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Start with a cappuccino at Café Sant’Eustachio . Follow Salita de’ Crescenzi into Piazza della Rotonda and the stunning beauty of the The Pantheon . Head down to Piazza di Minerva, with Bernini’s Elephant Obelisk and the façade of Santa Maria sopra Minerva , hiding masterpieces by Filippino Lippi and Michelangelo inside.

Via S Caterina da Siena becomes Via Pie’ di Marmo (look right to see the famous ancient marble foot). The street spills into the long piazza in front of Galleria Doria Pamphilj . After paying homage to works by Caravaggio, Tintoretto and Bernini continue out the east end of the piazza on Via Lata, then on to the Corso to Santa Maria in Via Lata (see Santa Maria in Via Lata). Turn left up the Corso to the Baroque Piazza Sant’ Ignazio, backed by Rome’s best trompe-l’oeil frescoes in Sant’Ignazio di Loyola. Work your way behind the square’s mini palaces onto Piazza di Pietra. A narrow alley leads to the Column of Marcus Aurelius. Head to Giolitti for a delicious ice cream.

Walk west on Via del Leone into Piazza Borghese, home to an antiques print market and the Palazzo Borghese . Two blocks north it opens out on to Piazza Augusto Imperatore, home to many churches, Augustus’s Mausoleum and the Ara Pacis . End your morning with lunch at trendy ’s ’Gusto .

Augustus Caesar built this “Altar of Peace” between 13 BC and 9 BC to celebrate the famed pax romana (Roman peace) he instituted – largely by subjugating most of Western Europe, the Levant and North Africa. Fragments of the altar were excavated over several centuries, and in the 1920s Mussolini placed the reconstituted Ara Pacis by Augustus’s Mausoleum. The altar is now housed in a Richard Meier-designed museum, the first modern structure to rise in the centre of Rome in 70 years.

An example of Bernini’s fun-loving side. This baby elephant, carved to the master’s designs by Ercole Ferrata in 1667, carries a miniature 6th-century BC Egyptian obelisk on its back. It is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Carthaginian leader Hannibal’s war elephants, which carried tall siege towers across the Alps to attack the Roman Empire in 218 BC.

A passably genuine Irish pub in a cosy basement, with pub food and, in summer, outdoor seating.

Another best – this time the best cappuccino . Not surprisingly, the recipe is a closely guarded secret.

Here they sell their own line of fountain pens, covered in silver plating, as well as other writing and calligraphy utensils and beautiful leather-bound notebooks.

This wine bar-cum-restaurant is just the place for a quick aperitivo or a more leisurely alfresco lunch. The impressively bottle-lined interior shows that this is a serious wine bar with a well-stocked cellar offering a great choice of labels.

Part of an Italian chain of high-class toy stores with the very best in educational playthings.

Trajan’s Column was such a success (see Trajan’s Forum and Column) that this 29.5-m (97-ft) one was erected in AD 180–93 to honour the military career of Marcus Aurelius. The spiral of reliefs celebrates his campaigns against the Germans (169–73) on the bottom and the Sarmatians (174–76) on the top. In 1588, Pope Sixtus V replaced the statues of the emperor and his wife with that of St Paul.