Trastevere site features

The lanes are too narrow for the buildings to stand back from each other. Four and five storeys of ochre, rust and faded pink rise straight off a cobbled strip barely wide enough for a car, with washing, cables and window boxes crossing overhead and the sky showing as a ribbon.

Then the lane opens without warning into a square. Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere is the main one: a basilica with a mosaic blazing across its upper facade and a square Romanesque bell tower, a seventeenth-century palace along one side, and in the middle a low octagonal fountain on a shallow plinth where people sit on the steps facing outward.

By evening the squares fill and the lanes become the overflow. The city's own account of the quarter is a place that takes in, every evening, the many young people who come for its bars and its small squares.

At piazza Trilussa the ground changes. A fountain stands raised above the street at the top of fifteen steps, square on to ponte Sisto, and the steps work as seating for the whole square. A bronze poet declaims beside it.

West of the lanes the ground tilts and keeps climbing — up through the walls to the Gianicolo, where the view opens over the roofs of the centre and across to the dome of St Peter's, and where at 12 exactly a cannon goes off.

Villa Farnesina

Built for the banker Agostino Chigi to Peruzzi's design, 1505–1520. Raphael and his school painted the Loggia of Cupid and Psyche and the nymph Galatea. Open Monday to Saturday 9.00–14.00; closed Sunday but for the second of the month.

Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere

Probably the first official place of Christian worship in Rome. Apse mosaics of c. 1140 showing Innocent II holding a model of the church, and Pietro Cavallini's Life of the Virgin of 1291 below them. Twenty-two ancient granite columns, probably from the Baths of Caracalla.

The fountain in piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere

Among the oldest of Rome's monumental fountains; in Pietro del Massaio's map of 1471. Bernini restored it in 1659; Carlo Fontana replaced his shells in 1692. Four epigraphs in the lower basin summarise the whole story.

Palazzo Corsini — Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica

The only 18th-century Roman collection preserved intact, because Tommaso Corsini donated every work in it to the State in 1883. Beato Angelico, Rubens, Guido Reni, Guercino, Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci. Closed Mondays.

The Botanical Garden

12 hectares in the park of Villa Corsini, once Christina of Sweden's residence. Over 300 trees more than a century old, of more than 130 species; a bamboo collection among the richest in Europe; a rose garden of about 60 species tracing the genus Rosa across 2,000 years; Braille labels throughout the Garden of Aromas. Over 2,500 species in all, plus archaeological remains, six fountains — four of uncertain date and two of the 18th century, the Tritoni and the Undici Zampilli — and three historic greenhouses, the Corsini, the Francese and the Monumentale. Open every day.

Museo di Roma in Trastevere

In the ex-monastery of Sant'Egidio. Roman popular life of the late 18th and 19th centuries, Roesler Franz's Roma sparita, the six life-size Scene Romane, and the Stanza di Trilussa. Closed Mondays.

The Gianicolo, inside the rione

A double view over the historic centre and the dome of St Peter's; Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, 1502–1509; and the cannon that fires a blank every day at 12 exactly, as it has since 1904.

Piazza Trilussa

A fountain of 1613, dismantled in 1870 and rebuilt here in 1898 from what survived, raised on fifteen steps square on to ponte Sisto. The bronze of Trilussa by Lorenzo Ferri was unveiled 21 December 1954, with the verses of All'ombra beside it.

Mercato di Porta Portese

The city's largest and most famous market, born around 1945 out of the Campo de' Fiori black market. Among its hundreds of stalls, the old saying runs, you can find everything from a pill to a Jumbo Jet. No published hours.

Isola Tiberina

The only urban island of the Tiber, about 300 metres by 90, reached from Trastevere by the ponte Cestio of 46 BC. Laid out as a ship with stern and prow; the Fatebenefratelli hospital, founded 1584, is still working.