Every design for Roma

Rome grew up on the hills facing a bend in the Tiber, where Isola Tiberina gave the river its only natural ford, and the water still runs through the city like a spine. It is Italy's capital, the centre of the Catholic Church and the only city on earth with a whole country inside its boundaries, Vatican City. The poets of antiquity called it the Eternal City; others called it Caput Mundi, the capital of the world.

The Colosseo, the Colosseum to most English speakers, is its best-known silhouette, an arena that has outlasted an empire, centuries of papal rule and the arrival of the Kingdom of Italy. The Arco di Costantino stands beside it, while across the river the Basilica di San Pietro and the round bulk of Castel Sant’Angelo rise above the rooftops. Renaissance popes spent four hundred years reshaping the streets around them, and Rome went on to become the birthplace of the Baroque.

If you have lived here, you know the map is only half the story. Wear it for the evenings on a bridge over the Tiber, for the first coffee of the day in a piazza, and for the city that taught you how old a place can feel.