VIP Rome

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

A wet day in Rome is, for travellers, often a missed day. The luxury guest who has flown to Rome for five clear days and finds, on the third morning, that the forecast is rain through the next forty-eight hours, often surrenders the day to the hotel — or worse, to the shop. This is … Read more

Mosaic, in the Roman imagination, is a Pompeian floor or a Byzantine ceiling — a finished surface admired in a museum. The work itself — the cutting of marble tesserae from a slab with a hammer and a mallet, the laying of those tesserae into a bed of lime mortar, the slow making of a … Read more

The Italian aperitivo is a code. To order a Spritz at the wrong hour, to mistake an apericena for an aperitivo, to ask for a Negroni at the table reserved for the Negroni Sbagliato — these are not catastrophes, but they betray the visitor. The aperitivo is, in its proper Italian form, a forty-five-minute ritual … Read more

Pizza in the Italian imagination is Neapolitan. The Romans, however, have a separate pizza tradition that pre-dates the Neapolitan version by a century — the pizza bianca, the long flat oil-and-salt bread that has been baked in Roman ovens since the 1880s and that, in its proper Roman form, is one of the great products … Read more

Lake Nemi — the smaller of the two volcanic crater lakes of the Castelli Romani, twenty-eight kilometres south of Rome — has been called the Mirror of Diana since the Augustan poets. The lake is a perfect circle, four hundred metres deep at its centre, ringed by holm-oak forest, and overlooked by the medieval village … Read more

Frascati, in the Roman imagination, is a white wine and a roadside trattoria. It is also — for those who can reach them — a small ring of the most extraordinary patrician summer villas of the seventeenth century, built by the Barberini, Aldobrandini, Borghese and Pamphili popes within sight of one another along a single … Read more