Piazza Vittorio & the Magic Door

Why is it significant?

Walk into the gardens in the middle of the square, among the palm trees, the joggers and the men playing cards, until you reach a bricked-up stone doorway standing on its own. Two squat, bearded figures with their tongues out guard it on either side.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk into the gardens in the middle of the square, among the palm trees, the joggers and the men playing cards, until you reach a bricked-up stone doorway standing on its own. Two squat, bearded figures with their tongues out guard it on either side. Around the frame, strange symbols: stars, circles, crosses, and inscriptions in Latin and Hebrew. This is the Porta Magica, the Magic Door, and no one has ever fully solved it.

In the seventeenth century, this was the villa of the Marquis Massimiliano Palombara, a nobleman fascinated by alchemy. The legend says that one night a mysterious pilgrim stayed at the villa, searching the gardens for a herb that could make gold. In the morning he had vanished through this door, leaving behind a few flakes of gold and a sheet of paper covered in symbols. Unable to understand them, the marquis had them carved around the doorway, around 1680, hoping that one day someone would.

The symbols are the planets and metals of alchemy: Saturn for lead, Jupiter for tin, Mars for iron, Venus for copper, the moon for silver. On the threshold there is a palindrome, si sedes non is, which reads the same both ways: if you sit, you don't go... and backwards, if you don't sit, you go. The two guardians are images of the Egyptian god Bes, protector of the home, and they were brought here only in the nineteenth century.

The villa itself disappeared when this enormous square was built after 1870, with arcades in the style of Turin, the city of the new king. Today Piazza Vittorio is the most multicultural corner of Rome. Its market, under cover just nearby, sells Bangladeshi spices, Chinese greens, Senegalese fabric and Roman artichokes side by side. In the gardens you can also see the brick ruins of a monumental ancient fountain, once decorated with trophies of war.

Is the door a recipe for gold? A spiritual allegory? A joke? Scholars still argue. Take a photo of it and see if you do better. For the last stop, follow the tram tracks a little further east, to a ruin that has been given the wrong name for five hundred years.