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.
The church's name — "St Peter in Chains" — comes from its relic: the chains said to have bound the apostle Peter in his Jerusalem prison and again in Rome's Mamertine, displayed under the high altar. According to legend the two sets of chains miraculously fused into one when brought together.
Via dei Fori Imperiali runs in a straight line from Piazza Venezia to the Colosseum, and walking it is the simplest way to take in the Imperial Fora — the five linked ceremonial squares the emperors built when the old Roman Forum grew too cramped for a capital of a million people. Julius Caesar began the sequence in 46 BC; Augustus, Vespasian, Nerva and finally Trajan each added their own, the whole programme proclaiming, in marble and bronze, the power of every new dynasty.
This brooding brick tower is the stump of what was once the tallest and proudest of Rome's medieval fortified towers. Built around 1238 for the powerful Conti family — the family of Pope Innocent III — it was raised over the ruins of the Imperial Fora and originally rose far higher; the poet Petrarch called it "unrivalled in all the world".
Rising in a great brick hemicycle behind Trajan's Forum, the Markets of Trajan are a remarkable multi-level complex of vaulted halls, shops and offices built around 110 AD by Apollodorus of Damascus — often described, a little loosely, as the world's oldest shopping centre. In truth they were as much an administrative and service hub as a marketplace, ingeniously stacked up the slope of the Quirinal that had been cut away to make room for the forum.
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Trajan's Column is one of the most extraordinary objects to survive from antiquity: a marble shaft almost 30 metres tall, wound from base to summit with a continuous spiral relief that narrates the emperor's two wars against the Dacians in some 2,600 carved figures. Unrolled, the frieze would stretch about 200 metres — a stone newsreel of marching legions, river crossings, sieges and surrenders, meant to be read by an audience who could barely make out its upper bands.
If Monti has a living room, this is it. A small, sloping piazza where the rione's lanes converge, it is named after the church of the Madonna dei Monti and built around a graceful late-Renaissance fountain, the Fontana dei Catecumeni, designed by Giacomo della Porta in 1589 and fed by the restored Acqua Felice aqueduct.
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