The Cursed Cemetery: A Free Tour Capped at Six People

The walk starts on ground that used to be a cemetery for people the Church would not bury anywhere else. Murderers, unbelievers and prostitutes were put outside the walls, in what Romans called the cursed graveyard, and what remains of it is under Piazzale Flaminio, beside Piazza del Popolo. The gate beside it is the point. For centuries everyone arriving in Rome from the north came in through the Porta del Popolo, so the first ground a pilgrim set foot on was the ground where the damned had been dumped. The Muro Torto, the leaning stretch of Aurelian wall climbing towards the Pincio behind it, marked the edge of the unconsecrated strip. Find the meeting point by the domes. Santa Maria dei Miracoli is the right-hand of the two churches at the head of the Corso as you look south from the square, and it is the one with the circular dome. Its twin's dome is an oval, because that plot was narrower and the architects bent the geometry to make the pair read as identical from a distance. From there the route works south. Santa Maria del Popolo comes first, for what is hidden in the work of two Baroque masters who both left pieces here, Caravaggio and Bernini. The Caravaggios hang in the Cerasi Chapel beside the high altar, both painted in 1601: Paul thrown off his horse in the dark, and Peter being levered upright on his cross by workmen who are not looking at him. The church costs nothing to enter and the chapel light runs on a coin box. The Chigi Chapel across the nave was designed by Raphael and finished by Bernini more than a century later. Then Via del Corso and Paul II, and Via di Ripetta and Leo X, who imposed a tax on prostitution and in doing so changed how the city worked, since the revenue was substantial and the Church now had an interest in the trade continuing. That leads to Sant'Agostino, near the Biblioteca Angelica, and the claim that Caravaggio painted a working prostitute as the Virgin. He did, and the painting is still on the wall, and the people who commissioned it were not pleased. It is the Madonna of the Pilgrims, in the first chapel on the left, and the model was only half the offence: he put the two kneeling pilgrims across the foreground with the soles of their feet filthy and turned towards the viewer. The same church holds Raphael's fresco of the prophet Isaiah and Sansovino's Madonna del Parto, whose foot has been rubbed smooth by four centuries of women asking for a safe birth. Two to two and a half hours, ending at the Ponte Sant'Angelo. That is a good place to be left. The ten angels along the parapet were designed by Bernini and each carries an instrument of the Passion. Two of them he carved himself, and those were judged too fine to leave out in the weather, so the pope kept them and had copies made. The originals are indoors in Sant'Andrea delle Fratte. One thing the route has to work around: almost all of it is churches, and Roman churches close in the middle of the day and stop admitting visitors during services. The departure times are set by their hours rather than by convenience. Two practical notes. The group is capped at six people, and separate bookings do not get around it: larger parties need the private option. And cancellation is free up to two hours before the start, after which nothing is refunded, no-shows included.