The wedge of streets around Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain: Rome's most photographed corners, the President's palace, and the city's grandest shopping streets.
Last updated August 24, 2026
In a nutshell: the Tridente is the fan of three streets (Via del Corso, Via del Babuino and Via Ripetta) that opens out of Piazza del Popolo, and it packs an outsized share of Rome's icons. The Spanish Steps climb from Piazza di Spagna to Trinità dei Monti, with the Keats-Shelley House on the corner and the artists' lanes of Via Margutta behind. The Trevi Fountain is the city's most celebrated fountain, a baroque spectacle built around a coin toss. Via del Corso and the Quirinale cover the grand shopping avenue, the President's palace and the piazzas and gardens between Piazza del Popolo and the Pincio. The churches and museums gather the quarter's chapels, palaces and collections, from Santa Maria del Popolo to the Cripta dei Cappuccini. And when hunger strikes, the eating and drinking page lines up the best trattorias, coffee bars and gelato. From here you can reach the historic centre with its Pantheon and piazzas, ancient Rome, the Vatican and the green sweep of Villa Borghese on foot. It is also the most crowded part of the city: plan for early starts and late evenings.
| Sight | Ticket | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Spanish Steps & Piazza di Spagna | Free | Open air; sitting on the steps is forbidden |
| Trevi Fountain | Free | Open air; coin toss ritual, no bathing |
| Palazzo Barberini | €15 adult, €2 EU citizens 18-25 | Ticket also covers the Galleria Corsini within 20 days |
| Palazzo del Quirinale | Guided tour €2.50 | Tours in Italian only, booked well ahead |
| Museum of the Ara Pacis | €13 adult, €9.50 reduced | Augustan altar in a modern pavilion |
| Villa Medici | €14 adult, €11 reduced | Guided tours in French, Italian and English |
| Keats-Shelley House | €6 adult, €5 reduced | Corner of the Spanish Steps |
| Cripta dei Cappuccini | €10 adult, €6.50 reduced | Bone-decorated crypt near Piazza Barberini |
| Palazzo Colonna | €15 | Open Saturday mornings |
| Palazzo Valentini | €12 adult, €8 reduced | Multimedia tour over Roman domus |
The main sights sit close together, and walking is the best way to travel: it is how you discover the picturesque corners you would otherwise hurry past. The only real enemy is the summer heat, so carry water and pace yourself.
The map listings in the source chapter point to a range of options across the two areas. Around the Tridente: Casa Fabbrini in Campo Marzio, Fendi Private Suites and Hotel de Russie. Around Trevi and the Quirinale: Hotel Modigliani, La Controra, Night & Day, Palazzo Scanderbeg and the Radical Hotel. Most sit within easy walking distance of the metro and the main sights.
The vast oval piazza at the city's northern edge served for centuries as Rome's ceremonial front door. Until railways and aeroplanes changed how people travelled, nearly every visitor met the city here for the first time. Its neat symmetrical plan was laid out in the early 1800s, and the churches gathered around its rim are full of art.
The square's makeover began in 1480, when Pope Sixtus IV decided the tumbledown medieval town was leaving a dreadful first impression on the pilgrims trudging in from all across Europe. He gave planners the power to expropriate property, tear down old buildings and lay out straight new avenues. Further papal spruce-up campaigns followed; in 1510 Martin Luther entered Rome through this gate on foot from Germany, a journey of some 700 miles.
Rising at the piazza's centre, an obelisk some ten storeys tall was moved here in 1589 during a drive to beautify the square. It had earlier stood at a temple of the pharaoh Ramses II and later at the Circus Maximus racetrack.
On the south side, twin domed churches stand where three boulevards burst out of the square like a trident, and all three churches facing the square honour the Virgin Mary.
With that simple geometry, newcomers who had never set foot in the city knew exactly where to go. Two fountains flank the square, Neptune on the western flank and Roma on the eastern, where the Pincio hill begins; steps climb to an overlook with sweeping views of St Peter's and the skyline, a perch so romantic that local Romeos come here to propose. Despite the name, which translates as 'Square of the People', the piazza probably owes its title to the poplars that once grew on this spot.
A contender for Rome's most underrated church, Santa Maria del Popolo hides two chapels that showcase Caravaggio and Bernini at their best behind a facade of travertine recycled from the Colosseum. Championed by the Rovere clan, which gave the papacy two popes, the church wears their oak-and-acorn emblem throughout. Entry is free, but bring some coins to light up the art; the hours are irregular, roughly Mon-Sat 7:00-12:00 & 16:00-19:00, Sun 8:00-13:30 & 16:30-18:30. The church sits on the square's north flank, next to the gateway cut into the ancient wall.
The church is an Augustinian foundation and a showcase of the Renaissance style in its Roman guise: everything is harmony and lightness, its arches striding toward the altar, behind which a handful of uncommon Renaissance stained-glass windows glow, since almost every other church window in Rome dates from the Baroque and is plain clear glass.
Step inside and the building works like a miniature course in art history, with each chapel telling a different century. The Della Rovere Chapel, nearest the entrance on the right, belongs to the 1400s and its new realism: Pinturicchio's Nativity with St Jerome transplants a Bible scene into 1490 Italy, and the assured handling of the landscape, complete with a length of ancient Rome's brick wall, was groundbreaking. The Chigi Chapel, further along on the left-hand side, epitomises 1500s humanism. The Cerasi Chapel, beside the main altar, turns emotional in the Baroque spirit of the Counter-Reformation.
Raphael designed the Chigi Chapel, drawing on the Pantheon for inspiration: the dome, the pilasters and the capitals all echo the old temple, and through the oculus God peers down, helped by angels who keep the eight planets of the era turning. The chapel was Raphael's gift to his banker companion Agostino Chigi, a man of enormous wealth, who rests in a pyramid-shaped tomb built into the wall on the altar's right. Later, Chigi's great-grandson called on Bernini to sculpt a matching pair, completing the set of four, and Bernini obliged with theatrical flair: in a corner, Daniel bestrides a lion with his hands raised in prayer, while diagonally opposite an angel seizes the prophet Habakkuk by the hair and orders him to carry food to Daniel where the lions wait.
The two canvases by Caravaggio on the chapel's side walls are the real draw. On the chapel's right wall, the Conversion of St Paul (1601) lays the future saint flat on the ground next to his horse while a servant watches; the startled convert, dazzled by a harsh shaft of light, hears a voice from above demand to know why he persecutes. Across the chapel, the Crucifixion of St Peter makes martyrdom look like a mundane chore, the labourers straining like anonymous beasts in fierce contrasts of light and shadow. The artist's own maxim ran that wherever light fell, he would paint it.
Rome's celebrated Spanish Steps climb from Piazza di Spagna in a wide, curving sweep to Trinità dei Monti, the church at the top whose twin bell towers frame an obelisk, and it counts among the city's defining images. By day it belongs to shoppers chasing high-end fashion; in the warm evenings it fills with young people plainly charmed by the city. The Spanish Steps page tells the full story of the staircase and the artists' lanes around it.
Romans dress up for their early-evening stroll, the passeggiata, and this district is where they do it with the most style. The classic circuit begins in Piazza del Popolo, winds down the streets lining Via del Corso, then climbs Via Condotti to finish beneath the Spanish Steps. It is busy at every hour, but the crowds really swell between 17:00 and 19:00, with Friday and Saturday the liveliest; on Sundays the promenade happens in the early afternoon.
Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps and Piazza Venezia bound a district that follows Via del Corso, one that concentrates more luxury boutiques and designer flagships than any other corner of the city. The most refined stretch survives in the small street grid nearest the Spanish Steps, just off Via del Corso. Of these lanes, Via Condotti is the showpiece: lined with the smartest shops in Rome, it draws the smartest crowds, and the people-watching only builds as you near the staircase. For the avenue's palaces and the route south, see Via del Corso and the Quirinale.
Back in the 1960s, film stars from every continent paraded down the curving, tree-lined Via Veneto, among the flashiest nightlife addresses in Rome. The boulevard, running from the Borghese Gardens down to Piazza Barberini, still counts the city's most exclusive hotels and the American embassy among its residents, and it keeps a faded Champs-Elysées elegance, even if the local colour has long since washed out. The lawns and museums of Villa Borghese wait at its top end.
The neighbourhood's biggest draw is the Capuchin Crypt, beneath the Church of Santa Maria della Immacolata Concezione, just uphill from Piazza Barberini. In a chain of six chapels lie the remains of some 4,000 friars from the 1700s, their bones arranged with grim artistry. Admission is €10, or €6.50 for those 17 and under, with a 45-minute audio guide included; the crypt is open daily 10:00-19:00, modest dress is required and photography is banned. The entrance sits halfway up the church's grand exterior staircase, on the right (Via Veneto 27, Metro: Barberini).
Before the bones, a six-room museum recounts the Capuchins' history: one of the branches of the Franciscan family, they appear in painting after painting, tonsured and in brown habits, and the cases hold books, items of clothing and other everyday objects, all explained in English. The one genuine artistic gem is the canvas known as St Francis in Meditation, attributed to Caravaggio and hanging in room four.
The rooms begin with the so-called Crypt of the Three Skeletons, where a skeleton gripping a scythe and a set of scales decorates the ceiling, a clock that has no hands marks eternity, a chandelier is built entirely of bone, and the house motto is spelled out in an inscription: 'What you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be.' In the Crypt of the Shinbones and Thighbones, the niches hold robed Capuchin friars, whose brown habits with the pointed cowl gave the frothy coffee drink its name; this chapel also carries the Franciscan emblem of Christ's bare arm embracing a friar's robed arm, above a bony crown, with 18 simple crosses set in earth carried from Jerusalem some 400 years ago. Farther on come the Crypt of the Pelvises, named for the arch of wavy hipbones above its altar, and the Crypt of the Skulls, where a winged hourglass reminds visitors that time on earth is fleeting. A boneless chapel, still part of the working church, hosts sombre services, and the final Crypt of the Resurrection, whose painting of Jesus raising Lazarus leaves visitors with the Christian hope of new life.
Stepping back out into the daylight is a jolt. A few paces away you are back among the US Embassy, the Hard Rock Café as well as the fancy cafés of Via Veneto, where the less fortunate nurse a coffee in the hope of catching a glimpse of someone famous.