Rome on foot: notebook from Pantheon to Bernini & Trevi

Par Gabriel Goldberg 5 June 2026 6 min read

Some cities you visit. Rome you cross — the way you turn the pages of a book whose heroes you already know. Yesterday I walked. No guidebook route, no schedule — just my own steps, from the Pantheon to Piazza della Repubblica , by way of the Trevi Fountain , Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa , an imperial arch by the Forum, and Agrippa's dome at blue hour. Here is what the city gave me that day. Piazza Navona, first set Piazza Navona — the dome of Sant'Agnese in Agone, the obelisk and the Fontana del Moro, Rome. In the morning, Piazza Navona doesn't yet smell of cold coffee and postcards. The dome of Sant'Agnese in Agone , the obelisk taken from Maxentius' circus, the Fontana del Moro — it's all there, in stereo. And then that giant Prada ad, posted like a contemporary canvas at the foot of the Baroque: Rome is never afraid to stack centuries. It is a city that collaborates with itself. I linger a few minutes. I think of Brussels, my art-city where murals and street furniture answer each other — Rome does the same, four hundred years earlier, with an unlimited marble budget. The Trevi Fountain: the cliché that holds up The Trevi Fountain, Palazzo Poli behind, fed by the Acqua Vergine aqueduct. You arrive at the Trevi Fountain knowing exactly what you'll see. And still. The mass of Palazzo Poli, water so pale a green it looks like glass, Ocean on his chariot pulled by Pietro Bracci's sea-horses — it works. The cliché holds because it was designed to. Nicola Salvi, in 1762,…