End in Trastevere — across the Tiber, slightly apart from the rest of the city, and for that reason the neighbourhood that has best preserved its texture.
Narrow streets, ochre plaster, laundry overhead, the smell of food.
This is the part of Rome that looks most like what Rome has looked like for most of its history.
It also happens to be where the city comes alive at night.
The decades after the war brought the Italian economic miracle.
Between 1950 and 1970, Italy's GDP grew faster than almost any country on earth.
Italians bought Vespas, refrigerators, and televisions.
The country transformed from a largely agricultural society into a modern industrial economy within a single generation.
Rome doubled in size.
The periphery filled with apartment blocks.
The centre stayed as it was — too beautiful, too famous, too watched to change quickly.
Federico Fellini filmed all of this.
La Dolce Vita, shot in 1960, captured the strange glamour of Rome in the boom years — the celebrities, the paparazzi, the parties at dawn, the spiritual emptiness underneath.
Anita Ekberg wading through the Trevi Fountain is one of the most indelible images in cinema.
In Roma, made in 1972, Fellini turned the city itself into the subject — a place so layered with history that the present can barely find room to exist.
Both films are worth watching before you come.
Fun fact: Rome today is a city of about 4.3 million people, making it the largest city in Italy.
It receives around 35 million tourists a year — roughly eight visitors for every resident.
And yet, walk ten minutes off any tourist itinerary, and you will find streets where nothing has changed in a hundred years, and where the locals eat lunch without looking up.
