Residential streets around Rome's cathedral, the green calm of the Celio and Aventino hills, and the earthy, food-obsessed district of Testaccio below them.
עודכן לאחרונה 23 באוגוסט 2026
In a nutshell: this sprawling, multifaceted quadrant of south-east Rome mixes heavyweight sightseeing with everyday urban texture: quiet residential lanes, peaceful hilltop gardens, working-class streets and one of the city's liveliest food markets. The headline acts are Rome's cathedral, the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, the layered underground of San Clemente, the colossal Terme di Caracalla, the Nuovo Mercato di Testaccio and a keyhole framing one of the city's most magical views. The Colosseum and ancient Rome sit a short walk from the Celio, the historic centre lies just beyond them, and Trastevere glitters across the river from the Aventino.
| Sight | Ticket | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano | Free | Security check; cloister €6 with audio guide, €4 without |
| Santuario della Scala Santa | Free; Sancta Sanctorum €3.50 | Sacred staircase climbed on the knees |
| Basilica di San Clemente | Church free; underground €10/€5 | Book the underground levels online |
| Basilica dei SS Quattro Coronati | Free; Aula Gotica tours €10 | Bimonthly tours of the Gothic hall |
| Chiesa di Santo Stefano Rotondo | Free | Graphic 16th-century martyrdom frescoes |
| Case Romane del Celio | €8 adult, €6 reduced | Frescoed Roman houses under the Celio |
| Cave del Tempio di Claudio | €12 plus €5 ticket | Underground quarry tour with Roma Sotterranea |
| Museo della Forma Urbis | €9 adult, €6.50 reduced | Walk over the ancient marble map |
| Terme di Caracalla | Around €12 with exhibitions | Free on the month's first Sunday |
| Nuovo Mercato di Testaccio | Free | Legendary food stalls at lunchtime |
| Monte Testaccio | Tour €4 adult, €3 reduced | Artificial hill of amphora shards |
| Cimitero Acattolico | Free | Keats, Shelley and Gramsci rest here |
| Villa del Priorato di Malta | Free | The celebrated keyhole view |
| Basilica di Santa Sabina | Free | Original 5th-century doors |
| Roseto Comunale | Free | 1100+ rose varieties in spring |
| Mattatoio | Free | Contemporary art in the old slaughterhouse |
Each sub-neighbourhood is walkable on its own, whether you are covering San Giovanni & Celio or Aventino & Testaccio, but hopping between them calls for public transport.
Step beyond the famous basilica and San Giovanni reveals itself as a workaday district of shops, bars, apartment towers and increasingly fashionable eateries. The Celio, meanwhile, stays hushed and church-filled, a pocket of contemplative calm.
Next door to the Lateran, this sanctuary radiates a devotion that has faded from the city's more sterile, museum-like churches. Its prize is the flight of marble steps known as the Scala Santa, reputed to be the very flight Jesus climbed in the Jerusalem palace of Pontius Pilate. Believers treat the treads as holy, going up on their knees and murmuring a prayer at every one of the 28 steps. At the summit, shut behind an iron grille, glows the Sancta Sanctorum, a chapel so revered it earned the nickname 'Holy of Holies' and for centuries served as the popes' private quarters. Entry to the staircase is free; the Sancta Sanctorum costs €3.50.
Tip: Even if you are not religious, walk quietly and give the pilgrims space: watching them ascend on their knees is part of the experience.
Few sightseers make the detour to this fortified church, yet its medieval paintings are well worth the stop. Inside the Oratorio di San Silvestro, open 9.30am to noon Monday to Saturday, a 13th-century cycle tells how Emperor Constantine met Sylvester I and how the Donation of Constantine, as the document is known, came to be. The basilica has stood here since the 6th century, rebuilt into its present shape in the 1100s after Norman raiders wrecked the earlier building in 1084. To see the painted Aula Gotica, up on the Torre Maggiore's first floor and one of the few Gothic halls left in Rome, you must join one of the twice-monthly tours, which cost €10 per person; dates are on aulagoticasantiquattrocoronati.it.
The Donation of Constantine usually tops the list of medieval forgeries. In it, the emperor supposedly bequeathed to Pope Sylvester I (reigned 314-35) and his heirs both Rome and the whole Western Roman Empire, along with supremacy over the church seats at Antioch, at Alexandria, at Constantinople and at Jerusalem, and over every church on Earth. For hundreds of years the document was treated as authentic and quoted by popes defending their territorial ambitions, until the philosopher Lorenzo Valla exposed it as a fake in 1440. Its true date remains unknown, though the consensus puts it in the second half of the 700s.
Few of Rome's art-packed churches are as unsettling as this one. A 16th-century fresco cycle, commissioned while the Counter-Reformation was raging and the Catholic Church hoped to check Protestantism and fire up a fresh generation of believers, lines the walls with the ordeals inflicted on early Christian martyrs. Charles Dickens, who saw the paintings in 1846, declared that no dream could match such a waking spectacle of horror and slaughter. The church itself, set within its own walled and leafy grounds and built in the late 400s, is among Rome's oldest, and beneath the gore it is a lovely space: a circular, light-filled hall where columns of marble ring the high altar.
Tip: The frescoes are explicit and can unsettle children, and plenty of adults, so decide in advance whether the shudder is worth it.
Rome's cathedral and the pope's own church in his role as Bishop of Rome, the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano is also one of the city's most unmissable landmarks. Consecrated in 324 CE, it was Rome's first Christian basilica, and it remains the mater et caput, a Latin title meaning 'mother and head', of every Catholic church.
The church is the senior of Rome's four papal basilicas, built on Constantine's orders and consecrated by Sylvester I in 324 CE. It served as the chief pontifical church until 1309, when the papacy decamped to Avignon, and the neighbouring Palazzo Lateranense acted as the popes' residence throughout that era. Both buildings slid into ruin while the papacy was away in France, and when Gregory XI finally came back in 1377 he opted for the fortified Vatican instead. Of the original structure almost nothing survives: the building was remade again and again, and the version you see today is chiefly the work of Francesco Borromini's baroque overhaul in the mid-1600s.
Galilei's immense white facade of 1735 is best judged from across the piazza. Along its summit stand fifteen figures, each 7m tall: Christ between St John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, with the Twelve Apostles ranged alongside. Behind the enormous columns of the portico, seek out the bronze door leaves brought over from the Forum's Curia building, and the Holy Door at the far right, unsealed only during Jubilee years.
The Lateran has stood at the centre of Catholic Jubilees, or Holy Years, since 1425, when its Holy Door was first thrown open for the occasion, a tradition that continues today. Pilgrims who come in a Holy Year can still earn a plenary indulgence. Rome is currently giving the basilica's piazza a €15 million refurbishment to welcome the 2025 Jubilee.
Step inside and the sheer scale hits you first: this is an interior that makes you feel small. The marble-sheathed nave owes its current look to Borromini, who refashioned it for the 1650 Jubilee yet spared earlier treasures, among them the gilded, coffered ceiling from the 1500s and the Cosmati pavement laid in the 1400s. Along the wide central nave, statues of the apostles from the 1700s, every one 4.6m tall, occupy their own dramatic niches. A 14th-century Gothic baldachin soars above the papal altar, reputed to guard the skulls of Sts Peter and Paul; the confessio before it holds Martin V's tomb, set at the altar's foot beside a wooden effigy of St John the Baptist. Mosaics sparkle across the great apse, a handful of them survivors from the 4th-century original, though the majority date from the 1800s. Back near the entrance, an unfinished fresco by Giotto covers the first pillar of the right-hand aisle, and the next column carries the memorial of Sylvester II (reigned 999-1003), which locals claim groans whenever a pope is about to die.
The cloister lies through a doorway left of the high altar; built in the 1200s, it is among the most tranquil corners in Rome (€6 with an audio guide, €4 without). Its arcades frame a central garden, lined with columns that twist elegantly, plus marble fragments salvaged from the original church: among them the remnants of a papal throne from the 400s and the inscribed texts of a pair of papal bulls.
For a crash course in Rome's layered past, no site beats San Clemente. The basilica you enter at street level is a 12th-century building, yet under it sits a 4th-century church, and beneath that, in turn, lie Roman-era structures and a pagan shrine from the 100s.
The upper church, entered across a colonnaded atrium, guards genuine treasures: the apse holds a radiant 12th-century mosaic of the Trionfo della Croce, the Triumph of the Cross, while frescoes from the 1400s, painted by Masolino, depict a crucifixion and scenes from St Catherine's story.
The church itself costs nothing, but the buried levels need a ticket (€10 adult, €5 reduced) bought online in advance; allow roughly thirty minutes below ground, where a printed leaflet explains what you are seeing. Steps from the sacristy drop into the 4th-century basilica inferiore, wrecked during the Norman sack of 1084 yet still decorated with faded frescoes telling St Clement's story. One of them, just left of the high altar, may hold the earliest recorded swear word in vulgar Italian. A further staircase leads into dark corridors lined with rooms of a 1st-century Roman house and a structure thought to be the imperial mint of the 1st century. The highlight, however, is the mithraeum of the 100s, a temple of the god Mithras whose altar shows the god despatching a bull. Deep below everything, an underground spring rushes beneath a grille in the floor.
The buried temple honours Mithras, a cult that swept ancient Rome, especially among legionaries. Legend told how the Sun commanded the youthful god to slaughter a bull; the creature's death brought forth life, with crops and vegetation springing from its blood. Shrines to Mithras, the mithraeums, were virtually always set in caves or underground, since caverns stood for the cosmos itself. There, initiates passed through elaborate ceremonies and shared bread and water meant to stand in for the bull's flesh and blood.
Just a short climb from the Colosseum, the gardens of the Villa Celimontana offer blessed relief from the crowds. The grounds spread out from a 16th-century villa that now lodges the Italian Geographical Society, and they stay serene for most of the year before a celebrated summer programme of swing and jazz concerts takes over.
Tip: Come in summer for the concerts, or on any other day for quiet paths, shade and grass that is usually almost all yours.
The Celio hides a fascinating underground world, and these Case Romane are its showpiece: roughly twenty rooms, many still painted with their original frescoes. Until the 200s CE the chambers served as shops and storerooms; around then they were converted into a domus, a townhouse. Tradition links the house to two soldiers of Rome, John and Paul, who are not the apostles of the same names and who were supposedly beheaded on the orders of the emperor Julian. Hard proof is lacking, though excavations show that later the chambers hosted Christian worship. The site is tucked under the Basilica dei SS Giovanni e Paolo al Celio, with its entrance on the Clivo di Scauro, that picturesque Roman street with its medieval archways. Tickets via coopculture.it.
Official site →Deeper still, you can go caving through the guts of the Celio: an ancient tuff quarry plus several sunken ponds. From the entrance close to the Basilica dei SS Giovanni e Paolo, stairways descend into the core of the Tempio di Claudio and onward into the blackness of the workings, where passageways open onto the laghetti, the ponds, and onto chambers freckled with young stalactites and tiny organisms that glint like diamonds when your torch hits them. Keep an eye out for wells and for the vintage electric cables strung through the tunnels in their second career as bomb shelters in WWII. The quarry, probably worked for some 300 years before the 5th century CE, is toured by Roma Sotterranea at €12 plus a €5 ticket; the outing runs roughly ninety minutes. Book on visiteromasotterranea.it.
Cartography buffs will love this recently opened museum, devoted to a colossal 3rd-century map. The Forma Urbis Romae, displayed originally in Rome's Tempio della Pace, was a full city plan pieced together from 150 engraved slabs of marble, roughly 18 by 13 metres in size. About a tenth of it survives, and those fragments are now set into an 18th-century illustrated plan that covers the museum floor, letting you tread across the ancient street grid and pore over its astonishing detail. The museum crowns the Parco Archeologico del Celio, a compact archaeological park, free of charge, where finds from the area dug up during the 1800s are displayed.
Official site →In daylight, Via di San Giovanni in Laterano is every bit as touristy as its neighbours around the Colosseum. It falls away from the rear of the basilica, and its lower stretch is a string of cafes and restaurants where tired travellers grab a bite beneath the looming Flavian Amphitheatre. Nightfall changes the picture completely: the stretch nearest the Colosseum ranks among Rome's favourite gay hangouts, with bars such as My Bar and Coming Out quickly filling up and drawing mostly gay crowds that stay well into the small hours.
May Day rock-out: love Italian pop, or simply love a party? Then be in Piazza di San Giovanni on 1 May, when crowds running into six figures gather for Rome's free Primo Maggio concert. Headliners from the Italian scene, plus the odd international act, keep the jubilant crowd going through the afternoon and deep into the evening.
Baked goods and seasonal Italian plates are the draw at this well-known San Giovanni spot.
Laid-back Testaccio dining built on seasonal produce and first-rate ingredients.
Among the best bets on the touristy streets by the Colosseum.
A compact, friendly osteria sticking to Roman classics.
A busy Celio pizzeria, close to the Colosseum, turning out thin Roman-style pizza.
Stand in line for the archetypal Roman pizza: bare-bones room, gruff staff, razor-thin crisp bases.
Wood-fired pies, craft beer and an easy-going atmosphere in San Giovanni.
At Box 22 in Testaccio market, outstanding pizza by the slice with inventive, generous toppings.
The Aventino, with its rooftop gardens and swooning views, ranks among Rome's priciest residential addresses. Down below, Testaccio could hardly be more different: a one-time workers' quarter now humming as a foodie hub.
Among Rome's many showpiece viewpoints, the keyhole on the Aventino ranks with the city's most unforgettable sights. Climb to Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, an elegant 18th-century square whose ornamental facade belongs to the Villa del Priorato di Malta, and nothing seems to be on show until you press your eye to the keyhole of the villa's green door. Dead ahead, closing a tree-lined avenue, hangs the dome of St Peter's Basilica, dead-centre as if measured with a ruler. The effect is geometrically perfect and strangely hard to capture on camera.
Tip: Photographing the keyhole is fiddly: rest your phone flat against the door and try a few angles before the queue behind you grows impatient.
Also known as the Parco Savelli, this small walled park crowns the Aventino as a romantic haven: orange trees in blossom, tall stone pines, and swooning rooftop panoramas over towards St Peter's dome. Watch the cupola as you stroll: it seems to shrink the closer you walk towards the park's street-side edge, in apparent defiance of physics.
Tip: Few places beat it for watching the sunset: come late afternoon and stay for the changing light over the Vatican.
On the Aventino's verdant summit, this is a jewel of early Christian architecture, perhaps the loveliest church on the hill. It dates from the early 5th century and, although much modified since, preserves its original cypress-wood doors down the side, carved with 18 panels of biblical events. Check the upper-left panel: it holds one of the earliest Crucifixion images known, showing Jesus between the two thieves, strangely without their crosses. Inside, seek out the grave slab of Muñoz de Zamora, a founding father of the Dominicans.
The city's rose garden spills down the Aventino's flank, and every spring it explodes in colour as upwards of 1100 cultivars open their blooms. Garden lovers will want to see the prize entries grown for the Premio Rosa, the prestigious competition staged here each May. The site was once a Jewish cemetery, and the beds are arranged in the form of the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum, as a tribute.
Beneath the curious gaze of Testaccio's odd pyramid, in truth a tomb from the 1st century BCE, spreads the non-Catholic cemetery, a green and restful oasis where you can happily while away an hour. Some 4000 non-Catholics lie buried here, their headstones tucked beneath umbrella pines and slim cypresses. The roll call includes Keats and Shelley, the two Romantic poets who each died in Italy; Andrea Camilleri, whose Inspector Montalbano series became bestsellers; and the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. Among the graves, hunt down the Angelo del dolore, the 'Angel of Grief', a widely copied 1894 work that American artist William Wetmore Story made for his wife's resting place. Opening hours are on cemeteryrome.it.
Tip: Visit on a quiet morning: the silence under the pines, broken only by birdsong, is the cemetery's real gift.
Official site →For genuine cucina romana, Testaccio has no rival. The district's devotion to Roman cooking is legendary, and traditional trattorias turning out the city's classic dishes stand on every corner. The offal is the true signature of a Testaccio menu: Rome's whole nose-to-tail tradition was born here, when slaughterhouse hands found their wages padded with inexpensive cuts. Whether you mean to tuck in or steer clear, learn the vocabulary:
Inventive flavours and top-notch gelato; the Aventino scoop shop rarely lets you down.
A tiny San Giovanni gelateria scooping fine artisan ice cream into biscuity cones.
A historic Testaccio cafe famous for its cornetti (croissants) baked in-house, along with pastries and mini-tiramisu sweets.
A French-style patisserie turning out indulgent cakes, pastries and sweet things.
The Terme di Caracalla, sprawled at the Aventino's base, ranks with the most staggering ancient sites in Rome. The towering remains of Caracalla's early-3rd-century bathing palace testify to Roman engineering genius and to the sheer bulk of the imperial city. The ruins are clearly signposted and seldom crowded, which makes wandering them a genuine thrill.
Opened in 216 CE as the Thermae Antonianae, the complex stretched across 10 hectares and threw together gardens, libraries, gyms, shops and a full run of baths. As many as 8000 bathers a day passed through its doors, while deep underground an army of slaves, hundreds strong, kept the machinery running along 9.5km of service tunnels. Roughly 10 tonnes of timber went up in smoke daily to keep the water hot; it arrived via an aqueduct built for the purpose. The baths operated until 537, when the Visigoths severed Rome's water supply. After that the complex was stripped for construction stone and dug over repeatedly; the most famous excavations, commissioned in the 1500s by Pope Paul III, brought up major sculptures, several of which ended up in the Farnese collection and today hang in the Vatican collections and in Naples' Museo Archeologico Nazionale.
What stands today is essentially the central bath block: a vast rectangle flanked at either end by a palestra, or gym, and built around the frigidarium, the cool hall where bathers recovered after the tepidarium and the dome-topped caldarium, the hot room. After all that exertion, Romans unwound beside the natatio, its swimming pool framed by columns. You come in through the palestra occidentale, the western gym, then follow a wooden walkway across stretches of black-and-white geometric mosaic to the natatio, an Olympic-size pool ringed by space for ball games. Along the way, to your right while heading towards the eastern gym, the palestra orientale, notice the pitted marble slab known as the tabula lusoria: a gaming table for a lost Roman pastime called 'tropa', or 'the hole game'. A gravel track leads out of the eastern gym, swings back and re-enters the frigidarium, a mighty hall, once lavishly ornamented, that measures 58 by 24 metres and went on to shape structures as far afield as Chicago's Union Station or New York's original Pennsylvania Station.
Buried in the honeycomb of tunnels beneath the ruins lies Rome's biggest Mithraeum, uncovered in 1912 and restored around the start of the 2000s. One of a number of Mithras sanctuaries across the ancient city, it was where followers met for rituals revolving around a bull sacrifice. Access is limited to special events, so watch soprintendenza-specialeroma.it for openings.
Leading off the eastern gym stands the Domus di Vigna Guidi, freshly restored and dating from the 100s CE; part of it was demolished when the baths went up. What remains includes the sacellum, a household shrine, whose rare devotional frescoes pair Roman gods with Egyptian deities, a pairing that mirrors the way cults were converging across Rome back then.
When the ruins are done with you, amble across the lawns, where a pair of contemporary artworks wait. One of them, Lo Speccio (2024), whose name translates as 'The Mirror', is a big rectangular sheet of water built to mirror the ruins and toss light around with fountains along its sides. In the grounds' upper right corner, Il Terzo Paradiso (The Third Paradise, 2012) by Michelangelo Pistoletto traces an infinity sign made of three interlocking rings in the turf.
The Nuovo Mercato di Testaccio shows you how ordinary Romans shop and eat. On weekday mornings the market throbs with locals doing the daily shop: squeezing fruit, inspecting vegetables, browsing racks of wardrobe basics. When noon arrives, the spotlight swings to the famous food counters.
The market has occupied a purpose-built hall since 2012, planned by the architect Marco Rietti. Daylight pours through the glass roof of the white steel-and-panel structure, and terracotta cubes across the exterior walls echo the shattered amphorae heaped on nearby Monte Testaccio.
Roughly a hundred stalls radiate from a central bar zone, serving shoppers, students from the architecture faculty up the road, gourmets and holidaymakers alike. Count on everything from bread still warm from the oven and seasonal fruit and vegetables to kitchenware, shoes, dainty jewellery and artisan fashion. If you arrive with an appetite, the food stalls steal the show: Mordi e Vai (Box 15) fills rolls with meltingly soft slow-cooked beef, the panino con l'allesso di scottona; Food Box (Box 66) turns out crispy fried bites; Casa Manco (Box 22) slices superb pizza; and Da Corrado al Banco 18 (Box 18) pours regional wines alongside cheese.
A trattoria with a retro 1970s look that is now San Giovanni's hardest table to book, devoted to traditional Roman cooking.
A Testaccio favourite whose modern look hides a devotion to classic Roman comfort cooking.
A cult trattoria, master of the Roman classics and notably clever with foraged greens.
Built into the flank of Monte Testaccio, serving down-to-earth cucina romana.
A famous market stall packing panini with rich, meaty Roman fillings.
Natural Italian wines poured alongside cheeses at Box 18 of the market.
Veterans drop in for bread and chit-chat; visitors come for the pizza bianca, the oiled, salted flatbread.
The trapizzino was born here: a focaccia cone packed with fillings such as meatballs in sauce.
A guided climb up Monte Testaccio gets you to the very core of the district. Locals call it Monte dei Cocci: a grassy, man-made hill that is one colossal heap of broken amphora pottery, testae in Latin, which is where the name Testaccio comes from. From the 2nd century BCE until the 200s CE, the zone functioned as Rome's river port: olive oil landed in giant terracotta jars that, once drained, were smashed and piled beside the warehouses, eventually banking up a hill fully 54m high. Tour details are on 060608.it; tickets cost €4 for adults and €3 reduced.
Tip: The tour is short but wonderfully quirky: a stroll over Rome's ancient recycling heap, where amphora stamps and drainage channels are still visible.
Official site →For the best part of a century this complex was Rome's chief slaughterhouse. Since closing in 1975 it has been reborn as the Mattatoio, a contemporary-arts centre where cavernous halls host shows, installations and live performances from established and up-and-coming international artists; entry is free. In the adjacent pens, the graffiti-covered Città dell'Altra Economia runs festivals of its own, notably the May-time Spring Beer Festival with its 220 craft beers, live bands and street food. See springbeerfestivalroma.com.
Official site →Sleeping options here trade the centre's noise for calm and value. The Hotel Lancelot sits on the Celio, just back from the Colosseum; on the Aventino, the Althea Inn Roof Terrace, Hotel Sant'Anselmo, Sonder and The Corner Roma cover several styles and price points, while Testaccio offers fewer beds but a prime position for food lovers.
Plan around an hour once you clear the security check. Crowds are rare outside the main religious festivals.
Correct: the church itself is free, but the buried levels need an advance online ticket (€10 adult, €5 reduced), and you should set aside roughly thirty minutes below ground.
It joins most state sites in waiving the fee on a Sunday at the start of the month. Otherwise expect a ticket of around €12 when a temporary exhibition is on.
Ride metro line B to the Piramide stop: the market, Monte Testaccio and the Cimitero Acattolico are all within easy walking distance of the station.
Weekday mornings for the full local shopping scene. The food stalls are busiest between 12.30pm and 2pm, so go before or after to dodge queues.