Trastevere and the Ghetto, with a Crypt Five Metres Down

Twelve people at most, across the river and into two quarters that keep their own character. The walk starts in a church almost nobody enters, where a Bernini sculpture stands in a side chapel with no queue in front of it: the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, one of his last works, and you can stand two metres from it alone. Then Santa Cecilia, where the nuns give the group access to the underground level. Five metres below the modern street are Roman rooms, including what is held to be the house Cecilia lived in. Rome is layered like a lasagna, and this is one of the few places where you can walk down through the layers rather than read about them. After that Vicolo dell'Atleta, a narrow lane holding the oldest synagogue in Rome, now a restaurant, and Tiber Island, where the Ponte Fabricio still carries traffic on foot after two thousand years. The walk ends in the Ghetto, home to the oldest Jewish community in Europe, with the Portico of Octavia and the Theatre of Marcellus, the building the Colosseum was modelled on.