Jewish Ghetto and Trastevere on a Pay-What-You-Want Basis

Two quarters on opposite banks of the Tiber, and a payment model worth understanding before you book. This is a tip-based tour. The guides work on the pay-what-you-want model and are paid by your tips alone, so at the end you give what you thought the walk was worth. That arrangement tends to produce guides who work harder than the salaried kind. It starts in the Jewish Ghetto, where Rome's oldest community was confined by papal decree for three centuries and where it still lives. The walk covers what that confinement meant, how the community came through it, and the details you would never notice unaided: the marks on doorways, the statues with reputations, the symbols cut into the stone. Then across the river to Trastevere, which has been the awkward quarter of Rome for two thousand years. Popes who ran from here, poets who wrote in dialect against the Vatican, duels over women and honour, and drinking fountains older than most European countries. It ends in Piazza Trilussa, at the foot of the Ponte Sisto, in the part of Trastevere where people go to eat.