Monti

Small enough to learn in an afternoon

The whole rione is maybe six streets deep, and everything orbits Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, where the fountain steps work as the neighbourhood's living room from about six in the evening. People buy a drink from the bar behind them, sit on the steps, and stay for three hours. Nobody moves them on.

The two streets to walk are Via Urbana and Via del Boschetto, running uphill roughly in parallel. Vintage clothes, small jewellers, a couple of galleries, a good bookshop, and wine bars that consider four tables on the pavement to be ample seating.

What makes it strange is the geography. You are five minutes from the Forum, and the crowd on the piazza at aperitivo is still substantially Roman. Very few European cities manage that this close to a monument of that size.

Cavour, and the walk back up

Monti sits between the Colosseum and Termini, hemmed in by Via Cavour, Via dei Fori Imperiali and Via Nazionale.

Metro B to Cavour drops you at the bottom, and the staircase up to Via Urbana is the proper way in. Termini is ten minutes east on foot, which is the single most useful fact about the rione if you're arriving by train or airport bus. The Colosseum is eight minutes downhill.

Note the word downhill. Monti is one of the few central districts where you'll feel the gradient, and the climb home at the end of a fourteen-kilometre day is real. Not brutal. Real.

Wine bars, mostly

Monti's strength is small rooms and good glasses rather than serious dining.

Ai Tre Scalini on Via Panisperna is the institution: a wine bar so small and so busy that the crowd is routinely standing on the cobbles outside holding their glasses. Before eight or forget it.

Urbana 47 plays the other side of the same street, doing a relaxed, design-conscious kitchen with produce from Lazio and a menu that shifts with what turned up that week.

For a proper sit-down meal, Trattoria Monti is a few minutes east and technically over the line into Esquilino. It's run by the Camerucci family, cooks from the Marche rather than strictly Roman, and the egg-yolk tortello is the reason people book weeks out.

Why we recommend it more than anywhere else

For a first visit, Monti is usually the right answer, and we say so more often than is probably good for variety.

The case makes itself: fifteen minutes' walk to the Colosseum, the Forum, the Trevi and Termini; streets with residents on them, which means food priced for people eating there twice a week rather than once a lifetime; and quiet after midnight in a way Trastevere simply is not. Rooms cost less than the equivalent in the centro.

The honest downsides are the hill, a single metro stop, and Via Cavour itself, which is a proper road with proper traffic. Book on the small streets, not the artery.

One more thing

There's a chapel almost nobody visits at San Pietro in Vincoli, up the steps at the top of the rione, and it contains Michelangelo's Moses. No queue, no ticket, no fuss. It was meant to be one of forty figures on Julius II's tomb, a project that consumed forty years of Michelangelo's life and was never finished. He is said to have struck the knee and shouted "Perché non parli?" — why don't you speak?

It's a five-minute detour from the Colosseum and it is free.