Rome Guided Walk with Pantheon Fast-Track and the Trevi Paid Area

Two reserved entries on one walk, which is what separates this from the free tours covering the same squares. It opens in Piazza Navona, where Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi stands on the outline of a Roman stadium, and the guide starts with how the square got its shape. The Pantheon comes with fast-track entry, so you go in rather than photographing the portico. Two thousand years of continuous use, and a dome that has never needed replacing. Piazza di Pietra is next, where eleven columns of the Temple of Hadrian stand embedded in the wall of a later building. Ancient Rome does not sit in a compound here: it is built into whatever came afterwards. At the Trevi Fountain the booking includes reserved access to the paid area, which since the access rules changed is the difference between the rail and the back of the crowd. There is free time down there for the coin. The walk ends at Piazza di Spagna, with the guide on the history of the steps. Under two kilometres in total, all of it on foot and most of it on sampietrini, the small basalt setts Rome paves its centre with. That surface matters more than the distance. It is hard on thin soles, worse on wheels, and there is no point on the route where a vehicle could take over. The fountain in the opening square repays a correction. The four figures are the Danube, the Ganges, the Nile and the Río de la Plata, one river for each part of the world Rome then counted, and the Nile has its head covered because in 1651 nobody knew where the Nile began. The story that it is shielding its eyes from Borromini's church behind it was invented later and is still repeated on that square several times an hour. The obelisk above them is Roman rather than Egyptian, cut for Domitian and hauled in from the Circus of Maxentius out on the Via Appia. Piazza di Pietra makes a different point from the Pantheon's. Those eleven columns belonged to a temple raised to Hadrian after his death by the emperor who followed him, so within a few hundred metres you get a building Hadrian put up and a building put up to him. The wall behind them is not ancient: the temple's flank was swallowed by a seventeenth-century customs house, and the building has been in official use ever since. At the Trevi the reserved access is for the lower level beside the water, and it is entered in timed batches. The group goes in together on its slot, which is worth knowing because wandering off beforehand is what actually costs people the entry. The steps at the end are a French staircase with a Spanish name. A hundred and thirty-five of them by the usual count, built in the 1720s with money left by a French diplomat, climbing to a French church at the top. The name comes from the Spanish embassy to the Holy See, which has faced the bottom of them for centuries. Sitting on them has been an offence since 2019 and the rule is enforced, so the closing part of the tour is delivered standing.