About this walk
This loop of about two and a half kilometres runs through Trastevere, the quarter that lay outside the city walls for centuries and never quite considered itself Roman. You pass two of the oldest churches in Rome, a hidden seventeenth-century pharmacy, the square where the neighbourhood still gathers, and the island where doctors invented a disease in 1943 to keep people out of the occupiers' hands.
The walk starts and ends on Piazza Trilussa, by the Ponte Sisto. Entry is free throughout, with two places where you choose whether to buy a ticket. The churches close for a few hours around midday.
The stops
Walk them in order; each story plays when you reach its pin.
- 1Stop 1
On the Other Side
The neighbourhood across the Tiber, with a poet who invented his own name and a fountain that moved house.
- 2Stop 2
The district without a plan
District fourteen, last on Augustus's list, where nobody ever drew a map.
Read the story - 3Stop 3
The pharmacy above the church
A rejected Caravaggio that now hangs in the Louvre, and a seventeenth-century pharmacy above the church.
Read the story - 4Stop 4
The Spring of Oil
A mosaic that has hung outdoors for eight hundred years, and Egyptian gods on the columns inside.
Read the story - 5Stop 5
The oldest fountain
One of the oldest working fountains in the city, fed from the hill you can see rising above the rooftops.
Read the story - 6Stop 6
The market square
A market, a playing field and benches, sitting on top of a monastery that has cared for the sick since the Middle Ages.
Read the story - 7Stop 7
The body that hadn't decayed
A sculptor saw the body when the sarcophagus was opened, and carved exactly that from marble.
Read the story - 8Stop 8
The island that became a ship
Twenty-two centuries of medicine, an island disguised as a ship, and a disease invented in 1943.
Read the story - 9Stop 9
The Bridge of the Four Heads
Rome's oldest bridge that was never rebuilt, with the builder's name carved into the stone four times.
Read the story - 10Stop 10
The walls that took the river away
After the flood of 1870, the Tiber was given walls twenty metres high, and Trastevere lost its riverbank.
Read the story
Ready when you are
Walk Trastevere with ROODS.
10 stops through Rome. Open ROODS in your browser, walk to the first pin and the story plays.
- Stories on a map, with narrated audio
- Walk at your own pace, stop where you like
- Runs in your browser. An app is optional.
