DK Travel : Rome : History & Culture

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Henry James

The New York author (1843– 1916) spent half his life in Europe. Rome features in Daisy Miller , A Roman Holiday , Portrait of a Lady and his travelogue Italian Hours . In an 1869 letter he proclaimed “At last – for the first time – I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy – your education – nowhere.”
Il Vittoriano

Climb the “Wedding Cake” for vistas across the Imperial Fora.
Imperial Fora

The largest temple and one of the most commanding of this imposing zone was the 2nd-century AD Temple of Venus and Rome, its columns standing high on the hill between the Forum and the Colosseum. Its back-to-back design was Hadrian’s, and when the great architect Apollodorus criticized it, Hadrian had him put to death (see The Colosseum and Imperial Fora).
Innocent III

This medieval pope (1198– 1216) hand-picked emperors and approved monkish orders.
John Keats

The English Romantic poet (1795–1821) came to Rome in 1820 for the antiquities and Italian lifestyle – and to bolster his ailing health, which nevertheless failed. Keats died at age 25 of tuberculosis in an apartment by the Spanish Steps (see The Spanish Steps and Piazza di Spagna).
John Paul II

The first non-Italian Pope for over 400 years, John Paul II (1920-2005), was famed for his extensive travelling.
Julius II

Warrior pope and patron of the arts (1513–21), he hired Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel and Raphael to decorate his apartment (see , .
Juvenal

Romans invented satire; Juvenal (60–130) perfected the form in his poems.
Keats-Shelley Memorial

The pink-stuccoed apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps, where 25-year-old John Keats breathed his last, consumptive breath in 1821, has been turned into a modest little museum dedicated to the Romantic-era British poets who lived part of their lives in Rome (see John Keats). Main displays include documents, letters, copies of publications, and Keats’s death mask. Companion Joseph Severn cradled Keats’s head as he died; his resultant drawing of Keats on his Deathbed is also on exhibit.
Knights of Malta Keyhole

St Peter’s Dome is perfectly framed through a gate keyhole in this garden (see Piazza of the Knights of Malta).