Rome

Start at the Circus Maximus, the long green hollow where chariots once raced in front of crowds that ancient writers put at 150,000 and more. Cross the road and take the steep lane called Clivo dei Publicii up the Aventine. The noise of the city drops away almost at once: this is a hill of villas, convents and orange trees.

Halfway up, the city’s Rose Garden fills the slope with more than a thousand varieties, open from late April to June. From 1645 to 1934 this was the Jewish cemetery of Rome, and the paths of one section are laid out in the shape of a menorah in remembrance.

At the top, Santa Sabina is one of the oldest basilicas in the city, built in the 420s: tall columns, clear light, and a door of cypress wood carved with some of the earliest surviving images of the Crucifixion. Next door, the Orange Garden ends at a terrace with one of the best free views in Rome, straight across the Tiber to St. Peter’s.

A few steps on, in Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, there is usually a short line at a green door. Look through its keyhole and St. Peter’s dome sits framed at the end of a garden avenue. From here the streets run downhill to Testaccio, a working neighborhood with a covered market and some of the best Roman cooking in town.

End at the Pyramid of Cestius, a Roman tomb from about 12 BC, built when everything Egyptian was in fashion. Beside it, the Non-Catholic Cemetery holds the graves of Keats and Shelley under the pines.

Every Roman schoolchild knows the story. Twin boys, Romulus and Remus, are set adrift on the Tiber by a king who fears them. Their basket snags below the Palatine Hill, where a she-wolf finds them and nurses them in a cave, and a shepherd takes them in and raises them. Grown, they decide to found a city where they were saved, and argue over exactly where it should stand.

Romulus wanted the Palatine; Remus wanted the Aventine across the valley. They agreed to let the gods decide by the flight of birds. Remus saw six vultures first, Romulus saw twelve, and each claimed the omen. When Remus mocked his brother’s new wall by jumping over it, Romulus killed him. The traditional date is 21 April 753 BC, and the city still celebrates its birthday on that day.

A town of one man needed people. Romulus opened a refuge on the Capitoline to anyone who came, and when his new Romans found no wives, they invited the neighboring Sabines to a festival and carried off their daughters. Years later, as the Sabine army marched on Rome, the women ran between their fathers and their husbands and stopped the battle. Jacques-Louis David painted that moment in 1799, as France came out of its own years of bloodshed.

The ground tells a quieter version. On the Palatine, archaeologists have found the post holes of Iron Age huts from around the 8th century BC, the same period the legend names. The valley below, later the Forum, was marshland that the early Romans drained.

Legend and dig agree on the essentials: a few villages on hills above a river crossing, joined into a town.

The she-wolf became the city’s emblem. The bronze in the Capitoline Museums was long thought to be Etruscan, from the 5th century BC; recent tests suggest it was cast in the Middle Ages, and the twins beneath her were only added in the 15th century. Either way, she has stood on the Capitoline for more than five hundred years, and her copies stand in cities across the world.

Kings gave way to the Republic, and the Republic to emperors. Julius Caesar, dictator for life, was stabbed by senators on the Ides of March, 44 BC, in the hall where the Senate met that day, the Curia of Pompey, whose ruins lie in today’s Largo di Torre Argentina. Jean-Léon Gérôme painted the aftermath: the body left on the floor, the senators already walking away.