Rom entdecken

The Capitoline Museums occupy the Palazzo dei Conservatori and the Palazzo Nuovo on Piazza del Campidoglio, the square Michelangelo designed on the Capitoline Hill. The collection began with ancient bronzes Pope Sixtus IV gave to the people of Rome in 1471 and includes the Capitoline Wolf, the Dying Gaul and the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.

The Vittoriano is the white marble monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of unified Italy, built between 1885 and 1935 to designs by Giuseppe Sacconi on Piazza Venezia. It holds the Altar of the Fatherland with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and lifts climb to a terrace beneath the bronze quadrigae, about 70 metres up.

Palazzo Valentini is a palace beside Trajan's Column that has housed Rome's provincial administration since 1873. Excavations beneath it since 2005 have uncovered two large houses of the imperial period and remains of a temple, which visitors see on a guided route where projections and Piero Angela's narration reconstruct the missing parts.

Palazzo Venezia is an early Renaissance palace on Piazza Venezia, built in the 1450s by Cardinal Pietro Barbo, later Pope Paul II, and used by Mussolini as his headquarters in the 20th century. It houses the National Museum of Palazzo Venezia, with paintings, sculpture, ceramics, bronzes and decorative arts, and encloses a large garden.

Trajan's Market is a complex of brick buildings set into the slope of the Quirinal Hill, probably built between AD 100 and 110 by Apollodorus of Damascus as part of Trajan's Forum. Visitors walk through its multi-storey halls and arcades and along the ancient Via Biberatica, and the Museum of the Imperial Fora inside shows finds from the forums.

The Sacred Area of Largo Argentina is a sunken square in central Rome with four temples from the Roman Republic, uncovered by demolitions in 1926 and known by the letters A to D. Remains of the Curia of Pompey, where Julius Caesar was killed in 44 BC, lie at its western edge. Since June 2023 a walkway leads visitors among the ruins.

The Palatine Hill is the central one of Rome's seven hills, between the Roman Forum and the Circus Maximus. From Augustus onwards the emperors built their palaces here, and the ruins of the Domus Flavia, the Domus Augustana and the House of Augustus remain, alongside the Palatine Museum with finds from the excavations. It forms one archaeological area with the Roman Forum.

The Pantheon is a Roman temple on Piazza della Rotonda, rebuilt under Hadrian around AD 126 on the site of Agrippa's earlier temple, whose inscription it still carries. Its unreinforced concrete dome, 43 metres across, opens to the sky through a central oculus. Consecrated as the church of Santa Maria ad Martyres in 609, it holds the tombs of Raphael and two Italian kings.

Vicus Caprarius is an underground archaeological site a few steps from the Trevi Fountain, about nine metres below street level. Excavated in 1999–2001 during the conversion of the former Cinema Trevi, it shows a Roman apartment block turned into a 4th-century house and a water reservoir of the Aqua Virgo aqueduct.

The Trevi Fountain is an 18th-century Baroque fountain built against the side of Palazzo Poli, designed by Nicola Salvi and completed by Giuseppe Pannini in 1762. It is 26 metres high and 49 metres wide, with Oceanus on a shell-shaped chariot drawn by sea horses and tritons; since 2026 the area by the basin has a ticketed entrance.

The Museo di Roma occupies Palazzo Braschi, a Neoclassical palace between Piazza Navona and Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, built from 1790 by Cosimo Morelli for Luigi Braschi Onesti, nephew of Pope Pius VI. Its rooms show paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and furniture on the history and daily life of Rome from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

The Leonardo da Vinci Museum occupies rooms of the Renaissance Palazzo della Cancelleria, next to Campo de' Fiori. It shows large wooden models of machines reconstructed from Leonardo's notebooks, several of which visitors can operate, along with holograms and themed showcases; the basement reveals the tomb of Aulus Hirtius, who died in 43 BC.

The Case Romane del Celio are Roman houses beneath the Basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo on the Caelian Hill, opened to visitors in 2002. Built as two blocks of flats with shops in the 2nd and 3rd centuries and later joined into one house, they comprise more than 20 rooms, 13 of them with wall paintings, and a small antiquarium.

Palazzo Altemps is a 15th-century palace north of Piazza Navona, begun for Girolamo Riario and bought in 1568 by Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps. Since 1997 it has been a branch of the Museo Nazionale Romano, showing ancient sculpture from noble collections such as the Boncompagni Ludovisi and Mattei, an Egyptian section and frescoed rooms.

Palazzo Barberini is a Baroque palace begun in 1625 for the family of Pope Urban VIII, designed by Carlo Maderno and continued by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini. It houses part of the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, with Raphael's La Fornarina and Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes, and a great hall with a ceiling fresco by Pietro da Cortona.

The Capuchin Crypt lies beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on Via Veneto. Along a corridor of about 30 metres, six small chapels are decorated with the bones of some 3,700 people, mostly Capuchin friars, arranged into arches, rosettes and chandeliers. The visit starts in the friars' museum of art and history.

The Baths of Caracalla are the ruins of a public bath complex built between AD 212 and 216 under the emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla and used until the 530s. Visitors walk among the high brick walls of the caldarium, the gymnasiums and the bathing halls, see sections of mosaic floor, and the frescoes of an earlier Roman house, the Domus of Vigna Guidi.

The Museum of the Ara Pacis is a glass and travertine pavilion by Richard Meier, opened in 2006 beside the Mausoleum of Augustus on the Tiber embankment. It houses the Ara Pacis Augustae, the marble altar of the Augustan peace dedicated in 9 BC, whose reliefs show the imperial family in procession, and also stages temporary exhibitions.

The Lateran Palace stands beside the Archbasilica of St John Lateran and was the main residence of the popes for about a thousand years, until they moved to the Vatican. The present building was designed by Domenico Fontana in the 1580s; visitors see the papal apartment and a sequence of frescoed halls, among them the Hall of Constantine and the Hall of the Apostles.

The Leonardo da Vinci Museum is a privately run exhibition in the underground vaults of the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, on Piazza del Popolo. It presents Leonardo's life, inventions, anatomical drawings and scientific studies through models and reproductions rather than original works, and includes a virtual-reality flight in his flying machine.