Meeting Point

San Clemente

San Clemente

Our journey starts at a modest door on Via Labicana and goes down through 2,000 years. Upstairs, the 12th-century church shines with a golden apse where a vine grows out of the Cross and curls across the vault, full of birds, animals and tiny figures at work: paradise imagined as a garden. Downstairs, the earlier basilica of the 4th century keeps medieval frescoes of Saint Clement's miracles, and one scene where the characters' speech is written in early Italian, a rare and very funny glimpse of how people really talked. At the bottom, in the cool and the dark, we reach a sanctuary of Mithras, the Persian god loved by Roman soldiers, and hear a spring that has never stopped flowing.

Santi Quattro Coronati

Up the slope stands an abbey that looks more like a castle, built to protect popes in troubled centuries. Inside, a tiny chapel painted in 1246 tells one of the great stories of the Middle Ages: Constantine, sick and desperate, is cured by Pope Sylvester and in gratitude bows before him, offering him his crown. These vivid frescoes were a message to the emperors of the day about who held power in Rome. If the nuns have opened it, we also visit the medieval cloister, one of the most serene spots in the city.

Santo Stefano Rotondo

Among the trees of the Celio rises a church unlike any other in Rome: perfectly round, ringed by ancient columns, built in the late 5th century as an echo of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Its quiet light and vast circular space feel almost mystical. Then we look at the walls: a 16th-century cycle of martyrdom scenes, painted to move the faithful and famously disturbing to 19th-century travellers like Dickens, and a 7th-century mosaic with a jewelled cross.

Case Romane del Celio

We walk down the Clivo di Scauro, a lane that has been a street since Roman times, crossed by medieval arches. Under the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo we enter a hidden neighbourhood of Roman houses, shops and baths, used from the 2nd to the 4th century and then turned into a place of Christian worship linked to the martyrs John and Paul. The rooms still wear their colours: garlands, birds, painted figures, geometric panels, and a magnificent marine fresco where a goddess reclines among boats and cherubs.

Ending Point

in the peaceful square of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, a short walk from the Colosseum and Circus Maximus, with my suggestions for lunch and for the rest of your stay.