Caravaggio from Piazza del Popolo, Ending Inside the Pantheon

Caravaggio lived most of his adult life in Rome and the paintings stayed where they were commissioned, which means the city still holds them in the churches they were made for, lit by the windows they were composed around. This walk goes to four of those churches and finishes inside the Pantheon. It starts at Piazza del Popolo rather than in the middle of the centre, which puts the two Caravaggios in Santa Maria del Popolo first, before the crowds thicken further south. From there the route works down through Campo Marzio, into Santa Maria della Pace for Raphael's Sibyls, then Sant'Agostino and San Luigi dei Francesi, where the three canvases on Saint Matthew hang together in one chapel. The theories about Caravaggio's death are covered along the way, and there are several, none settled. The walk ends inside the Pantheon, which is a useful place to end an art walk: the building is the oldest thing on the route by a thousand years and it survived because people kept finding new uses for it. In 663 the emperor Constans II stripped the gilded bronze tiles off the roof and shipped them towards Constantinople. They got as far as Syracuse. If you have a short stay in Rome and no idea where to start, this is a route that covers a lot of ground in one direction.