The Centuries Everyone Skips: Medieval Rome After Dark

Rome sells you the empire and it sells you the Renaissance. The thousand years in between are the part nobody books, and this walk is about them. Medieval Rome was a small, frightened town living inside the wreckage of a much larger one. The population had collapsed. Cattle grazed in the Forum. Citizens with nothing to sell stripped the ancient monuments for building stone, burned the marble for lime and prised the bronze clamps out of the walls, which is why so much of what survives looks gnawed at the joints. The guide takes you past buildings you have already photographed and explains what was done to them, and why. The Inquisition ran through the same streets, setting neighbour against neighbour, burning heretics in public, and trying to reduce street crime by fixing images of the Virgin to corners so that someone was always watching. The route crosses the river and covers the bridge haunted by a girl destroyed by her own family and by a pope, and the house of the city's most notorious killer, whom the guide will make more comprehensible than you expect. Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, Campo de' Fiori, Via Giulia, Via del Governo Vecchio, Piazza Farnese, Castel Sant'Angelo, all lit and without the daytime crowds. It starts on the steps of Sant'Andrea della Valle, about 150 metres from Largo Argentina.