Ivy-draped lanes, wine bars and boutiques wrapped around ancient streets: Monti is Rome's oldest quarter, home to the buried Domus Aurea and a string of treasure-filled medieval churches.
Last updated August 23, 2026
In a nutshell: this is the oldest quarter of Rome, wrapped around the lanes of the ancient Suburra - today a web of wine bars, boutiques and hidden churches. The buried Domus Aurea is the star turn, with the relic trail and a walk through the old Suburra close behind; Michelangelo's Moses waits a few streets away, the basilica and museums of the Esquilino sit just beyond, and the bars and tables are a short stroll in any direction. Back on the district overview you can plan the whole area.
Monti takes its name from the mountains: in the Middle Ages the label covered the Esquilino, Viminal, Quirinal and Celio hills together. The low land below, near the Colosseum, was the Suburra ('below the city'), ancient Rome's most disreputable quarter, a name that became synonymous with sleaze thanks to the brothels that flourished there. These days Romans and visitors alike love the area for its cafes, bars and independent boutiques, while the Esquilino has grown into a separate rione (district) that takes in the down-at-heel streets around Stazione Termini, the graffiti-cloaked bohemia of San Lorenzo and the magnificent Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore - plus two fabulous wings of the Museo Nazionale Romano: Palazzo Massimo alle Terme and the Terme di Diocleziano.
Ancient Rome's red light district: the Suburra (also spelt Subura) lay in the valley between the Viminal and Esquilino hills and was infamous as a centre for prostitution, trade and overcrowded poor housing. In Italian the name became shorthand for a seedy underworld - so much so that Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo de Cataldo used it as the title of their novel about organised crime in Rome, which in turn inspired the Netflix series (2017-20) made in the mould of Gomorrah. Yet the district was not always rough: Julius Caesar grew up in the family home here and lived in it until he became Pontifex Maximus in 63 BCE.
Nero's Golden House, named after the gold that lined its facade and interiors and built after the fire of 64 CE, was long off limits while archaeologists worked out how to make it accessible. Now you can book a 75-minute tour or go solo (from 1pm only) through the excavated rooms beneath the Oppian Hill. They sit underground and are chilly, and only traces of the once-rich frescoes remain - mostly the palace's service corridors, which makes you wonder how grand the imperial quarters must have been. On a walking tour with an archaeologist you can let your imagination run wild, then don virtual-reality headsets for a far more vivid idea of the lavishness of this city-like complex.
Tip: Book well ahead through ticketing.colosseo.it and dress warmly: the underground rooms stay several degrees cooler than the street, even in summer.
Official site →Built on ashes: the palace rose from the great fire of 18 July 64 CE, which started close to the Circus Maximus - at a time when Rome's poor areas were a tinderbox of wooden houses - and burned for six days and seven nights, largely destroying 10 of Rome's 14 districts. Legend paints Nero playing his lyre (the fiddle had yet to be invented) on the Palatine while the city burned, and his opportunistic use of the cleared land for his extravagant palace is part of why the image took hold. Subsequent emperors set about erasing the building: Vespasian drained Nero's ornamental lake and, in a symbolic gesture, built the Colosseum in its place; Domitian raised a palace on the Palatine; and Trajan sacked and destroyed the upper floor, entombing the lower level in earth as the foundations of his public baths, abandoned by the 6th century. That burial is exactly what preserved the rooms you walk through today.
Tucked down a small lane close to Santa Maria Maggiore, this intimate, ochre-walled medieval church offers an entirely different experience of church art: brilliant blue and gold Byzantine mosaics that seem to emit their own light. The small 9th-century church is dedicated to St Praxedes, an early Christian heroine who hid Christians fleeing persecution and buried those she could not save in a well - look for the marble disc on the nave floor that marks the position of the well. The mosaics covering the walls and vault were produced by artists Pope Paschal I had brought in specially from Byzantium and carry all their trademarks: bold gold backgrounds and heavy Christian symbolism. In the apse, Christ is flanked by Sts Peter, Pudentiana and Zeno on the right and Paul, Praxedes and Paschal on the left; every figure has a golden halo except Paschal, whose head is shadowed by a blue nimbus showing he was still alive when it was made.
Official site →The Chapel of San Zeno: further treasures await in the heavily mosaicked Cappella di San Zenone, including a piece of the column to which Christ is said to have been tied when he was flogged, brought back from Jerusalem - it sits in the glass case on the right.
The church of Rome's Filipino community contains a sparkling 4th-century apse mosaic, the oldest of its kind in the city. An enthroned Christ is flanked by two female figures crowning St Peter and St Paul, with the apostles dressed as Roman senators on either side. Sadly, only 10 of the original Twelve Apostles survive: a barbarous 16th-century facelift lopped off two and amputated the legs of the others.
Official site →The church with no facade: this small convent church devoted to the 4th-century martyr St Lucy dates to before the 8th century but was reconstructed by Carlo Maderno in the 16th century, kept within the then monastery and therefore left without a facade. It was later restored by Borromini in the 17th century.
Enter and you first clock the ancient Corinthian columns dividing the aisles and Gagliardi's frescoes showing San Giovanni in Laterano and St Peter's Basilica in earlier incarnations. The real treasures, however, lie beneath your feet: head towards the back and you find an entrance to an underground world, several degrees cooler than the church above. This was already a place of worship in the 3rd century, when Christians met in what was then the home of a Roman named Equitius; after Christianity was legalised in the 4th century a church was constructed on the site, rebuilt in the 6th and 9th centuries, and Filippo Gagliardi built over the original in the 1650s.
Official site →Multi-layer Rome: under the later church you explore one of the earliest places of Christian worship in the city - like the 4th-century church beneath San Clemente near the Colosseum, yet receiving far fewer visitors and free to enter. The faint remnants of frescoes and even imperial fragments survive from the excavations, and during the war the underground church was used as an air-raid shelter: graffiti, including a poem, have been discovered scratched into the walls.
This walk focuses mainly on the area that was ancient Rome's Suburra district, in the dip between the hills of Monti. It runs about 1.6km and takes around 1.5 hours, starting at the Domus Aurea and ending at the wine bar Ai Tre Scalini.
The area of Monti close to Cavour metro station has long been a centre for small independent shops, including vintage stores, and the treasure-hunting opportunities keep growing: mixed clothing and accessories, plus vintage football tops, are the staples.
The guided tour with the VR headset (€26) brings Nero's palace vividly back to life, while the solo option (€18, from 1pm only) is cheaper but shows you the bare underground rooms. Either way, book ahead through ticketing.colosseo.it.