Uncover the city’s living history. Rione maps Rome’s ancient quarters dynamically — unlocking subterranean layers, hidden stories and local secrets right where you stand.
Dynamic, interactive boundaries of all of Rome’s historical rioni, colour-coded and tappable.
Every monument with photos, history and the stories beneath the stones.
San Clemente is the most vivid time-machine in Rome: three cities stacked one on top of another, which you descend through floor by floor. At street level stands a serene 12th-century basilica with a glowing golden apse mosaic — the "Triumph of the Cross" as a great vine — and a chapel frescoed by Masolino in the 1420s.
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Laid out on the north-western shoulder of the Caelian, the Parco Archeologico del Celio is a green terrace of umbrella pines and scattered ancient marbles with one of the finest views over the Palatine and the Colosseum. At its centre stands the Casina del Salvi, a little neoclassical coffee-house built around 1835 by the architect Gaspare Salvi — modelled on Valadier's pavilion on the Pincio — and recently restored to its original role as a café and public study room.
The basilica of Santi Giovanni e Paolo crowns the Caelian above the ancient Clivo di Scauro, its tall medieval campanile and a row of buttressing arches among the most photographed sights on the hill. The church is dedicated to two Roman officials, John and Paul, said to have been martyred in their own home on this very spot — and that home survives, astonishingly intact, in the painted rooms beneath the nave.
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Set back on the quiet ridge between the Caelian and the Lateran, the Santi Quattro Coronati looks more like a castle than a church — and that is more or less what it became. Founded in the early Middle Ages and rebuilt as a fortified abbey after the Norman sack of 1084, its towering walls once guarded the road the popes took between the Lateran and the Colosseum. The four "crowned" martyrs to whom it is dedicated were, by tradition, stonemasons put to death for refusing to carve a pagan idol.
Santo Stefano Rotondo is one of the oldest and largest circular churches in the world, consecrated in the 5th century and dedicated to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Its unusual plan — a tall central drum ringed by concentric aisles of antique granite and marble columns — may echo the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; standing at its centre, lit from the high clerestory windows, is a strangely moving experience of early-Christian space.
The Parco Archeologico del Colosseo is the great archaeological zone at the foot of the Caelian, gathering under a single ticket the monuments that were the stage of ancient Rome: the Colosseum itself, the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill and the Arch of Constantine, together with the Domus Aurea nearby. A combined itinerary lets you walk from the gladiators' arena, across the Forum where the Republic governed, and up onto the Palatine where the emperors lived — the very hill that gave us the word "palace".
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