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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.

Rome’s elegant public living room started as a trapezoidal piazza in 1538. In 1589, Sixtus V had Domenico Fontana build a fountain crowned with a 3,200-year-old obelisk – the 25-m (82-ft) megalith from Heliopolis, honouring Ramses II, was brought to Rome by Augustus. Napoleon’s man in Rome hired Giuseppe Valadier to overhaul the piazza to its current Neo-Classical look in 1811–24, a giant oval that grades up the steep slope of the Pincio via a winding road. Valadier also added the fountain’s Egyptian-style lions (see Santa Maria del Popolo).

A priceless lesson in Renaissance and Baroque art, architecture and sculpture can be found in this spectacular church.

This elegant, off-centre sweep of a staircase is Rome’s most beloved Rococo monument. It is at its most memorable in May, when it is covered in azaleas, but all year round it is littered with people drinking in la dolce vita (sweet life) and musicians strumming guitars until late into the night. Francesco De Sanctis designed the steps in 1723–6 for King Louis XV, and their true name in Italian is Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti, after the church at the top. The hourglass-shaped Piazza di Spagna, with its Bernini Barcaccia fountain and milling tourists, was named after the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican located nearby.

This church, crowning the French-commissioned Spanish Steps, was part of a convent founded by Louis XII in 1503. The twin-towered façade (1584) is by Giacomo della Porta; the double staircase (1587) by Domenico Fontana. Unfortunately, the Baroque interior is divided at the third chapel by an iron grille opened only during services. Daniele da Volterra frescoed the third chapel on the right and painted the Assumption altarpiece (which includes a portrait of his teacher Michelangelo as the far right figure), as well as the Deposition in the second chapel on the left. The nearby 16th-century Villa Medici (open for special exhibits) has housed the French Academy since 1803.

The “Fifth Avenue” of Rome, lined with some of its chicest shops and fashion boutiques of top-name designers. After flirting with high street retail chains in the 1990s, the street has been re-conquered by the haute couture that made it famous. It’s fun to window-shop if you can’t afford to buy.