Rome Free Walking Tour from Trajan's Column to the Colosseum

Two hours through ancient Rome at no cost, which for a first afternoon in the city is hard to improve on. The group gathers under the umbrella pines by Trajan's Column and walks from there into Piazza Venezia, the working centre of the modern city, where the Victor Emmanuel II monument stands in white marble. Romans call it the wedding cake and they do not mean it kindly. The column repays arriving early. It went up in AD 113, and the relief winding round it is one continuous band about two hundred metres long carrying something like two thousand six hundred figures, a campaign diary of the Dacian wars read from the bottom upwards. Most of it is too high to make out from the pavement, which mattered less when the libraries on either side had upper floors to look down from. Trajan's ashes were placed in the base. The bronze figure of him on the top went missing in the Middle Ages, and the statue standing up there now is Saint Peter, put in its place in 1588. From there the route climbs the Capitoline, one of the seven hills, to Piazza del Campidoglio, which Michelangelo laid out down to the paving pattern. The terrace behind it gives the view down over the Roman Forum, which was the political, religious and commercial centre of the ancient city and reads as a field of broken columns until somebody explains it. Two things about that square. The oval paving with the twelve-pointed star was drawn by Michelangelo and only laid in 1940, four centuries after he designed it. And the bronze rider at the centre is a copy: the original Marcus Aurelius is indoors in the Capitoline Museums, and it is the only Roman equestrian bronze to survive whole from antiquity, because the Middle Ages took it for Constantine and left it alone. The walk carries on past the Imperial Fora, the sequence of squares and temples each emperor built to outdo the last, with the Palatine on one side and the Colosseum at the end of the road. The road is the intrusion. Via dei Fori Imperiali was driven through in 1932 for military parades, flattening a dense residential quarter and sealing part of the excavation under tarmac, which is why the fora now sit in two halves either side of a boulevard. It finishes two hours after it starts. Be clear about what that includes. The terrace view over the Forum costs nothing, and neither does the square above it, so the free part of this walk is genuinely the best free hour in the city. Admission to the Forum, the Palatine and the Colosseum is a separate ticket that has nothing to do with this booking, and the tour stops at the gate. There is one real climb, because the Capitoline is a hill and you go up it on foot. One booking rule to know: this tour does not take groups of more than six, even if you book separately. Larger parties need the private option. The guide is paid by what the group hands over at the end, since nothing is charged when you book and tips are not included. That same cap of six means an empty place is a place nobody else could take, so cancel if your plans change rather than simply not appearing.