Twenty-eight centuries layered on top of each other, and Caravaggios still hanging in the chapels he painted them for, free, for the price of a coin in the light box.
Cardinal Scipione Borghese's villa, built for his collection: Bernini's marbles, six Caravaggios, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.
The French church, with Caravaggio's three paintings of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel (1599–1602), his first public commission.
Seven kilometres of galleries ending at Michelangelo's ceiling. The Raphael Rooms are on the way and deserve more time than people give them.
A princely family still lives in this palazzo. Its picture gallery is hung frame to frame, as in the 18th century.
The world's oldest public museum (1471), on Michelangelo's piazza: the bronze she-wolf, the Marcus Aurelius and fragments of a colossal Constantine.
The national gallery of ancient art in a Baroque palace by Bernini and Borromini, with Pietro da Cortona's ceiling and Raphael's La Fornarina.
Zaha Hadid's national museum of 21st-century art and architecture: concrete ribbons and black staircases.
Rooms, ruins and curiosities: the city's other museum.
Classical statues from the Capitoline collections, shown among the diesel engines and turbines of Rome's first power station.
Andrea Pozzo's ceiling and his fake dome, painted on a flat canvas when the money for a real one ran out.
Six small chapels decorated with the bones of about 3,700 friars, arranged in rosettes and chandeliers.
A few streets of fantasy buildings by Gino Coppedè (1913–27): Liberty, Gothic, Assyrian and Florentine all at once, around a frog fountain.
Keats, Shelley and Gramsci beside the Pyramid of Cestius, with W.W. Story's Angel of Grief, and cats.
A covered courtyard of the 1880s whose walls are painted from top to bottom with Art Nouveau women personifying the virtues of the ideal wife. It is the entrance to an office building, open to anyone who walks in.
The 'Square Colosseum': a 1930s white cube of 216 arches built for Mussolini's cancelled 1942 World's Fair. Fendi has its headquarters there now, with exhibitions on the ground floor.
A single concrete housing block almost a kilometre long (1972–82), designed as a whole town. Its abandoned fourth floor has slowly been rebuilt as homes.
The Sacro Bosco, a 16th-century garden of monsters carved from the rock, about 90 minutes north.
Villa d'Este's fountains and Hadrian's Villa, under an hour away.
Galleria Borghese at the first slot → walk down to Palazzo Barberini → lunch near the Pantheon → San Luigi dei Francesi → Sant'Ignazio → Galleria Doria Pamphilj → sunset on the Capitoline.