Meet at the Closed Barbershop: Rome's Myths After Dark

The meeting point tells you what kind of walk this is. Via del Banco di Santo Spirito 25, outside a barbershop that will be shut, with a large sign reading BARBIERE. Easy to find, and nobody else is standing there. The route starts at Castel Sant'Angelo and covers the executions carried out there, its use as a prison, and the Passetto di Borgo, the walled corridor a pope could run along to reach it. Also the Tiber, which defended the city and repeatedly flooded it, and the archangel who is supposed to have appeared over the building in 590 to signal the end of a plague, which is how the fortress got its name. Then Via Giulia, laid out by Julius II to drive a straight line through a medieval tangle, and Piazza Farnese, where the two fountains are made from granite bathtubs taken out of the Baths of Caracalla and set on pedestals. Roman baths, reused as garden furniture by a family with a pope in it. The Passetto del Biscione is next, a covered passage near Campo de' Fiori with medieval fresco still on its vault, which almost nobody walks through. It ends in Campo de' Fiori, where the executions happened and where the bars are now, so you can stay on.