Rome

Beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione, five small chapels are decorated floor to ceiling with the bones of nearly four thousand Capuchin friars: chandeliers of vertebrae, arches of skulls, a whole ceiling worked in shoulder blades. A sign at the end reads that what you are now, they once were, and what they are now, you will be. Not a horror show. A four-hundred-year-old sermon on dying, made from the dead. No photos, and better for it.

• Touristy

The old Protestant cemetery under the Pyramid of Cestius, where the foreigners Rome would not bury in its churches went instead: Keats beneath a stone that names no name, Shelley’s ashes, Gramsci, and Emelyn Story’s weeping Angel of Grief slumped over her tomb. Cats everywhere, cypresses, and almost no one else. A slow, kind, melancholy hour.

Best shot The Angel of Grief face down on the Story grave, or Keats’s stone under the pyramid.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The deepest of Rome’s catacombs, ten miles of tunnels cut on four levels into soft rock, the only one with a sunken basilica still standing at its heart and early Christian frescoes on the walls. You go down with a guide, past shelf after shelf where the bodies once lay. Cold, close and genuinely old. Treat it as the burial ground it is.

• Quiet

Inside Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, the one neo-gothic church in Rome, a single glass case holds scorched books, cloth and handprints said to be burned into them by the dead reaching back from purgatory to beg for prayers. A priest assembled it a century ago and the church still shows it, entirely straight. Small, free, and quietly unnerving.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

Three cities stacked on one staircase: a twelfth-century basilica on top, a fourth-century church below that, and under it all a first-century Roman house with a windowless temple to Mithras, where an underground spring can still be heard running in the dark. Pay the small fee and climb down fifteen hundred years.

• Quiet

Built as Hadrian’s round tomb, then a papal fortress, prison and place of execution, linked to the Vatican by the raised Passetto the popes ran along when the city fell. Spiral up past the cells and the ramparts to the bronze angel on top and the best view in Rome.

Best shot The bridge of Bernini angels leading to the drum of the castle, at dawn before the crowds.

• Touristy

A black stone pit at the edge of the Forum where Rome kept the condemned and lowered them through a hole in the floor to starve or be strangled in the dark. The rebel Jugurtha died here, and by tradition Peter and Paul were held below. One small, grim, ancient room. Stand in it and feel the whole thing.

A sunken square of four ruined temples where the Senate once met and Caesar was stabbed, run for decades as a cat sanctuary. Feral cats sprawl across the very stones where he fell, and new walkways finally let you down among the ruins with them. Free to watch from the railings.

Best shot Cats draped over the broken temple columns, the Ides of March underfoot.

• Solo-friendly

Under the altar, Maderno’s white marble shows the martyred Cecilia lying exactly as her body was said to be found in 1599, turned to the wall with the wounds still in her neck. Pay to go down into the excavated Roman house beneath the floor, and up to a hidden Cavallini fresco of the Last Judgment few people bother to find.

• Quiet

On the quiet Aventine hill, the green door of the Knights of Malta has a keyhole that frames the dome of St Peter’s dead-centre down an avenue of clipped hedges, three sovereign states in a single squint. Free, faintly absurd, and best just after dawn before the queue forms.

Best shot St Peter’s dome framed in the keyhole, hedges narrowing to it.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The old road out of Rome, straight and rutted with two thousand years of cart wheels, lined for miles with the broken tombs of people who wanted to be remembered by everyone passing. Rent a bike on a Sunday when it closes to cars and ride out among the cypresses, the mausolea and the catacomb gates.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A 1925 Liberty-style hotel a step from Piazza del Popolo: stained glass, a brass cage lift, Tiffany lamps and a fire in the bar, long a haunt of film people and writers. Faded in exactly the right way, with a rooftop for a negroni and bikes at the door. Ask for a room in the old wing.

• Adults only

A seventeenth-century palazzo off Piazza Navona stripped back to bare plaster and raw stone, then filled with twentieth-century Italian design. Dark, spare and grown-up, ten rooms only, a cocktail bar downstairs. Nothing chintzy anywhere in it.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A discreet townhouse hotel by the Forum with a first-century secret in the cellar: a walled fragment of Trajan’s market that guests can go down and see for themselves. A roof garden over the ruins above, and Monti waiting at the door.

• Quiet

An aristocratic family villa near the Quirinale, run like a private house: a dozen rooms set among the family’s own portraits and antiques, a walled garden, a library, a small spa down in the old cellars. Hushed, formal, and completely off the tourist track.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A narrow, theatrically dark little hotel by the market square: red walls, mirrors, velvet and a much-loved roof terrace over the tiles. Right above Campo de’ Fiori, so lively to loud after dark. Take a top room and live on the roof.

• Adults only
• Party scene

Upstairs is an ordinary old trattoria. Go down. The cellar rooms are built straight into the ruins of the Theatre of Pompey, the complex where the Senate met the day Caesar was killed. Roman classics among two-thousand-year-old stone. Book the downstairs and eat where it happened.

• Adults only

A wine bar in a former bishop’s house under a painted medieval ceiling, “Vino e Olio” still lettered across the old shopfront. Hundreds of bottles, good cheese and cured meat, standing room and regulars three deep. No frills, no booking, exactly right.

• Adults only

A 1920s-style speakeasy behind an unmarked door, password on the website, no phones out once you are in. Low light, serious cocktails, a short and strict list of rules. Book ahead and play along. One of the best drinks in the city, hidden on purpose.

• Adults only

A dark-panelled wine bar of wooden booths a minute from the Forum, a long list and plates of cheese and salumi, quiet enough to hear yourself think. A good solo perch to end a day spent underground and among ruins.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

An apothecary trading since the 1700s, one small room lined floor to ceiling with labelled wooden drawers of dried herbs, teas and tinctures, the old counter and glass jars still in place. Buy something bitter and useful, or just stand in it and breathe.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A tiny marble-carver’s workshop on arty Via Margutta, every wall tiled with engraved offcuts and Latin mottoes, an old man chiselling at the bench in a haze of stone dust. Pick a phrase and he will cut it into marble for you while you wait.

• Solo-friendly

An antique-print dealer on Piazza Navona with a serious stock of old engravings, above all Piranesi’s Rome: his imaginary prisons and ruined temples, black and crumbling, the city drawn as a beautiful wreck. Worth a look even if the good sheets are out of reach.

• Quiet

Rome’s big, serious vintage store, racks deep in black, leather, old band shirts and decades of good junk, spread over branches in Monti and Pigneto. Dig long enough and the whole outfit walks out with you.

• Solo-friendly