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A taste for the macabre may be all you need to enjoy this place. A cast-iron stomach doesn’t hurt, either. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this intense memento mori is its position, at the bottom of what was the most sophisticated of streets when la dolce vita was in full swing.

If you like a good haunted house, this is your first stop. The bones of thousands of deceased monks have been used to decorate every conceivable surface in the most ghoulish designs. Those corpses that weren’t taken to bits have been hung on walls, decked out in cowled robes (see Capuchin Crypt).

Caravaggio uses strong chiaroscuro techniques here. As a naturalistic shaft of light spills from Christ to his chosen chronicler, St Matthew, Caravaggio captures the precise moment of Matthew’s conversion from tax collector to Evangelist (see San Luigi dei Francesi).

Caravaggio strove to outdo Michelangelo’s Pietà by making his Mary old and tired. Rather than a slender slip of a Christ, Caravaggio’s muscular Jesus is so heavy (emphasized by a diagonal composition) that Nicodemus struggles with his legs and John’s grasp opens Christ’s wound.

This most personal of films (1994) opens with the director, Nanni Moretti, riding his scooter around surburban Rome.

This house under an ancient church belonged to two Constantinian officials, martyred in AD 362. There is also a series of buildings, including a frescoed nymphaeum, dating from the 1st to 4th centuries.

Hadrian designed his massive circular tomb in 123-39. Aurelian fortified it in 271 as part of his city walls (see Beyond the City Walls). It was the papal castle for 1,000 years - a viaduct from the Vatican let the popes scurry here in times of crisis. Gregory the Great named it in 590 after a vision of St Michael announced the end of a plague from its tower, commemorated by the bronze statue of a sword-bearing archangel. There are frescoed Renaissance papal apartments and a small arms and armour collection (Etruscan through to the 1900s), plus stunning panoramas from the ramparts.

Lazy Tiber River vistas with the Ponte Sant’Angelo directly underneath (see Castel Sant’Angelo).

Dr Silvia Viviani is the guiding genius of this loving undertaking, but what makes it work is the volunteers’ enthusiasm. Tourists are welcome to visit the veterinary clinic, and are also encouraged to adopt one of the cats. The sanctuary has a “no-kill” policy.

The burial tunnels of Rome’s early Christians are like a honeycomb beneath the consular roads out of Rome, especially along Via Appia Antica. Grave niches stacked like shelving along dark corridors are carved into the tufa, with some precious remnants of fresco and engraved marble slabs (see Beyond the City Walls).