Rome by Evening: the Piazzas and Fountains, Semi-Private

An evening walk through the squares, when the working city has gone home and the fountains are lit. The route takes the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona and the Spanish Steps, along with the streets between them, which is where most of the walk actually happens. Rome at this hour is quieter, cooler and considerably better to look at. The thread running through it is who made these places and why. Popes and emperors commissioned the palaces and the fountains, artists built them, and ordinary Romans lived around them; the political and religious institutions that shaped modern Italy took their form on exactly these squares. Water is the connecting material: every fountain on the route is fed by an aqueduct, and several of those aqueducts are ancient. Semi-private, so the group is small enough to hear the guide in a street with a fountain running in it. The meeting point is in front of the Al Sogno toy shop on Piazza Navona, where the guide waits with a Through Eternity sign.