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 "Field of Flowers" is the rare central square in Rome with no church on it — and that absence carries a memory. In its centre broods a hooded bronze statue of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher and former friar burned alive here for heresy on 17 February 1600 for, among other things, insisting the universe was infinite and full of other worlds. The statue, raised by anticlerical activists in 1889, deliberately faces the Vatican.
The grandest Renaissance palace in Rome, begun in 1517 for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese — who in 1534 became Pope Paul III, instantly turning his family seat into a statement of papal power. Its construction drew on the finest architects of the age: Antonio da Sangallo the Younger began it, and after his death Michelangelo took over, designing the powerful projecting cornice and the upper storey of the courtyard.
Behind a façade encrusted with white stucco statues and garlands — one of the most richly decorated in Rome — Palazzo Spada hides a small but choice picture gallery, the Galleria Spada, kept exactly as Cardinal Bernardino Spada arranged it in the 17th century, a perfectly preserved Baroque "quadreria".