1 Campidoglio
2 Castel Sant'Angelo
3 Colosseum (Colosseo)
4 Palazzo Barberini
5 Pantheon
6 Piazza Navona
7 Roman Forum (Foro Romano)
8 San Clemente
9 Sistine Chapel & Vatican Museums
10 St Peter's (San Pietro)
This powerful monument on the Tiber symbolises almost 2,000 years of Roman history, from Hadrian to Italian Unification.
Castel Sant'Angelo was central to the history of the papacy and the defence of the city until 1886 when it was turned into a museum. It is a labyrinth of a place both literally and historically.
Built by Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138) as a mausoleum to himself, visitors today enter via the original Roman passageway, up which the funeral procession passed. This joins up with one of the medieval ramps that were added when the tomb was converted into a defensive fortress. The dark ramp finally opens on to a courtyard (originally the funerary garden), where now there is Montelupo's statue of an angel (1544) sheathing a sword, commemorating (along with the monument's name) a legendary event in which an angel was seen over Rome at the end of a plague in 590. Off the courtyard (with its Michelangelo façade from 1514) is the Sala di Apollo (1548), exquisitely decorated with ornate grotteschi (frescoes); illuminated windows in the floor give you a view down to the underground corridors that led to a notorious papal prison. Following Medici Pope Clement VII's seven-month siege inside the Castello (1527), the popes felt they needed more sumptuous apartments. Farnese Pope Paul III (1534-49) commissioned the magnificent Sala Paolina, with its beautiful frescoes and trompe l'oeil doors. Off the library (with gorgeous stucco work) is the wood-lined papal treasury, the room believed to have held Hadrian's tomb, although the whereabouts of his remains are a mystery. The tour finishes with a walk around the ramparts.Address: Lungotevere Castello 50
Phone: 06 681 9111
Open: Tue-Sun 9-7
Restaurant: Bar on ramparts (Expensive)
Bus: 49, 70, 87, 280, 492, 926 to Piazza Cavour
Metro: Lepanto
Admission: Moderate
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