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.
When Cardinal Ippolito d'Este was passed over for the papacy in 1550 and sent to govern Tivoli as a consolation, he took his revenge on disappointment by building the most spectacular garden in Europe. He demolished a hillside and terraced it into a theatre of water: some five hundred fountains, jets, cascades and pools, every one driven by gravity alone from a channel cut off the river Aniene above.
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The largest and richest villa of the entire Roman world, Hadrian's Villa was less a country house than a small imperial city, spread across 120 hectares below the town. Built from around 117 AD, it was the cultured emperor's attempt to gather the wonders of his far-flung empire in one place: porticoes, libraries, theatres, thermal baths, and pavilions evoking the monuments of Greece and Egypt.
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While the other two villas are about human artifice, Villa Gregoriana is about the raw drama of nature — sculpted, admittedly, by a pope. After catastrophic floods, Gregory XVI had a double tunnel bored through Monte Catillo in 1835 to divert the river Aniene, and in doing so created the Grande Cascata, a 120-metre waterfall that crashes into a deep wooded gorge.
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Perched on the very lip of the gorge above the Villa Gregoriana stands one of the most painted ruins in all of art: a small, perfect circular temple of the early 1st century BC, ringed by ten surviving Corinthian columns. Traditionally linked to the Tiburtine Sibyl — the prophetess who, legend says, foretold the coming of Christ to the emperor Augustus — it sits beside a second, rectangular temple.
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