Piazza Navona Is a Racetrack: An Audio Tour of Rome's Landmarks

Get to Piazza Navona early enough and you will watch a waiter drag steel tables out across the paving in the half-light, setting them down in a long curve because the square curves and he has no choice about it. He is laying out breakfast on a running track. The oval he is following is the arena floor, and the buildings he is working between are standing on the seating.

Nothing on the square says any of this. That is the ordinary condition of a Roman landmark, and it is the problem an audio tour of Rome has to solve: the monument is free, it is outdoors, it is enormous, and it is anonymous.

Thirty thousand seats under the cafe tables

Domitian put the stadium up and dedicated it in 86. It ran about two hundred and seventy-five metres long and a hundred and six wide, seated roughly thirty thousand, and its outer tiers stood thirty metres over the street. It was built for Greek-style athletics, foot races rather than chariots, which is why the shape is a long oval with one squared end and not the great flattened U of the Circus Maximus.

Then, when a fire put the Colosseum out of service in 217, the gladiator shows moved here for a few years while the repairs went on.

The stadium never left. The piazza is lying directly on the arena, the palazzi around it are sitting on the lower arcades, and the curve the waiter is following at seven in the morning is the curve of the track. Point a phone at the facade of the building behind him and Chiaro starts on the arcade buried inside it, which is the only part of the sentence he could verify himself, by going down to his own cellar.

The corridor a pope took twice

Walk west and cross the river and you arrive at a drum of a building that Hadrian ordered as a tomb for himself. It went up between 123 and 139. His ashes went in the year before it was finished, then his wife Sabina, then his adopted son Lucius Aelius, then emperor after emperor, the last recorded arrival being Caracalla in 217, which was the same year the Colosseum burned and the athletes' stadium started hosting gladiators. In 401 the mausoleum was turned into a military fortress, which is what it has been ever since.

Running from it back toward the Vatican there is a wall about eight hundred metres long with a covered passage inside it and a patrol walk on top. Whether the enclosed passage was added in 1277 under Nicholas III or later, in the fourteenth century under Boniface IX, is not settled.

What is settled is that two popes have used it while people were trying to reach them. Alexander VI went through in 1494 when Charles VIII brought a French army into the city. Clement VII went through on the worst morning in the building's history, during the Sack of Rome in 1527, while the troops of Charles V were killing almost the whole Swiss Guard on the steps of Saint Peter's behind him.

From the street the thing reads as masonry. It is a decision somebody made, centuries in advance, about how a pope leaves a city.

Nineteen BC, and still arriving

Turn back east for the Trevi, and expect to pay. Since Monday, February 2, 2026, Roma Capitale has charged two euros to go down onto the steps at the basin, every day from nine in the morning until ten at night. Residents of the city and the metropolitan area get in free with an ID, as do children under five and visitors with disabilities and their companions. About four hundred people are allowed down at a time.

What nobody at the barrier mentions is that the water is the oldest thing on the square by a distance. The fountain is the show end of the Acqua Vergine, the revived Aqua Virgo, finished in 19 BC after Roman engineers found a spring some thirteen kilometres out of town. The relief on the right of the fountain shows a young woman pointing the source out to them, which is where the aqueduct got its name and where the fountain got its subject. The channel still runs. Nicola Salvi began the marble in 1732, Giuseppe Pannini finished it, and Pope Clement XIII opened it on May 22, 1762, which makes the plumbing seventeen centuries older than the sculpture in front of it.

The money runs the other way. Coins lifted out of the basin come to something like one and a half million euros a year, and the city hands them to Caritas, which puts them into a food bank, a soup kitchen and a low-cost supermarket, around fifteen percent of the charity's yearly budget. Staff sweep the coins into heaps with brush poles and draw them up through a suction hose.

Four hundred people on those steps are rarely from the same country. Self-guided audio tours have to hold up in the language the visitor actually thinks in, and Chiaro runs in ten, each one voiced natively instead of read over the top of an English original, so the Japanese couple on the third step down and the Brazilian family behind them are getting the Aqua Virgo out of the same stone at the same moment.

A hundred and ninety metres you cannot see

South of the fountain, Trajan's Column is the hardest thing in Rome to actually look at.

The shaft is thirty metres of Carrara marble in twenty drums, each around thirty-two tons, dedicated on May 12, 113. Wound around it is a carved frieze a hundred and ninety metres long, turning twenty-three times from bottom to top, carrying 2,662 figures across 155 scenes, with Trajan himself in fifty-eight of them. His ashes went into a chamber in the base after he died in 117. The bronze on top is Saint Peter, put there by Pope Sixtus V on December 4, 1587.

The catch is the geometry. Two libraries once flanked the column with upper floors that worked as reading galleries, and they are gone, so the upper windings now turn away from you into open sky. The finest carving in the city was arranged for a vantage point that no longer exists.

That gap is what an audio tour of Rome is actually for. Standing at the base with the camera up, you get the pontoon bridge over the Danube and the scene where the Dacian king Decebalus cuts his own throat rather than be taken, described out loud while you are looking at a band of stone your eye cannot resolve, and you can keep asking until the column is accounted for.

Three hundred and thirty days, by the will

Head south, past the Circus Maximus, and Rome ends in a pyramid.

Gaius Cestius was a magistrate and one of the Septemviri Epulonum, a priestly college that ran public banquets. He died sometime between 18 and 12 BC and his will specified the tomb: a hundred Roman feet square at the base, a hundred and twenty-five high, brick-faced concrete under white marble slabs on a travertine footing. The inscription records that the work was done in accordance with the will in three hundred and thirty days, under his heir Lucius Pontius Mela and his freedman Pothus.

Then, between 271 and 275, the crews building the Aurelian Walls ran the city defences straight into the pyramid and used it as a triangular bastion. Getting swallowed by a fortification is the reason it is one of the best-preserved ancient buildings in Rome.

By this point in a day you have looked at a lot of brick, and this is where a walking audio tour app either earns the afternoon or wastes it. Rome repeats: another stretch of wall, another arch, another travertine front with a papal crest on it. Chiaro tracks what it has already told you, so the fourth wall of the day is not a fresh lecture on Roman bricklaying, and a monument you photograph again tomorrow gives you the next layer down instead of the same paragraph.

Fair warning about the parts of the city that are simply shut. Nothing on a phone opens the Passetto, or gets you onto the Trevi steps ahead of the four hundred people already on them, or persuades a gate on the Aventine to stay open past closing. Rome in July will also drain a battery faster than you expect, because the screen fights the sun the whole way. Bring a power bank and take the hill in the evening.

An audio tour of Rome ends at a keyhole

The Aventine is a short climb from the pyramid, and the best thing up there costs nothing and takes ninety seconds.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi spent his life etching Roman ruins and built almost nothing. In 1765 he designed the Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta for Giovanni Battista Rezzonico, Grand Prior of the Order of Malta and a nephew of Pope Clement XIII, and it is the only piece of city he ever got to make. The obelisks and trophies he cut into the walls of that square are the same vocabulary as his prints, standing up in stone.

Put your eye to the keyhole of the priory gate and the dome of Saint Peter's is sitting at the far end of a corridor of clipped hedge, small and exact, across the whole width of the city.

It is my favorite landmark in Rome and it is not close. There is no ticket, no barrier, no attendant, and no sign explaining a thing.

Note the dates, though. Clement XIII opened the Trevi Fountain in 1762 and three years later his nephew was commissioning the square you are standing in, which means the beginning and the end of this walk were paid for by the same family inside four years.

Rome charges two euros for the steps at a fountain and nothing at all for a keyhole, a pyramid, or the floor of a stadium. It has never charged anybody for an explanation, because it has never once offered one.