the traveller arrives at one of the most cinematic small landscapes in the Lazio region: Lake Bracciano, a perfectly circular volcanic lake of fifty-seven square kilometres, ringed by three medieval villages, and dominated by the silhouette of the Castello Orsini-Odescalchi … Read more

Seventy kilometres east of Rome, in the dramatic Aniene valley of the Simbruini mountains, a Benedictine monastery has been carved into a vertical cliff for nine hundred years. The Sacro Speco di Subiaco — the «sacred grotto» — is the cave in which Saint Benedict spent three years in solitary meditation between 497 and 500 … Read more

Roman luxury shopping has a geography. It is not the via del Corso (too commercial), nor the via dei Condotti alone (which is now mostly the same global flagships available in any capital). It is the triangle formed by three intersecting streets — the via dei Condotti from the Spanish Steps, the via Margutta running … Read more

In the heart of the Regola district, a few minutes from Campo de’ Fiori, there is a small palace, the Palazzo Spada, in whose garden Francesco Borromini constructed, in 1652, what is probably the most elegantly intelligent piece of theatre in all baroque Rome. The garden gallery — known to art historians as the «prospettiva» … Read more

A traveller who has crossed the Colosseum a dozen times rarely climbs the narrow ramp of the via dei Santi Quattro — and yet, two hundred metres from the amphitheatre, behind a fortified gate that looks more like a 9th-century military stronghold than a church, lies what may be the most extraordinary single room in … Read more