Where the Borgia Are Buried: Two Hours, Fifteen People

Everyone knows the Borgia name. Very few people know that two Borgia popes are buried in a Spanish church a few streets from Campo de' Fiori, in a city that spent centuries trying to forget them. This walk goes there. Two hours, a group of fifteen at most, and a route through the streets where the papacy did the things it does not put on the plaques. It starts at the Ponte Sant'Angelo, which was the city's main site for public executions, with the papal fortress at the far end and the Vatican visible from an angle most visitors never take. Then the story of an executioner who personally put hundreds of people to death, and Via dei Banchi Vecchi, where one of Rome's most prolific killers lived and worked. Via Giulia follows, elegant and quiet, and the church of Prayer and Death, headquarters of a confraternity whose work was collecting bodies nobody claimed. The walk also takes in the papal palace that Michelangelo had a hand in, which is a reminder that the same century produced both the architecture and the crimes. It ends in Campo de' Fiori, where heretics were burned and where the market is now.