Rome travel guide

Top 10 sights in Rome

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© FeaturedPics · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Colosseum

   Opened in AD 80 and holding somewhere between fifty and eighty thousand people, which no European building matched again for eighteen centuries. The pitted travertine is where medieval scavengers dug out the iron clamps; the arena floor and the tunnels beneath need a separate timed ticket.

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   St. Peter's Basilica

   Built between 1506 and 1626 over the tomb the early church identified as Peter's, and still the largest church interior in the world. Michelangelo's dome rises a hundred and thirty-six metres and can be climbed; his Pietà, carved at twenty-three, is behind glass in the first chapel on the right.

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   3© The original uploader was Snowdog at Italian Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Sistine Chapel

   The pope's chapel, and where conclaves elect his successor. Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512 standing on scaffolding, and returned twenty-four years later for the Last Judgment on the altar wall — by then a darker man, with the flayed skin in it carrying his own face.

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   Pantheon

   Rebuilt by Hadrian around AD 126 and still, after nineteen centuries, the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built — forty-three metres across, thinning towards a nine-metre hole at the crown that is the only light source. It became a church in 609, which is why it survives intact. Raphael is buried in it.

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   5© This Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder. Feel free to use my photos, but ple · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Roman Forum

   The political and religious centre of the republic and then the empire, where the senate met, triumphs ended and Caesar's body was burned. It silted up into cow pasture in the Middle Ages and was dug out only from the nineteenth century, which is why the ground level is so far below the modern street.

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   Trevi Fountain

   A baroque wall of water finished in 1762 to Nicola Salvi's design, fed by an aqueduct the Romans built in 19 BC and still flowing through it. Roughly three thousand euros in coins are thrown in daily and collected for a Catholic charity.

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   7© Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Saint Peter's Square

   Square in front of St Peter's, laid out by Bernini between 1656 and 1667. Two colonnades of 284 columns curve out like arms; the obelisk at the centre came from Egypt in AD 37.

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   Vatican Museums

   Seven kilometres of galleries that begin with the papal collection of 1506 and end at the Sistine Chapel, because the route is one-way. The Raphael Rooms and the Gallery of Maps are the stretches worth slowing for; the first entry slot of the morning saves half a day.

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   9© Vitold Muratov · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Palatine Hill

   The hill where the city began and where Augustus and his successors lived, so completely that the word palace descends from its name. The brick shells of the imperial residences stand above the Forum, with the Circus Maximus on the other side.

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    Archbasilica of St. John Lateran

    The cathedral of Rome and the pope's own seat, ranked above St Peter's as mother of all churches. Founded by Constantine in the 4th century and rebuilt after fires and earthquakes, it keeps Borromini's baroque nave; the Lateran Treaty of 1929 left it extraterritorial ground.

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   Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore

   A basilica of the 430s and the only one of Rome's four papal churches to keep its early Christian shape. The mosaics along the nave date from that decade, the coffered ceiling was gilded with the first gold from the Americas, and Bernini is buried here without ceremony.

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   Apostolic Palace

   The pope's official residence, a complex of about a thousand rooms beside St Peter's. The window on its top floor is the one from which the Angelus is given on Sundays, and the Sistine Chapel and the museums are part of the same building.

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   3© StPaul.jpg · CC BY 4.0

   Basilica of Saint Paul outside the Walls

   Built over the grave the church identifies as Paul's, and the largest basilica in Rome after St Peter's. Fire destroyed it in 1823 and the reconstruction is nineteenth-century, but the fifth-century arch and the medallion portraits of every pope from Peter onward survived.

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   4© Rione Colonna · CC BY 4.0

   Circus Maximus

   A chariot-racing arena that held something like a hundred and fifty thousand spectators, longer than five football pitches. Nothing much is left but the shape of it, now a grass hollow used for concerts and running, which conveys the scale better than ruins would.

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   Altare della Patria

   A national monument built between 1885 and 1935 in honour of Victor Emmanuel II, first king of a united Italy. It stands between Piazza Venezia and the Capitoline Hill and was designed by Giuseppe Sacconi.

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   Arch of Titus

   An arch of about AD 81 on the Via Sacra, put up to mark the sack of Jerusalem. The relief inside shows the menorah and the temple vessels being carried in triumph, which is why for centuries Rome's Jews would not walk under it.

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   7© Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Trajan's Column

   A column of AD 113, thirty metres high, wound with a continuous relief of the Dacian wars containing over two and a half thousand figures — the fullest visual record of the Roman army in existence. Trajan's ashes were in the base; a statue of St Peter has stood on top since 1587.

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   Mausoleum of Augustus

   Augustus built his tomb in 28 BC, before the wars were even over — a drum of concrete forty metres across planted with cypresses. It later became a fortress, a bullring and a concert hall, and reopened in 2021 after decades shut and full of cats.

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   9© Paolo Monti · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Piazza Navona

   Piazza Navona is a baroque square built around Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers. Café terraces and street painters complete a Roman evening, and the shape of the square is that of the stadium of Domitian beneath it.

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    Baths of Caracalla

    The Baths of Caracalla are the brick ruins that convey the scale of Roman bathing. They are at their most dramatic when they turn into an opera house on summer nights.

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