Rome's Dark Side: Poison, Power and Fifteen People

Two of the best stories on this route are about women, which is not what the genre usually delivers. One ran Rome. She held no office, could hold none, and exercised real power through a pope for years, to the point that the city's satirists gave her a title. She is said to cross Ponte Sisto still, and the walk stops on that bridge. The other sold cosmetics. Her preparation was odourless, tasteless and slow, and it was bought by wives who wanted to be widows. The shop is a gelateria now, on Via dei Banchi Vecchi, and you stand outside it while the story is told. The rest holds up too: an 18th-century magician who is supposed to have stayed on in these back streets, the most notorious pope in Roman history and his family, one of the worst prisons the city ever ran, an order of monks whose job was collecting the dead, and the house of the executioner. It ends at Castel Sant'Angelo, which was an emperor's tomb before it was a place of execution, with the tragedy that happened there. A group of fifteen at most, led by a storyteller rather than a lecturer. The humour is dry and the material is real.