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The original big budget ($50 million) gladiator epic from 1959. William Wyler directed Charlton Heston as a Jewish prince betrayed into slavery. He bares his chest, wins his freedom and engages in a chariot race that has influenced every cinematic race since. The film won 11 Academy Awards.

Poet and film-maker (b.1941). After great success outside Italy he returned home for Stealing Beauty .

Rarely has marble captured flowing, almost liquid movement so gracefully. Bernini freezes time, wind-blown hair and cloak, in the instant the fleeing nymph is wrapped in bark and leaves, transformed into a laurel by her sympathetic river god father.

The saint here is being pierced by a smirking angel’s lance, and is Bernini at his theatrical best. He sets this religious ecstasy on a stage flanked by opera boxes from which members of the commissioning Cornaro family look on (see Santa Maria della Vittoria).

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.

Imperious, pragmatic and power-hungry, Boniface (1294–1303) instituted the first Jubilee to make money.

General, dictator and writer (100–44 BC). De Bello Gallico describes his campaigns in Gaul (France), The Civil War his fight against Pompey.

This “field of flowers” bursts with colour during the morning market, and again after dark when its pubs and bars make it a centre of Roman nightlife. The dour hooded statue overlooking all is in honour of Giordano Bruno, a theologian who was burned at the stake here for his progressive heresies in 1600 during the Counter-Reformation.

The “Field of Flowers” occupies what was, in ancient times, the open space in front of the Theatre of Pompey. Since the Middle Ages, it has been one of Rome’s liveliest areas, a backdrop for princes and pilgrims alike. On the darker side, it was also the locus of the Inquisition’s executions, as attested to by the statue of the hooded philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned here in the Jubilee celebrations of 1600.

The basic principle for comprehending Rome is that everything is built on top of something else. For example, the Capitoline (see Capitoline Venus) was originally two peaks: one, called the Arx, graced by the Temple of Juno, and the other, the Cavo, with the Temple of Jupiter, now mostly occupied by the Palazzo dei Conservatori (see Palazzo dei Conservatori Exhibits). The huge Tabularium (Record Office) was built between them in 78 BC, thus forming one hill, called the Capitol; and over that the Palazzo Senatorio was built in the 12th century.