Where to Rome in the eternal city

The best hot chocolate in the world is sold in Babington’s Tea Rooms at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. This 18th century city block, with its shuttered windows and old, grey wood interior, sits on one side of Rome’s famous steps, while the house where John Keats died is on the other.

There’s no sense of melancholy here though. The Spanish Steps (so named because they linked the Spanish Embassy with the Church of Trinità dei Monti above) are always a riot of colour, like a vertical wall of brightly-clad young people sitting among the flower baskets.

This is a place to congregate and take in the view down Via Condotti — the place to go if you prefer your clothes expensive. Anthony Minghella filmed one of the cleverest scenes in The Talented Mr Ripley on these steps and was shocked by how much it cost to bribe people to keep out of his shots.

Walking up the steps down which Matt Damon as Tom Ripley trotted reveals increasingly spectacular views the higher you get. From the top you can see the Vatican and the dome of St Peter’s west of the Tiber. Thank goodness Rome didn’t make London’s mistake of dwarfing its most famous church with modern office blocks.

There is an even better view, however, if you cross Piazza della Trinità dei Monti and climb the steps to this twin-towered landmark.

The church itself was built in Renaissance-style by French residents and consecrated by Pope Sixtus V in 1585. Its small inside and the artwork is modest by Roman standards, although the Assumption of the Virgin in the third chapel on the right is by a pupil of Michelangelo and is said to contain a portrait of the man himself.

Leaving Trinità del Monte, walk to the right. This road, Viale della Trinità dei Monti, skirts the Villa Medici and its grounds and was a popular carriageway for healthy drives in John Keats’ stime. It’s a massive country house, bought by Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1576 to give the family a permanent base in Rome.

You can spend a whole morning at the Villa, now property of the French state, having been “acquired” by Napoleon in 1803. Mussolini seized it back in 1941 but it is now owned by the French Ministry of Culture.

Further north, the Viale della Trinità dei Monti begins to run downhill as it approaches the old city walls and the Flaminian Gate. An elegant series of S-bends designed for barouches and calashes winds down to Piazza del Populo, a huge space flanked by two sets of twin baroque churches and dominated by an Egyptian obelisk and ornate fountains. With typical Renaissance symmetry the scene is overlooked by two groups of classical statuary and flanked by 18th century sphinxes.

Populo is today a place of meeting (when Rome was recently and unexpectedly deluged by snow it became a popular place for building snowmen). In the Middle Ages this was the site within the city gates for executions and carnivals.