Rome in Three Hours: Spanish Steps to Campo de' Fiori

A three-hour walk designed for the first day, when you still need to work out how the city fits together. It leaves from Caffè Greco near the Spanish Steps and ends in Campo de' Fiori, which is a deliberate route rather than a loop: you finish in a square with a market and a dozen places to eat, at roughly the hour when that becomes useful. In between: the Trevi Fountain, the government quarter around the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the Temple of Hadrian, the Pantheon reached down a narrow street, and Piazza Navona. Navona is where the scale of ancient Rome lands. The square is the exact footprint of Domitian's stadium, which held about thirty thousand spectators, and the buildings around the edge stand on the old seating. The church of Sant'Agnese is on one side, and Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers, designed in 1651 for Pope Innocent X, is in the middle. By the end you will also have picked up the local rules that nobody writes down, which is half of what a first day is for.