Rome, narrated properly

What's inside

• 01ColosseumThe thousands of holes in the outside are not war damage — they are where medieval scavengers chiselled out the metal clamps24 min
• 02Roman ForumA ramp restored in 2015 let Domitian walk down from his palace into the Forum without being seen19 min
• 03Palatine HillThe word "palace" comes from this hill, not the other way round15 min
• 04Basilica of San ClementeTwo more churches underneath the one you walk into, and at the bottom a temple of Mithras with the water still running past it14 min
• 05Trevi FountainNine metres down, a Roman apartment block and 800 coins someone hid during the sack of 4557 min
• 06PantheonThere is no glass in the hole in the roof, so when it rains in Rome it rains indoors, into 22 drains in the floor14 min
• 07Piazza NavonaFor two centuries the square was flooded on purpose on August weekends and the nobility drove through the lake8 min
• 08Castel Sant'AngeloIn 537 the defenders ran out of catapult stones and broke up the marble gods to throw instead8 min
• 09St. Peter's BasilicaThe Pietà carries the only signature Michelangelo ever cut, added after he heard the work credited to someone else17 min
• 10Vatican Museums and Sistine ChapelThe face on the flayed skin in The Last Judgment is Michelangelo's own7 min
• 11Galleria BorgheseBernini found a crack in the cardinal's forehead, secretly carved a flawless second bust, and both are in the room7 min
• 12Capitoline HillOf roughly twenty-two large equestrian bronzes in ancient Rome, the Marcus Aurelius here is the only one that survived14 min
• 13Spanish StepsThe English name comes from the Spanish embassy on the square. Nothing about the steps is Spanish — a Frenchman's money built them16 min

Every one of those runs in full offline. Tap a landmark above to read the research behind it, where a page has been written.

Why a stop runs twenty minutes instead of ninety seconds

Each landmark starts as a written dossier — earliest history, construction, architecture, archaeology, the people, the myths, and what is actually known — researched and written out before a word of it is narrated.

Each claim in that dossier carries how confident the research is, and the sources are listed. That rating survives into the guide. Rome punishes guides that skip this: half of what gets repeated about the city is Renaissance invention or nineteenth-century tidying, and the honest version is almost always the better story. Where something is only a story, the guide says so.

Three Rome stops most guides skip

• Palatine Hill — fifteen minutes on the hill the emperors actually lived on. Domitian's architect levelled parts of it to build a palace so large that the word palace comes from the hill's name, rather than the other way round.
• Piazza Navona — eight minutes on a square that still holds the perimeter, the proportions and the arena floor of the Stadium of Domitian, with the surrounding houses standing on its seating.
• Castel Sant'Angelo — eight minutes on a building that has been an emperor's tomb, a fortress, a prison and an escape route for popes, and is now none of those.

How it works on the day

Download Rome over wi-fi before you go. After that the whole guide plays on aeroplane mode, in the queue, underground, and on roaming you would rather not pay for.

Start a stop, lock the phone and put it in your pocket — it keeps playing, and you can pause or skip from your headphones or the lock screen. The app can also show you an optional list of landmarks within about a kilometre, which in Rome is a genuinely long list. Decline that permission and everything else still works.

Walking it

The ten are not a route. Roughly: the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine are one continuous site at the south-east end and share a ticket; the Pantheon, Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain sit within ten minutes of each other in the centro storico; St Peter's, the Vatican Museums and Castel Sant'Angelo are across the river; and the Galleria Borghese is north, in the park, and needs a timed ticket booked in advance.

Play them in any order. Nothing in the guide assumes you have heard another stop first.