All the monuments in Rome
The landmarks and masterpieces worth planning a day around.
Basilica di San PietroSt. Peter's BasilicaMichelangelo's dome and Pietà, Bernini's baldacchino, Saint Peter's Square, the papal tombsThe current St. Peter's Basilica replaced Constantine's fourth century church and took from 1506 to 1626 to build, passing through the hands of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giacomo della Porta and Carlo Maderno. Michelangelo designed the dome, completed after his death, and refused payment for the work as an act of devotion; Maderno added the long nave and facade that give the building its current, slightly controversial proportions. Inside, Michelangelo's Pietà stands behind glass to the right of the entrance, Bernini's bronze baldacchino rises 29 meters over the papal altar, and the crypt below holds the tombs of popes back to antiquity. The basilica remains a working church run by the Fabbrica di San Pietro, with Mass said daily even as tour groups move through.Plan the visit
PalatinoPalatine HillRome's mythical founding site, Augustus's house, the Domus Flavia, the Farnese Gardens, views over the ForumThe Palatine Hill is where Rome's own foundation myth and its archaeology come closest to agreeing: excavations have found Iron Age huts dated to roughly the 8th century BCE, the same period tradition assigns to Romulus, on the very hill where he was said to have founded the city. By the second and first centuries BCE it had become the address of choice for the Roman elite, and Augustus deliberately built his own relatively modest house here to align himself with that founding legend. His successors were less restrained: the Domus Tiberiana, Domus Transitoria, the enormous Domus Flavia and Nero's Domus Aurea layered increasingly extravagant palace complexes over the hill across the first century CE, some incorporating earlier structures rather than replacing them outright. The Farnese Gardens, planted in the 16th century over Tiberius's ruined palace, now shade one of the best views in Rome, looking directly down onto the Forum below.
Via Appia AnticaUNESCOAppian WayOriginal Roman basalt paving, the catacombs of San Callisto and Domitilla, umbrella pines, Roman tombsThe Appian Way began in 312 BCE under the censor Appius Claudius Caecus, who also built Rome's first aqueduct in the same year, and it originally ran straight from Rome to Capua before later extensions pushed it all the way to the port of Brindisi on the Adriatic, earning it the nickname Regina Viarum, Queen of Roads. Long stretches near Rome still carry their original basalt paving stones, worn into ruts by two thousand years of cart wheels, and run past umbrella pines, ruined aqueduct arches and the entrances to Christian catacombs including San Callisto and Domitilla, where early Romans buried their dead outside the sacred city boundary. Because the road survives as a serial UNESCO property rather than one continuous open-air museum, sections differ enormously in condition and access: some stretches near the Appia Antica Regional Park are closed to cars and ideal for cycling, while others remain ordinary, traffic-heavy roads, so any visit has to be planned section by section rather than as a single continuous walk.
ChurchBasilica di Santa Maria MaggioreFifth-century mosaics, Torriti's apse mosaic, the legend of the August snow, its gilded ceilingSanta Maria Maggiore is one of Rome's four papal basilicas, and its core dates to the fifth century, built in the wake of the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE, which formally affirmed Mary as Theotokos, mother of God, and touched off a wave of Marian church building across the Christian world. Its nave and triumphal arch still carry mosaics from that original fifth century campaign, among the oldest surviving in any Roman church, while later centuries layered on Jacopo Torriti's shimmering apse mosaic, a Cosmatesque inlaid marble floor, Arnolfo di Cambio's sculpted Nativity scene, and a coffered wooden ceiling gilded, according to tradition, with some of the first gold brought back from the Americas. Devotional legend holds that the Virgin herself directed the church's location by causing snow to fall on the Esquiline Hill in the middle of an August night, a story the basilica still commemorates every year rather than something that appears in its construction records.
CastleCastel Sant'AngeloHadrian’s mausoleum, Passetto di Borgo, bronze angel, papal apartments, terrace viewsHadrian built this drum-shaped mausoleum for himself and his family, laying the first stone in about 135 and seeing it finished, after his death, under his successor Antoninus Pius in 139. Rome’s popes later folded it into the city’s defenses and linked it to the Vatican by the Passetto di Borgo, a raised corridor Pope Clement VII used to escape the Sack of Rome in 1527. Its name comes from a medieval legend of Pope Gregory the Great seeing the Archangel Michael sheathe his sword above the ramparts to mark the end of a plague, which explains the bronze angel on the terrace. The castle was also a papal prison, holding Benvenuto Cellini and Giordano Bruno, and is now a national museum.
Scavi di Ostia AnticaOstia AnticaPiazzale delle Corporazioni mosaics, Roman theatre, thermopolium, everyday Roman life, Museo OstienseOstia was Rome's harbor city, and when the Tiber moved and the sea retreated it was buried and forgotten rather than destroyed, so daily life survives street by street: the bakeries with their millstones, the thermopolium bar with its painted counter, the apartment blocks that look strikingly modern. In the Piazzale delle Corporazioni, black-and-white mosaics outside the offices advertise the shipping firms that worked here, with elephants for Africa and grain measures for the corn trade. A theatre still seats a crowd, and the museum holds the sculpture found on site. Set among pines and wild grass, it is quieter than Pompeii and only a train ride from Rome.
SquarePiazza NavonaBernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, Borromini's Sant'Agnese, Domitian's stadium footprint, Baroque theatre of RomePiazza Navona's long oval shape traces the exact footprint of Domitian's stadium, built in 80 CE for Greek-style athletic contests the Romans called agones, a word that survives in the square's old name, Circus Agonalis. The stadium crumbled after Rome's fall and was quarried for stone, but the space it left stayed open, becoming the city market by the late fifteenth century before Pope Innocent X, whose family palace faces the square, transformed it into a Baroque stage during his reign from 1644 to 1655. At its center, Gian Lorenzo Bernini's 1651 Fountain of the Four Rivers sends four river gods, the Nile, Ganges, Danube and Rio de la Plata, sprawling beneath an ancient Egyptian obelisk, positioned to face the facade of Francesco Borromini's Sant'Agnese in Agone, Bernini's great architectural rival, in what is often told as a piece of professional theater between the two men even if the design predates their direct rivalry on this square.
Musei CapitoliniCapitoline MuseumsMichelangelo's piazza, Capitoline Wolf, Marcus Aurelius bronze, oldest public museumIn 1471, Pope Sixtus IV donated a group of ancient bronzes, including the Capitoline Wolf and the Spinario, to the Roman people, an act generally credited as the founding of the world's first public museum, more than three centuries before the Louvre opened its doors. Michelangelo redesigned the piazza and the two palaces flanking it from 1536 onward, laying the star-patterned pavement and the gently rising staircase, or cordonata, that still frames the approach from below. Inside, the original gilded bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, moved indoors in the 1980s and replaced outside by a copy, shares the collection with the Capitoline Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus (the wolf itself is ancient, though the twins were added in the Renaissance) and the colossal fragments of a statue of Constantine, a head and hand alone taller than a person. A tunnel beneath the piazza, the Galleria Congiunzione, links the two palace buildings and runs past the foundations of Rome's ancient Tabularium archive.
GalleryGalleria BorgheseBernini's Apollo and Daphne, a room of six Caravaggios, Canova's Pauline Bonaparte, the cardinal's pleasure villa<p>Cardinal Scipione Borghese commissioned a villa outside Porta Pinciana to house his collection. Construction began in 1607 under Flaminio Ponzio and was completed by Giovanni Vasanzio. The rooms remain part of the encounter with the art: painted ceilings, coloured marbles and sculpture turn the route into a succession of elaborate settings.</p><p>The collection also tells a story of patronage and papal power. In 1607, Pope Paul V ordered paintings seized from the Cavalier d’Arpino and gave them to his nephew Scipione. Room VIII now brings together six Caravaggios, including <em>Boy with a Basket of Fruit</em>, <em>Sick Bacchus</em> and <em>David with the Head of Goliath</em>. Their concentration makes it worth allowing time to look at the paintings together.</p><p>Bernini’s <em>Apollo and Daphne</em> occupies the centre of Room III. Follow the carved change from feet becoming roots to hands and hair becoming laurel; the museum’s object record describes Bernini’s original viewing sequence along the group’s right side, where Apollo’s expression shifts to astonishment. In Room IV, <em>The Rape of Proserpina</em> stands amid mosaics, coloured marbles and imperial busts. Canova’s reclining <em>Pauline Borghese as Venus Victorious</em> in Room I holds the apple awarded in the Judgment of Paris. Upstairs, Titian’s <em>Sacred and Profane Love</em> is in Room XX, the Psyche Room; its marriage-allegory interpretation remains debated.</p><p>A standard visit has a two-hour limit. Choose a few works to study closely, then leave time for the rooms around them. To connect the gallery with the wider city, continue with our <a href="/en/regions/lazio/rome">Rome travel guide</a>.</p>
Terme di CaracallaBaths of CaracallaVast imperial baths, underground galleries, Mithraeum, summer opera, Farnese HerculesRome's Baths of Caracalla were inaugurated in 216 CE and could take some sixteen hundred bathers at once. The surviving brick shell is still enormous: the great vaults dwarf everything around them, and beneath the floor runs a network of galleries, some two kilometers of them, where the furnaces, water channels and service tunnels that kept the complex hot are still visible. Down there is also a Mithraeum, among the largest known. Marble, mosaics and statues once filled the rooms; the Farnese Hercules came from here. In summer the ruins become the stage for Rome's open-air opera, with arias rising into the brick skeleton, a fitting use for a building designed for crowds.
Scalinata di Trinita dei MontiSpanish Steps135-step Baroque cascade, Trinita dei Monti church, Barcaccia fountain, Keats's final homeA French diplomat's bequest funded the idea as early as 1660, but decades of wrangling, including a scrapped plan to crown the steps with an equestrian statue of Louis XIV that scandalized papal Rome, delayed construction until architects Francesco de Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi finally built the 135-step staircase between 1723 and 1725. It climbs the steep Pincian slope from Piazza di Spagna, named for the Spanish embassy to the Holy See at its base, up to the French-patronized church of Trinita dei Monti at the top, a deliberate diplomatic balancing act built into stone between two rival powers. At the foot of the steps, Pietro Bernini's Barcaccia fountain, shaped like a sinking boat, is said to commemorate a flood that once stranded a boat on this exact spot. English poet John Keats died in 1821 in the rose-colored house immediately to the right of the steps, now a small museum, having come to Rome for his health only to succumb to tuberculosis within sound of the fountain outside his window.
DistrictTrastevereCobbled ivy-hung lanes, Santa Maria in Trastevere's gold mosaics, trattoria life, Rome's oldest quarter across the riverThe name simply means "across the Tiber," and the neighborhood has felt like a place apart from Rome since antiquity: Etruscan territory the Romans called Ripa Etrusca before conquering it mainly to control both riverbanks, then a district settled early on by sailors, fishermen and immigrant communities of Syrians and Jews rather than the political elite across the water. Augustus folded it into the city as Regio XIV in his reorganization, but Trastevere kept its own character and, for centuries, hosted Rome's oldest Jewish community. That looser, working-class identity survives in its ochre facades, ivy-draped alleys and irregular street plan, a contrast to the more monumental center across the river. At its heart, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of Rome's oldest churches, glows with twelfth-and thirteenth-century gold mosaics, and the piazza in front of it fills nightly with a mix of residents, students and visitors settling in for Rome's longest-running dinner scene.
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More within reach
Monuments a day trip away, elsewhere in Lazio.
BagnoregioCivita di BagnoregioFootbridge access, crumbling tuff plateau, badlands, the dying town
TivoliUNESCOHadrian's VillaCanopus pool, Maritime Theatre, Piazza d'Oro, Poecile, Roman concrete vaults
TivoliUNESCOVilla d'EsteAvenue of the Hundred Fountains, Organ Fountain, Oval Fountain, Rometta, Renaissance garden
FrascatiHidden GemTusculumRoman theater and amphitheater, birthplace of Cato, Cicero's villa, destroyed in 1191
BomarzoSacro Bosco of BomarzoMonster park, Mouth of Hell, leaning house, Mannerist riddles in the woods
Montalto di CastroHidden GemVulciEtruscan-Roman ruins, Ponte dell'Abbadia (Devil's Bridge), Castello dell'Abbadia museum, wild river park
CaprarolaHidden GemVilla FarneseVignola's pentagonal plan, Scala Regia, Zuccari frescoes, Room of the World Map, gardens
TarquiniaUNESCONecropolis of MonterozziPainted Etruscan tombs, Tomb of the Leopards, dancers and banquets, UNESCO listing with Cerveteri