VIP Rome

Travellers connecting through Rome with a four-hour layover at Fiumicino airport often dismiss the idea of seeing the city as impossible. They are wrong — but only by a narrow margin. The honest answer is that a Roman layover of less than four hours from gate to gate is impossible; a layover of four hours, … Read more

Rome’s most discreet luxury at the moment of golden hour is not a tasting menu or a private museum opening — it is the four to five hotel rooftop terraces that open between 18:30 and 19:30, are reserved for hotel guests and a small ring of in-the-know Romans, and overlook the city from heights that … Read more

Of all Rome’s great galleries, the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj is the only one whose owners still live above it. The Doria Pamphilj — an extraordinary patrician dynasty descended from the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria and from Pope Innocent X — open the four wings of their family palace to visitors every morning from 09:00, and … Read more

There is a Roman ceiling that ranks, in the small canon of European Baroque painting, alongside the Sistine and the Galleria Farnese — and that opens to the public exactly one morning a month, by appointment, for three hours. It is Guido Reni’s Aurora, painted between 1612 and 1614 on the ceiling of the small … Read more

Nine metres below the Trevi Fountain, behind a small bronze door on the Vicolo del Puttarello, lies an entire fragment of Imperial Rome that almost no one above ground knows: the Vicus Caprarius, the «City of Water» — a four-storey Roman insula, an open cistern of the Acqua Vergine aqueduct, and a private museum that … Read more

Ninety seconds on foot from the basin of the Trevi Fountain — through a narrow opening in a palazzo most visitors never look at twice — opens one of the strangest and most beautiful interiors in Rome: the Galleria Sciarra, a glass-roofed Liberty arcade decorated, ceiling to capital, with allegorical frescoes of the modern Italian … Read more

Almost every visitor to Rome photographs the Vittoriano — the white marble monument that closes Piazza Venezia like a wedding cake — and almost no one knows that you can ride a glass elevator to its roof and stand on the highest accessible terrace in the historic centre. Romans call it the Terrazza delle Quadrighe, … Read more

A guide’s honest comparison of Ostia Antica and Pompeii — the working imperial port versus the frozen provincial town. How to choose, how to combine, how to spend the day.