Castel Sant'Angelo Privately: The Borgia, the Cells, the Passetto

A private guide, skip-the-line entry, and a route that follows the building's worst centuries rather than its best. It starts with the tomb. Hadrian died in 138 and the mausoleum was finished the following year; the burial chamber is still at the centre of the drum, reached along the original Roman ramp. Deeper in is the Treasury room, where his ashes are said to have been kept until the sack of Rome in the 5th century scattered them. Upstairs, the frescoed papal apartments, and the people who lived in them: the Borgia among them, and the popes who moved in when things outside became unsurvivable. In the courtyard, the room used for torture, next to the ground where executions were carried out. The two functions sat a few metres apart from the state rooms. The Passetto Secreto, the covered passage running along the wall from here to the Vatican, is the escape route that made the arrangement work. It is also the corridor Dan Brown put at the centre of Angels and Demons, which is how most people now hear about it. The visit ends on the roof, under the bronze archangel with the sword, looking over the city he is supposed to be guarding.