Altar of the Fatherland (Vittoriano) site features

The Vittoriano is 135 metres wide, 130 metres deep and 70 metres high — 81 metres counting the quadrigae and Winged Victories on top. Those figures are the experience. It occupies one whole side of piazza Venezia in white marble and does not let you take it in from anywhere close.

The approach is a single enormous stair. The entrance stairway is 41 metres wide and 34 metres long, rising straight off the piazza, and the entrance gate at the foot of it runs 40 metres and weighs 10,500 tons. You climb rather than walk in.

The first thing the stair delivers you to is a tomb. At the top comes the terrace of the Altar of the Fatherland and of the Italian Unknown Soldier — the first raised platform of the monument and its symbolic heart — a shelf 66 metres wide with the tomb set into it, guarded, with flames either side.

Then the climb splits in two and goes round the tomb. At the sides of the Altar the staircase resumes, dividing into two symmetrical ramps parallel to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and both arrive at a pronaos — a deep colonnaded porch across the upper front, which is the dark horizontal band you see from below.

Above the pronaos the building keeps going. Colonnade, then roofline, then the bronze quadrigae and Winged Victories that add the last eleven metres.

Getting high up is done by lift, and there are two stages. From the Terrazza Italia two panoramic lifts continue to the Panoramic Terrace at the top. On the Aracoeli side the entrance has a stairlift for wheelchairs and a lift reaching the Terrazza Italia; the Palazzo Venezia entrance at via del Plebiscito 118 has two lifts that let wheelchairs and pushchairs reach the second floor and about 90% of the spaces open to the public.

One thing to plan around: the entrance never coincides with the exit. You come out somewhere other than where you went in, so arrange any meeting point accordingly.

Inside the base, the monument is also a museum. The Museo Centrale del Risorgimento is reached from the main entrance, and the structure runs deep below ground as well as high above it.

Admission is EUR 18 including the temporary exhibition — and free on the first Sunday of every month, when the ticket is valid only for the day it is issued.

The Tomb of the Italian Unknown Soldier

Built beneath the statue of the goddess Roma after the First World War, following an idea of General Giulio Douhet. The side facing outward at the Altar of the Fatherland is guarded permanently by a guard of honour, with two flames burning in braziers. The tomb is a symbolic shrine to all the war's fallen and missing — which is why it is watched rather than displayed.

The Altar of the Fatherland itself

Originally an altar of the goddess Roma, conceived as the chapel of a deity, and only afterwards the soldier's shrine. Both readings are still legible in the sculpture, and knowing the order they happened in is what makes the Altar comprehensible.

The Panoramic Terrace

Reached by the two glass lifts installed from 2007, and the reason to buy a ticket. It is the only high, central, publicly accessible vantage point in Rome that looks down the length of the Imperial Fora, and the view runs a full 360 degrees.

The Museo Centrale del Risorgimento,

In the base of the monument: the national museum of Italian unification, and the context that explains why an object of this scale exists at all.

The quadrigae and the Winged Victories

The bronze chariot groups on top add eleven metres to the monument's height. From the free terraces you see them from below; from the Panoramic Terrace you are level with them.

The great garden of Palazzo Venezia,

Included in the free zone and almost unvisited: a walled garden a minute from the busiest square in Rome, where you may sit without paying anything.