Ninety Minutes with Dowsing Rods, Ponte Sant'Angelo to Campo de' Fiori

Everyone hands out a ghost kit. This one hands out dowsing rods, the paired brass wires that are supposed to cross when they find something, and lets you carry them for the whole ninety minutes. Whether they work is not the point; walking a dark street holding a pair of them changes how you walk it. The route starts on the Ponte Sant'Angelo, which is the most photographed bridge in Rome and was where the bodies of the executed were displayed. From there it goes into the narrow streets behind it: Via dei Banchi Vecchi, a square where two professional poisoners supplied hundreds of women who wanted to be widows, and Via Giulia, which a pope had laid out partly so that he could reach his mistresses without being seen. Then the church of the Confraternity of Death, where the bodies collected from the streets of Rome were buried, and the Fontana del Mascherone, where John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in the 1970s in a case that ended with a severed ear posted to a newspaper. It finishes in Campo de' Fiori, where heretics were burned. Small groups, and the stories are documented rather than invented. Check-in is fifteen minutes before the start. Latecomers are not waited for.