Emperors, Saints and Alchemists: Monti & the Esquiline Hill

From Trajan's spiral column through the Suburra where Caesar grew up, past Michelangelo's horned Moses and Nero's buried palace, to a magic door no one has ever deciphered

Rome · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Trajan's Column: A War Comic in Marble

Via dei Fori Imperiali, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

Tilt your head back and follow the band of carved marble as it winds around the column, round and round, all the way to the bronze saint at the top. Soldiers march, rivers are crossed, forts are built, battles rage. You are looking at a story told like a comic strip, almost two thousand years before comics existed.

Trajan's Column was dedicated in 113 to celebrate the emperor's two wars against the Dacians, in what is now Romania. The frieze is about one hundred and ninety metres long if you could unroll it, and it shows more than two thousand five hundred figures. The emperor himself appears some sixty times: speaking to his troops, making sacrifices, receiving envoys.

But here is the strange thing. No one could ever really read it. The top scenes are almost forty metres up, and the column was originally surrounded by libraries and colonnades. Some historians think it was meant less to be read than to be felt, a sacred spiral of victory, perhaps once brightly painted. Inside, a spiral staircase of one hundred and eighty-five steps, lit by tiny slit windows, climbs to the top.

And the base was a tomb. When Trajan died in 117, his ashes were placed in a golden urn in a chamber at the foot of the column, an extraordinary honour, since Romans normally buried their dead outside the city. The urn vanished long ago. So did the bronze statue of Trajan at the summit. In 1587, Pope Sixtus the Fifth replaced it with Saint Peter, who has stood up there ever since.

One more detail: the inscription on the base says the column shows how high a hill once stood here, a hill that Trajan's engineers cut away to make room for his forum. The column is a measuring stick of human ambition. Now look to your right, toward the great curved brick building climbing the slope. That was a shopping mall... of sorts.
2. Trajan's Markets & the Tower of the Militia

Via Quattro Novembre 94, 00187 Roma RM, Italy

Look at the great half-moon of red brick carved into the hillside: arched doorways on the ground floor, windows above, more storeys stacked up the slope behind. Imagine every one of those arches with a shopkeeper standing in the doorway, and you are not far from the truth.

This is the complex known as Trajan's Markets, built in the early second century, probably designed by Apollodorus of Damascus, the emperor's favourite architect. It contained around one hundred and fifty rooms on several levels, linked by staircases and by a steep, paved street that still survives up the hill. Shops, storerooms, offices of the imperial administration... Scholars still argue over exactly what went on in each room, but it feels astonishingly modern.

What was clever was the engineering. The semicircle holds back the slope of the Quirinal hill that had been cut away for the forum below. Instead of a dead retaining wall, Apollodorus built a living building into it. Two thousand years later, you can still walk through those vaulted halls, which is more than can be said for most shopping centres built in the twentieth century.

Now raise your eyes to the tall tower leaning over the complex. That is the Torre delle Milizie, built in the Middle Ages, when Roman noble families fought each other from fortified towers. Romans used to tell visitors that Nero stood on top of it, singing as he watched Rome burn in 64. A lovely story... except that the tower was built more than a thousand years after Nero died. It leans because an earthquake in 1348 shifted its foundations, and it has been tilting gently ever since.

Apollodorus, by the way, came to a bad end. According to an ancient historian, he mocked the architectural designs of the next emperor, Hadrian, telling him to go away and draw his pumpkins, and Hadrian never forgave him. Walk down toward the wide road and turn up the slope behind the forums, toward a towering grey wall.
3. The Firewall of Augustus & Arco dei Pantani

Via Tor de' Conti, 00184 Roma RM, Italy

Stand beside the enormous wall of grey stone blocks and put your hand on it. It rises around thirty metres above you, built without mortar, of a dark volcanic stone that does not burn. On the other side, the columns of a temple. On this side, where you are standing, the slums of ancient Rome.

The wall belongs to the Forum of Augustus, finished in 2 BC. Its centrepiece was the temple of Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, which the young Octavian had vowed to build during the battle of Philippi, when he hunted down the murderers of Julius Caesar. Three of its huge columns still stand. But the purpose of this wall was more practical. It was a firewall.

Behind you began the Suburra, the most crowded, noisy and dangerous neighbourhood in the city, a maze of wooden tenements several storeys high where fires broke out constantly. Poets complained that you could not sleep there for the carts and the shouting. And this is where Julius Caesar grew up: not on an aristocratic hill, but in a modest family house in the Suburra.

Look at the forum's plan, and you will notice it is not perfectly symmetrical. The Roman historian Suetonius tells us why: Augustus did not dare force out the owners of the neighbouring houses, so he built a smaller forum than he wanted. The most powerful man in the world... defeated by a few stubborn landlords.

The arch cut through the wall is the Arco dei Pantani, the arch of the swamps. After the fall of the empire, the drains clogged, water collected in the low ground, and the glorious forums became marshes, vegetable gardens and pasture. For centuries, the knights of Rhodes kept a house built right on top of these ruins, and you can still see it perched above the temple. Walk through the arch into the Suburra and up the gently curving street. Today it is called Monti, and it is the coolest neighbourhood in town.
4. Piazza della Madonna dei Monti

Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, 00184 Roma RM, Italy

Sit down on the steps of the fountain, like everyone else. Look around: ivy on the walls, a few café tables, a man fixing a scooter, students with beers, a priest crossing the square. This is the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, and at sunset it is the village square of the most fashionable neighbourhood in Rome.

The fountain behind you was designed in the late 1580s by Giacomo della Porta, one of the busiest architects of his day, the man who finished Michelangelo's dome of Saint Peter's. Water had just returned to these hills, thanks to Pope Sixtus the Fifth and his new aqueduct, the Acqua Felice. For more than a thousand years, after the Goths cut the ancient aqueducts, the hills of Rome had been almost empty, and people had crowded down by the river to drink.

The people who came back to live here were called monticiani, and they were famously proud and quarrelsome. Their great enemies were the trasteverini, from across the river. For centuries, gangs from the two neighbourhoods met for stone-throwing battles in the Roman Forum, which was then a cow pasture. The authorities tried again and again to ban them. Today the rivalry survives mostly as jokes... mostly.

Walk a few steps to the church of the Madonna dei Monti. In 1579, workers clearing a hayloft found an image of the Virgin hidden in the wall, and miracles were soon attributed to it. The pope had this church built to house it, again by della Porta. Monti has always been like that: the sacred and the everyday mixed together, a holy image in a barn.

The streets around you, Via Urbana, Via del Boschetto, Via dei Serpenti, are now full of vintage shops, artisan workshops and tiny restaurants. Have a look, but come back to the main street, because the next stop is a staircase with a very dark family history. Take Via Leonina down to Via Cavour, and look for a narrow stair climbing under an arch.
5. The Borgia Steps & Michelangelo's Moses

Piazza di San Pietro in Vincoli 4a, 00184 Roma RM, Italy

Climb the steep stairway that passes under the dark arch of an old tower house. It is called the Salita dei Borgia, the Borgia climb, and tradition says the house above belonged to Vannozza Cattanei, the mistress of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander the Sixth.

Vannozza was the mother of his most famous children, Cesare and Lucrezia, and of another son, Juan. On a June evening in 1497, Juan and Cesare dined with their mother at her vineyard here on the Esquiline. Juan rode off into the night. Days later, fishermen pulled his body out of the Tiber, stabbed many times. The murder was never solved, but Rome had its suspicions... and many of them pointed at his own brother.

At the top of the stairs is the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Saint Peter in Chains. Under the main altar, in a reliquary, lie the chains said to have bound Peter in prison in Jerusalem and in Rome. According to legend, when the two sets were brought together, they fused miraculously into one.

But most people come for something else. On the right, at the end of the nave, sits Moses, carved by Michelangelo for the tomb of Pope Julius the Second. The tomb was supposed to have dozens of statues and stand in Saint Peter's. Michelangelo called it the tragedy of his life; after forty years of quarrels, only this reduced version was built, and Julius himself is buried elsewhere. Look at the veins in Moses' arms, the twisting beard, the furious gaze... and the two horns on his head.

Why horns? Because the Latin Bible, translating the Hebrew word for the rays of light shining from Moses' face, used a word that also means horned. Artists took it literally for centuries. And the legend says that when Michelangelo finished, he struck the statue's knee with his hammer and shouted: why don't you speak? Now cross the street and walk up into the park on the hill. Under the grass lies the most extravagant palace ever built in Rome.
6. Domus Aurea: Nero's Buried Golden House

Via della Domus Aurea 1, 00184 Roma RM, Italy

Walk into the park on the Colle Oppio and look at the brick ruins rising from the grass, the arches half sunk into the ground. These are the walls of the Baths of Trajan. But beneath them, sealed underground like a time capsule, lie the rooms of something far more outrageous: the Domus Aurea, Nero's Golden House.

After the great fire of 64 cleared a huge part of the city centre, Nero took the land for himself. His new palace spread across the hills with gardens, vineyards, woods and pastures, and in the valley where the Colosseum now stands he made an artificial lake. At the entrance stood a bronze statue of himself more than thirty metres tall. When it was finished, he is reported to have said: at last I can begin to live like a human being.

The Roman writer Suetonius describes walls covered with gold and gems, ceilings of ivory that could open to shower guests with flowers and perfume, and a main dining room that turned constantly, day and night, like the heavens. Archaeologists have found an octagonal room with a central opening that may be that room, or near it, and possibly traces of a mechanism.

When Nero died in 68, his successors wanted to erase him. They drained the lake and built the Colosseum there, gave the land back to the people, and filled the rooms of the palace with earth to support the baths above. Then, around 1480, a young man fell through a hole in this hillside and found himself in caves painted with strange figures. Raphael, Pinturicchio and their friends had themselves lowered on ropes with torches to copy the paintings, and scratched their names on the walls.

Because the rooms looked like caves, grotte, the fantastic decorations they found were called grotesques. That is where the word comes from. Raphael then painted them across the Vatican, and grotesques spread across all of European art. The site can be visited only on guided tours, but you are standing above it. Now leave the park by the eastern side and walk toward the high bell tower of the Esquiline.
7. Santa Prassede: The Garden of Paradise

Via di Santa Prassede 9a, 00185 Roma RM, Italy

Look for a modest side door on a narrow street. No façade, no steps, no sign of anything special. Go in, let your eyes adjust... and then walk to the small chapel on the right side of the nave. Put a coin in the light box if there is one, and step inside a jewel box of gold.

This is the Chapel of Saint Zeno, built in the early ninth century by Pope Paschal the First as a tomb for his mother, Theodora. Every surface is covered in mosaic: saints, angels holding up Christ in a medallion, the Virgin, gold everywhere. Medieval Romans called it the Garden of Paradise. It is the most important Byzantine mosaic ensemble in Rome, and most visitors walk right past the door.

Look for a woman with a square blue halo. A square halo meant the person was still alive when the image was made. Next to her is the inscription Theodora Episcopa. Episcopa is the feminine of bishop. Historians debate exactly what the title meant, most likely an honour for the pope's mother, but it has made this mosaic famous far beyond Rome.

In a niche of the chapel stands a short stump of dark stone. It was brought from Jerusalem in 1223 by a cardinal returning from the Crusades and is venerated as the column at which Christ was scourged. And in the nave, a round slab of porphyry marks a well. Legend says Saint Praxedes, the daughter of a Roman senator, soaked up the blood of martyrs with a sponge and squeezed it into this well, so that it would not be lost.

Paschal the First was a ruthless man, accused of having enemies blinded and beheaded, and yet he left Rome some of its most beautiful art. The apse mosaics still glitter exactly as he saw them twelve hundred years ago. Leave by the same door, turn the corner, and you will find yourself in front of one of the four great papal basilicas.
8. Santa Maria Maggiore: Snow in August

Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore, 00100 Roma RM, Italy

Stand in the square and look up at the bell tower, the tallest in Rome, then at the baroque façade with its loggia of mosaics. Behind that eighteenth-century front hides one of the oldest churches in the city, and a story that begins with a snowfall in the middle of summer.

According to legend, on the night of the fourth of August, in the fourth century, the Virgin appeared in a dream to a wealthy Roman and to Pope Liberius, asking for a church to be built where snow would fall. The next morning, in the scorching Roman August, the top of the Esquiline was white. Every year, on the fifth of August, a shower of white petals falls from the ceiling of the basilica in memory of that miracle.

History is more prosaic. The basilica was built around 432, under Pope Sixtus the Third, just after a church council declared that Mary could be called the Mother of God. And it still has the mosaics from that time, on the walls of the nave and on the arch before the altar. They are among the oldest Christian mosaics in the world, fifteen centuries old.

Now look up at the coffered ceiling. It is gilded, and tradition says with some of the first gold brought back from the Americas, a gift from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to the Spanish pope Alexander the Sixth, a Borgia, our acquaintance from the stairway. From Nero's golden house to the gold of the New World in a ten-minute walk.

And look down, to the right of the main altar. A simple slab in the floor marks the grave of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the genius who reshaped baroque Rome and asked for nothing more than this. In 2025, this church received another tomb: Pope Francis chose to be buried here, near the ancient icon of the Virgin he had prayed before so many times, the first pope in over a century to be buried outside the Vatican. Leave the basilica from the back and walk east along Via Carlo Alberto, toward an old gate.
9. Arch of Gallienus & the Witches of the Esquiline

Via di San Vito, 00185 Roma RM, Italy

Here, on a little street, a single ancient arch stands squeezed between a church and the houses, as if the city had grown around it without noticing. Traffic squeezes past. Pigeons nest in the cornice. Hardly anyone looks up at the inscription.

This was once the Porta Esquilina, a gate in the oldest walls of Rome, the walls traditionally attributed to King Servius Tullius. Around 262, a local official rebuilt it and dedicated it to the emperor Gallienus and his wife Salonina. Gallienus ruled in one of the most desperate periods of Roman history: invasions, plague, rebellions, his own father captured by the Persians. Flattering inscriptions like this one were how loyal men kept their heads.

Outside this gate, in the days of the Republic, stretched the Esquiline field, and it was a terrible place. Here the poor, the slaves and the executed were thrown into open pits, and the bodies were left to the dogs and the birds. Archaeologists in the nineteenth century found these pits still full of bones.

Then, in the age of Augustus, his friend Maecenas, the great patron of poets, covered the area with earth and turned it into magnificent gardens. The poet Horace, whom Maecenas supported, celebrated the change in a satire. It is told by a wooden statue of a garden god, who complains that witches still come at night to dig for bones and brew their spells. And how does he scare them away? With a sudden, enormous noise from his rear end... Yes, one of the great Latin poets wrote a fart joke, and it is still read in classrooms today.

Rome is layered like that: the gate, the graveyard, the gardens, the jokes, and then all of it buried again under nineteenth-century apartment blocks. Continue east. A huge arcaded square opens up ahead, and in its gardens stands a door that leads nowhere.
10. Piazza Vittorio & the Magic Door

Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, 00185 Roma RM, Italy

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.
11. Temple of Minerva Medica: The Ruin with the Wrong Name

Via Giovanni Giolitti, 00185 Roma RM, Italy

Stand by the fence and look at the ruin rising between the tram lines and the railway: a tall, ten-sided brick hall, its dome broken open to the sky. Trains rattle past every few minutes on their way into Termini. Commuters barely glance at it. Yet architects from all over Europe once travelled here specially to draw it.

For five hundred years, everyone has called it the Temple of Minerva Medica, Minerva the healer. In the Renaissance, a statue of Minerva was said to have been found nearby, and the name stuck. But it was never a temple. It was built in the fourth century as a monumental pavilion, probably a nymphaeum, a fountain hall, in the luxurious gardens of a wealthy family on the Esquiline.

What makes it remarkable is the dome. Its diameter is about twenty-five metres, and it was built on ten sides, with niches opening out between the pillars, and ribs of brick in the vault. After the Pantheon, it was one of the boldest domes of the ancient world, a bridge between Roman engineering and the domed churches of Byzantium. Renaissance masters like Giuliano da Sangallo measured and drew it, and its ideas echo in buildings far from here.

It stood almost complete until 1828, when a large part of the dome finally collapsed. Then, after 1870, the railways and the new residential district swallowed the gardens around it. Recent restoration has stabilised the ruin, and archaeologists keep studying it, still debating who exactly built it.

And that is the spirit of this whole walk: in Rome, the most extraordinary things hide in plain sight, behind a side door, under a park, in a traffic island, with the wrong name on them. You started at the column of an emperor who conquered half a continent, and you end at a garden pavilion nobody can name. Termini station is a short walk away... and the trains are still rattling past.