Rome's Most Iconic Landmarks

Completed under the Flavian emperors in 80 AD, the Colosseum could hold up to 50,000 spectators for gladiatorial combat, staged hunts, and public spectacles, its ingenious system of vaults, lifts, and trapdoors delivering wild animals and fighters into the arena.

Built of travertine, tuff, and brick-faced concrete, it remains a masterpiece of Roman engineering and the model for stadiums ever since. Though earthquakes and centuries of stone-robbing stripped it, its scarred grandeur is undiminished.

Today you can walk the reconstructed arena floor, descend into the underground hypogeum, and climb the tiers for views over the Forum.

Rebuilt by Hadrian around 126 AD on the site of an earlier temple, the Pantheon has stood, roof intact, for nearly nineteen centuries, a feat unmatched in the ancient world.

Its coffered concrete dome, a perfect hemisphere whose diameter equals its height, is pierced by the oculus, a nine-meter opening that floods the interior with a moving shaft of light (and the occasional rain).

Converted to a church in the 7th century, which spared it destruction, it now holds the tombs of the painter Raphael and Italy's kings. Its proportions have inspired architects from the Renaissance to the present day.

Amassed by popes over five hundred years, the Vatican Museums hold one of the greatest art collections in existence, classical sculpture like the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere, the map-lined galleries, and Raphael's frescoed Rooms, all building toward the overwhelming climax of the Sistine Chapel.

There, Michelangelo's ceiling (1508–1512) and his later 'Last Judgment' represent one of the supreme achievements of Western art, thronged daily by hushed crowds craning upward. The scale is immense and the crowds intense, but the artistic payoff is unmatched.

Begun by Emperor Hadrian as a monumental cylindrical tomb and completed in 139 AD, this riverside landmark was later converted into a fortress, a papal residence and refuge, and a prison, its history spiraling upward through nearly two millennia.

Popes could flee here from the Vatican along the elevated 'Passetto' corridor during sieges.

Inside are frescoed Renaissance apartments, dungeons, and an armory; the rooftop terrace, crowned by a bronze statue of the Archangel Michael sheathing his sword, offers a superb panorama over the Tiber and St. Peter's. Bernini's angel-lined bridge leads to its door.

Piazza Navona traces the exact oval footprint of the Stadium of Domitian (1st century AD), where Romans once watched athletic games, its long, curved shape a fossil of the ancient racetrack.

Reborn in the baroque age, it centers on Bernini's magnificent Fountain of the Four Rivers (1651), whose muscular figures personify the Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Río de la Plata beneath an Egyptian obelisk, framed by Borromini's church of Sant'Agnese in Agone.

Two further fountains and a ring of cafés complete Rome's grandest open-air salon, alive with artists, musicians, and crowds day and night.

Founded in the 5th century, Santa Maria Maggiore is the largest and best-preserved of Rome's four papal basilicas dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and a dazzling anthology of Roman art across the ages.

Its nave glitters with 5th-century mosaics; the gilded coffered ceiling is said to use gold first brought from the Americas; the Cosmatesque marble floor gleams underfoot; and baroque chapels flank the aisles.

A working, deeply venerated church far from the tourist scrum, it rewards visitors with grandeur and calm just steps from Termini station.