Museum of the Walls

The Museum of the Walls is at Via di Porta San Sebastiano 18, in the Celio district, inside the largest gate of the Aurelian Walls, and it's free to visit: no ticket to pay for, just an entry pass to pick up at the ticket desk. Hours are Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 16:00, with last entry one hour before closing. It's closed on Mondays, May 1 and December 25. The museum admits a maximum of 20 visitors at a time, five per room, and the permitted stay is 50 minutes: if you arrive at 15:55, you don't get in. For information and group reservations call 060608, open every day from 09:00 to 19:00. The official website is museodellemuraroma.it. You get there by bus 118, stop Porta S. Sebastiano/Numa Pompilio, and by bus 218, which comes down from Piazza di Porta San Giovanni and stops right at Porta S. Sebastiano before heading onto Via Appia Antica. Metro line B, Circo Massimo station, is a little over a kilometer's walk along Viale delle Terme di Caracalla. The tower terrace is not accessible. The wall walk, which is the real reason to come here, is.

To place it in the city's museum landscape, start from the page on the museums of Rome, where this small civic institution sits alongside collections that draw millions of visitors and still comes out ahead on one point: it is the only museum in the city where you walk inside the monument the museum describes.

What the Museum of the Walls really is

It's best to be clear about this before you go, because it avoids disappointment and prepares you better for the visit: the Museum of the Walls is not a gallery of finds. You won't find display cases with statues, there is no collection of marbles, there are no signed masterpieces. The museum is made up almost entirely of double-sided educational panels, with texts in Italian and English, color drawings, historical photographs, plaster casts and a few models. Anyone who walks in hoping for a traditional archaeological museum leaves puzzled. Anyone who walks in knowing that the real object on display is the building itself, and that the panels are there to teach you how to read it, leaves with a skill that is worth a great deal in Rome: the ability to look at a wall and date it.

The current display dates from 1990 and spreads over the first and second floors of the gate. It is divided into three sections, ancient, medieval and modern. The ancient section retraces the history of urban fortifications, from the defenses of the regal and Republican age to the Aurelian circuit of the third century AD. For the latter it explains the historical and political events that forced its construction, the strategic reasons for its route, the construction technique, the types of gates, the restorations and the later transformations. The medieval and modern sections, on the second floor, pick up the story and show how the relationship between the circuit and the built-up area changed as the population dwindled and the city withdrew toward the river, leaving huge areas inside the walls cultivated as vineyards and vegetable gardens.

In our opinion the Museum of the Walls is the most underrated museum in Rome, and it is so because of a communication flaw. Anyone who presents it as a museum condemns it to a comparison with the Capitoline Museums, and in that comparison it loses. Anyone who presents it for what it is, that is the free public access point to 400 meters of late antique military architecture still standing, gets admiring silence. The whole difference is in the expectation. Prepare your companions for the second idea and not the first.

The history of the Museum of the Walls, which is more eventful than it looks

The gate became a museum through an accumulation of occasions, not by design. The decisive step dates to 1939, and it should be told in full because it explains the shape of the rooms you walk through today. That year, despite the opposition of the Antiquities and Fine Arts Department of the Governorate, work began to adapt the interior of the gate as the home and private studio of a Fascist official. New floors were poured, new rooms were created with partition walls, stairs were installed, the floors were redone with mosaics set in on the first floor. What the visitor walks through today as a museum sequence is, in its physical layout, the apartment designed back then.

After World War II the City reopened the gate and started a museum project that moved forward in fits and starts. In 1960 part of the rooms was handed over to the Ministry of Public Education to house a Special Office of the Appia Antica that never began operating: 10 years of empty rooms assigned to an office that was never born. In 1970 the City took the monument back. The following year a small Museum of the Walls was set up there, open on Sundays only, a formula that lasted a short time and ended in complete closure. The reopening came in 1984, on the occasion of the exhibition Roma sotterranea, and that time the gate stayed open. In 1989 a City Council Resolution formally established the Museum of the Walls. In 1990 the educational display that can still be visited today was inaugurated.

35 years is a long time for a display, and it shows. The panels have the graphics of their time, some photographs are dated reproductions, the language is that of museum education in the late 1980s. I'm not saying this as criticism, I'm saying it as a warning. If you're used to video mapping and immersive projections, here you'll find a museum of paper and plaster. It does have an advantage that technological museums lose every five years: it still works, it doesn't break down, and the drawings of the wall sections are very clear.

Where the Museum of the Walls is and how to get there

The address is Via di Porta San Sebastiano 18, postal code 00179. The street is one of the most curious urban stretches in Rome. It starts from Piazzale Numa Pompilio, runs for about 800 meters between the boundary walls of private villas, cypresses and pines, and ends against the gate. It is paved, narrow, with little traffic and intermittent sidewalks. The silence, 100 meters from Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, changes suddenly. Anyone who walks it for the first time feels they have left the city while still staying inside the walls, and that is exactly what already happened in the sixteenth century, when there were vineyards and farmhouses here.

How to get to the Museum of the Walls by bus

The most convenient line is the 118, a circular bus that links the Appia Nuova area with the Colosseum and Piazza Venezia and has its terminus on Via Appia Antica, level with Villa dei Quintili. Along the route it serves the stop Porta S. Sebastiano/Numa Pompilio outbound and, on the way back, the stops Porta S. Sebastiano/Sepolcro Scipioni and Porta S. Sebastiano. The full run takes between 70 and 80 minutes and weekday frequency is every 15 or 20 minutes. It's a bus to take with patience and with the timetable in your pocket, because buses don't come often. First departure around 05:30, last around 23:00.

The other useful line is the 218, which starts from Piazza di Porta San Giovanni and heads south through Via dell'Amba Aradam, Via dei Laterani, Piazzale Ipponio, Via Illiria, Piazza Epiro, Via Lusitania, Via Cameria and Viale delle Mura Latine, then leaves the city right at Porta San Sebastiano and takes Via Appia Antica toward the Ardeatina. It's the line Romans use to reach the catacombs, and for the Museum of the Walls it's perfect: the Porta S. Sebastiano stop is a few meters from the entrance. Anyone who arrives by metro at San Giovanni and changes to the 218 takes the most direct route of all.

On Viale delle Terme di Caracalla and at Piazzale Numa Pompilio other surface lines pass, which bring you to within a 10-minute walk of the museum. Check the active lines on the transit company's website before leaving: Rome's surface network changes routes with a frequency that no printed guide can keep up with.

The Museum of the Walls by metro, bike and car

The metro doesn't reach the gate. The closest station is Circo Massimo, on line B. From there you take Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, walk along the archaeological enclosure of the baths, reach Piazzale Numa Pompilio and turn onto Via di Porta San Sebastiano. It's about 20 minutes at a normal pace, a little under a kilometer and a half, almost all slightly uphill but on a tree-lined sidewalk. It's one of the most beautiful urban walks in Rome and I recommend it even to people who could take the bus: you cross the valley of the Camene, you see the monumental side of the baths, you pass Santi Nereo e Achilleo Church and the start of Via di Porta Latina.

By bike the road is good, with the warning that the last stretch of Via di Porta San Sebastiano has an uneven surface and some sanpietrini. If you continue toward the Appia Antica, you find traffic closed on public holidays and one of the most pleasant de facto bike routes in Italy. By car, on the other hand, count on a problem: parking along Via di Porta San Sebastiano is scarce, almost all of it reserved for residents and private villas, and the gate has no parking area. If you come by car, leave it in the Piazzale Numa Pompilio area or along Viale delle Terme di Caracalla and walk the last few minutes. The blunt advice: don't come by car. You don't save a minute and you lose the best part of the approach.

Hours, free admission and access rules for the Museum of the Walls

Admission to the Museo delle Mura is free for everyone. You still pick up the ticket at the ticket office, because the museum counts visitors and applies a strict quota. There are three rules in force and you need to know them before setting out, because on an April afternoon with two school groups ahead of you they make the difference between visiting and going home.

The Museo delle Mura Quotas: 20 People, 50 Minutes

The museum can be visited by a maximum of 20 visitors at the same time, with no more than five people per room, and the maximum time you can stay is 50 minutes. If you arrive when the quota is full, you wait your turn. On days with big crowds the wait is real, even if it has nothing to do with the lines at the museums in the center. The 50-minute rule is not a suggestion: it is the time assigned, and it includes both the rooms and the walkway. If you want to walk the whole stretch of walls and come back, you have to plan carefully, because the walkway alone takes a good half hour if you stop to look.

Groups and School Classes at the Museo delle Mura

Groups of five to 20 people plus the guide get in with a free reservation at 060608 and can stay up to 60 minutes. School classes must make a free reservation even when they ask for admission only, and must present the list of names signed by the school principal. Guided tours and workshops are paid services by reservation, available in several languages. Anyone who brings a group without reserving risks being refused at the door, and it's not a formality: with five people per room, 20 people showing up together block the museum.

The MIC Card and Free Admissions in the Civic Museums System

The Museo delle Mura belongs to the Sistema Musei di Roma Capitale, the network of civic museums that includes the Capitoline Museums, the Centrale Montemartini, the Markets of Trajan, the Museo di Roma, the Casina delle Civette and another two dozen sites. Anyone who lives or studies in Rome can get the MIC Card, the annual card that opens the permanent collections of the whole network for free. Card holders and people entitled to free admission pick up their ticket by calling 060608 or directly at the ticket office. Here the card isn't needed to save money, because admission is already free for everyone. But it helps you see which family you are entering, and plan your day by fitting other museums of the network into the same outing.

The Aurelian Walls: Why Rome Decided to Wall Itself In in 271

For three and a half centuries Rome had no need of walls. The Republican circuit, the one tradition attributes to Servius Tullius and that archaeology dates in large part to the fourth century BC, had become a ruin swallowed up by houses. In the first century AD people built against it, shops leaned on it, and in some places it was demolished to make room. The defense of the City was the legions on the Rhine and the Danube, not a wall. When that system cracked, the city realized within a few months that it was naked.

What convinced the Senate and the emperor was the invasion of the Alemanni and the Juthungi in 270 and 271. Aurelian faced them in northern Italy, suffered a heavy defeat near Piacenza and won only afterward, at Fano and at Pavia. In the meantime panic had broken out in Rome, and not only panic: there was unrest, and the revolt of the mint workers left hundreds dead inside the city. An emperor returning to a frightened, insubordinate capital has two problems to solve together, external defense and internal control. The walls solved both, and this explains the speed of the construction site.

The Numbers of the Aurelian Walls as Told at the Museo delle Mura

In antiquity the circuit measured about 19 kilometers and enclosed more than 1,200 hectares, an area no European city would equal for more than 1,000 years. Modern sources count 378 stretches of crenellated curtain wall spaced about every 30 meters by 381 towers, 14 main gates in addition to many smaller passages and postern gates, well over 100 service latrines and arrow slits in quantities hard to count. The towers were equipped for projectile artillery: estimates speak of hundreds of ballistae distributed along the circuit. The initial height of the curtain wall was six or eight meters, with two meters of foundation, and the overall thickness was 3.3 meters, of which about 60 centimeters was wall and 2.7 meters was walkway.

Today about 12.5 kilometers of it still stand, a figure that overturns the common perception. We are not talking about a monument that survived in fragments. We are talking about two thirds of an ancient circuit still in place inside a European capital of almost 3 million inhabitants. In no other city on the continent can you walk for 12 kilometers along a Roman wall. That Romans ride past it on scooters without looking at it is an interesting sociological fact and a glaring shame.

The building technique of the walls, explained by the models at the Museum of the Walls

The speed of the Aurelian construction site depended on two practical choices. The first was to absorb everything that was already there: aqueducts, tombs, warehouses, the Castrense Amphitheater, the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Praetorian camp, the Claudian Porta Maggiore. It's not an isolated case, it's a method: wherever a sturdy building lay along the chosen line, that building became wall. If you walk along the circuit today and see a structure that has nothing to do with a fortification, it's usually because the fortification simply adopted what it found.

The second choice concerned construction: a core of concrete made of rubble and mortar, brick facing, and an enormous quantity of reused bricks. The brick stamps you can read in the curtain wall often belong to productions from two centuries earlier, recovered from demolitions. The work was not entrusted to the army but to the urban building guilds, according to the hypothesis that prevails today, and this explains the unevenness in the care of execution from one stretch to another. The models displayed in one of the rooms of the Museum of the Walls serve exactly this purpose: they show the phases in section, the difference between the Aurelian curtain wall and the later raising, and they let you understand in 30 seconds what a two-dimensional drawing can't explain in three pages.

The gates of the Aurelian Walls

There were 14 main gates and they followed the departure of the great consular roads: Flaminia, Pinciana, Salaria, Nomentana, Tiburtina, Prenestina and Labicana together in the double Porta Maggiore, Asinaria, Metronia, Latina, Appia, Ostiense, Portuense, Aurelia. The most important ones had two archways with semicylindrical towers on either side, the minor ones a single passage. The late antique rebuilding reduced the archways from two to one almost everywhere, and the reason is as obvious as it is melancholy: fewer openings, fewer weak points, fewer men needed to guard them. A gate that narrows is a city that feels less safe.

In the Museum of the Walls an entire room is devoted to Porta Appia and the other gates of the circuit, with panels comparing their plans and elevations. It's the room I recommend looking at most carefully, because it gives you the grammar to read all the other gates of Rome. Anyone who leaves here and passes Porta Latina, Porta Metronia, Porta Asinaria or Porta Tiburtina recognizes them as variants of the same scheme, and not as unrelated buildings.

From Aurelian to Honorius: the doubling that saved Rome

Aurelian's circuit was born as a barrier, not as a fortress. Six or eight meters of height stop a mounted band, not an army that knows how to conduct a siege. The correction came a century and a half later, at a time when the threat had become concrete, and it was radical: around 403, under Honorius and on Stilicho's initiative, the height was almost doubled, going from the initial six or eight meters to at least 10.5 meters, with peaks of around 15. The uncovered Aurelian walkway was covered and turned into an inner gallery with arrow slits, and above it a second open-air walkway was created, protected by crenellations.

This is the intervention that makes the Aurelian Walls what you see today, and it is the technical reason the wall walk of the Museum of the Walls exists. When you walk through that covered gallery and peer into the arrow slits, you are not on Aurelian's wall: you are inside Aurelian's wall, in a space created by raising it. Above your head, the second level. Under your feet, the third-century walkway, now become a floor.

The restorers of the twentieth century insisted a great deal on the Honorian part of Porta Appia, and rightly: it is the most readable and best preserved phase. The Honorian raising produced the present raised attic with two rows of six arched windows each, the reduction of the passage to a single archway, and the enclosing of the tower bases inside two square-plan bases faced with marble, a material recovered from older monuments. Anyone looking at the gate from outside sees first of all those two white cubes at the base of the towers: they are the signature of the Honorian phase.

Belisarius, the Goths and the Aurelian Walls at war

The walls were seriously tested in the sixth century. In 537 and 538 Belisarius, Justinian's general, defended Rome from the siege of the Gothic king Vitiges with a ridiculously small force compared to the length of the perimeter. His strategy was the one every commander adopts when he has 19 kilometers of wall and 5,000 men: make the secondary gates impassable, wall up the posterns, concentrate the defenders on the points under attack, use the city's internal mobility as a multiplier. The sources of the time say the Goths attempted the assault with mobile towers drawn by oxen, and that the Byzantine archers brought down the oxen before the towers. It's a tactical detail worth a lesson: the most imposing siege machine falls if the traction falls.

Rome changed hands several times in those years. The city that re-emerged at the end of the Gothic war was depopulated, impoverished and reduced to a little under a tenth of the inhabitants it once had, but the walls were still there. In the following centuries the ordinary maintenance of the circuit remained one of the political obligations of Roman power, first ducal and then papal. Restoring the walls was the way you declared that you governed the city. Pope Hadrian I in the eighth century, Leo IV in the ninth when he walled the Vatican after the Saracen raid of 846, Nicholas V and Sixtus IV in the 15th, Pius IV in the second half of the 16th when the threat of Barbary corsairs made coastal and urban defense relevant again: each time a rebuilding, each time a coat of arms set into the wall to sign the work.

The medieval walls and their relationship with a city that was emptying out

The medieval section of the Museum of the Walls deals with exactly this, and does it better than you'd expect. The historical fact is that from the seventh century onward the Aurelian circuit stopped corresponding to the city. Rome concentrated in the bend of the Tiber, in the Campo Marzio and in Trastevere. The Aventine, the Celio, the Esquiline, the Viminal and the Quirinal were depopulated and became a landscape of vineyards, vegetable gardens, reed beds, isolated monasteries and fortified farmhouses. The walls continued to run around 1,200 hectares of which perhaps a tenth was inhabited.

This produced curious consequences. Towers were rented out, occupied, turned into homes, hayloft barns, shelters for hermits. The gates became tax posts for collecting duties, and some of them took their name from the toll before the saint. The Roman barons, Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Frangipane, seized the stretches that passed near their properties and used them as private curtain walls in the city's wars. Anyone who walks the circuit and finds a stretch with irregular masonry, small tufa blocks and chaotic reused material is almost always looking at a medieval restoration carried out by someone who was defending himself, not the city.

The Ardeatine Bastion: the last military idea of the Aurelian Walls

In the sixteenth century the late antique walls were militarily useless. Gunpowder artillery had made the high, thin curtain wall obsolete, and the sack of 1527 had shown it in the most brutal way. Paul III Farnese then commissioned Antonio da Sangallo the Younger to rebuild the city's southern defenses according to the criteria of bastioned fortification, with low, thick, angled works able to withstand cannon and hit it from the side.

The result is the Ardeatine Bastion, which stands on Viale di Porta Ardeatina, between Porta San Paolo and Porta San Sebastiano, wedged inside the Aurelian circuit. It has the funnel-shaped embrasures typical of the sixteenth century, designed to hold artillery pieces, and casemates from which light weapons were fired. Inside it preserves eight octagonal chambers connected by tunnels. The Farnese coat of arms stands out on the structure, which is the signature of the patron. The threat that justified it was the Turkish one, feared along the southern Tyrrhenian coasts. Work slowed and was abandoned around 1539, partly because Sangallo was diverted to strengthening the Leonine City. The bastion remained unfinished and unused for the following centuries, when the threat faded.

In the Museum of the Walls the model of the Ardeatine Bastion takes up a room by itself, the seventh, and it's not a bizarre choice: it is the only element of the circuit that belongs to a completely different military logic from the Roman one, and seeing it as a model helps you understand why an angled bastion beats a round tower. Practical advice: look at it before you leave, then go see the bastion in person along Viale di Porta Ardeatina. It's a 20-minute walk and that wraps up the lesson.

1849 and 1870: the walls fight for the last time

The Aurelian Walls had two military epilogues 21 years apart, both lost by those defending. The first was in 1849, during the Roman Republic: the French siege concentrated on the Janiculum front, and the walls were hastily adapted to nineteenth-century rifle fire. The trace of that adaptation is visible right along the wall walk of the Museum of the Walls, where some square-shaped loopholes date from 1848 and were made by transforming the ancient openings to adapt them to portable firearms. They are a detail that almost nobody notices and that is worth looking for: it is the only point of the visit where a modification to the masonry has an almost certain date and a purely warlike reason.

The second epilogue is September 20, 1870, when Italian artillery opened the breach near Porta Pia and the bersaglieri entered the city, ending the temporal power of the popes. From that moment the walls stopped being a defensive structure and became an urban planning problem: Rome as capital had to grow, and the circuit was in the way. In the following decades new openings were made, some stretches demolished, portions cut away to let roads and trams through. That 12.5 kilometers remain, after 150 years of building expansion, is almost an administrative miracle.

Porta San Sebastiano, the gate that houses the Museum of the Walls

Porta San Sebastiano is the largest and among the best preserved of the gates of the Aurelian Walls. Anyone looking at it from outside, that is from the Piazzale Numa Pompilio side, faces a front that doesn't look like an urban gate but like a castle: two very tall semicircular towers set on square marble bases, a central body with a single archway, an attic with two rows of six arched windows, a mass of brick that closes the street. It's an image that ended up in hundreds of engravings of the Grand Tour, and that still has the same effect today: you see it appear at the end of the road and suddenly understand what it meant to arrive in Rome by land.

The names of the gate: Appia, Accia, Domine quo vadis, San Sebastiano

The original name was Porta Appia, because Via Appia, the regina viarum, left from here. It began a little further back, from the Porta Capena of the Servian Walls, and the gate kept the name for a long time. In the Middle Ages the name Accia also appears, which the sources give in the variants Dazza and Datia. The etymology is uncertain, but the most widely followed hypothesis links it to the little river Almone that flowed nearby and was called the Accia water. A document of 1434 mentions it as Porta Domine quo vadis, from the sanctuary found just outside, where tradition places the meeting between Peter in flight and Christ. Only after the middle of the 15th century is the name it bears today stably attested, owing to the proximity of the basilica and the catacombs of San Sebastiano.

This sequence of names is not useless erudition. It's the quickest way to explain to visitors how urban place names worked before street numbers. A gate was named for what lay on the other side, and changed its name when what mattered on the other side changed. First the road mattered, then the duty, then the sanctuary, finally the martyr with the most visited basilica. The religious and fiscal history of Rome is all inside four place names.

The Aurelian phase of Porta Appia

The original structure, built around 275, had an opening with two archways topped by arched windows, set between two semicylindrical towers. The facade was faced in travertine. Two side-by-side passages meant separate incoming and outgoing traffic, and this says how much the Appia mattered at that moment: you build a double-arched gate only where the flow requires it. The towers, in this first version, were lower and lacked the square bases.

At a later time, but still before the Honorian intervention, the two towers were enlarged, raised and connected by two parallel walls to the arch that stands a few meters further inside, the so-called Arch of Drusus. This created a closed courtyard in which the arch worked as a counter-gate: whoever entered passed a first archway, found himself in a cramped space watched from above and had to get past a second barrier. It's the simplest and most effective defensive device antiquity knew, and the major gates of the Aurelian Walls almost all adopted it.

The Honorian rebuilding and the present appearance

At the time of the rebuilding carried out in 401 and 402 under Emperor Honorius, the gate was redesigned with a single archway, with a raised attic in which two rows of six arched windows open, and was given an open crenellated wall walk. The base of the two towers was enclosed in two square-plan bases faced with marble. A later rebuilding gave it its present appearance, raising the whole structure by one floor, towers included.

On this last phase the discussion is open and it's worth reporting precisely, distinguishing the documented from the hypothetical. The usual commemorative plaque for the work is missing, and its absence has led some scholars to doubt that the intervention is Honorius's work, since he left laudatory inscriptions on every other job done on the walls and gates. It is an argument from absence, so fragile by definition, but not unreasonable: an emperor who always signs and suddenly doesn't either did not do the work himself, or his signature has been lost. Here the certain fact remains, namely the raising, and the attribution has to be kept as an open question.

The portcullis, the maneuvering chamber and the details nobody looks at

The gate was closed by two wooden leaves and a portcullis that came down within grooves still visible from the maneuvering chamber above, where the travertine brackets that supported it still exist. Some notches on the jambs suggest that reinforcing beams were also used for the closures. These are three details you can see with the naked eye, in 30 seconds, and almost all visitors walk past them without noticing.

My practical advice for anyone entering the Museum of the Walls is to spend the first five minutes on the archway, even before going up. Stand under the arch, look up at the thickness of the vault, look for the two vertical grooves at the jambs, locate the travertine brackets in the chamber above. Once you've understood how this gate closed, everything you see in the rooms will make concrete sense. It's the difference between visiting a museum of panels and visiting a defensive machine that you can still take apart with your eyes.

The Archangel Michael and the inscription of 1327

On the right jamb of the archway, toward the inside, is carved the figure of the Archangel Michael killing the dragon, accompanied by an inscription in medieval Latin in Gothic characters. It recalls a clash that took place on September 29, 1327, the feast day of Saint Michael, when the Ghibelline Roman militias tied to the Colonna, led by Giacomo de' Ponziani, faced the Guelph army of King Robert of Anjou of Naples, which included Giovanni and Gaetano Orsini. The text ends with the formula that the enemy was defeated by the Roman people.

This monumental graffito is, for me, the most moving object in the whole complex, and I say that after seeing an unreasonable number of Roman inscriptions. It's not an official epigraph commissioned by a power. It's a civic ex voto carved on the gate through which the danger had passed, with the saint of the day as guarantor of the victory. The real Roman Middle Ages, of baronial factions and district militias, reads better here than in many treatises. Look for it: it's at eye level, on the right as you enter the city, and most passersby walk right next to it without seeing it.

The Greek cross, Saint Conon and Saint George

On the inner side, on the keystone of the archway, there is a Greek cross inscribed in a circle, accompanied by an inscription in Greek invoking Saint Conon and Saint George. The proposed dating places it between the sixth and seventh centuries, so in the Byzantine period of the city, and this makes it one of the most direct testimonies of the Greek Rome of the imperial dukes, the one that spoke Greek in the offices and Latin in the streets.

The theme of the apotropaic cross on gates recurs throughout the circuit, and in the Museum of the Walls it is shown with plaster casts collected from several gates: crosses carved in the stone above the entrance arches, and crosses made directly with bricks during construction, together with palmette and radial decorations made by the workers. They are the signs with which a Christian city entrusted to a symbol the part of the defense that weapons did not cover. In the logic of those standing guard, the cross above the arch was worth as much as the portcullis.

April 5, 1536: Charles V, Antonio da Sangallo and the gate turned into a triumphal arch

The most theatrical day in the history of this gate is April 5, 1536, when Emperor Charles V entered Rome on his return from the Tunis campaign. Paul III wanted a triumphal entrance in the ancient style, and the staging was entrusted to Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who transformed Porta San Sebastiano into a true triumphal arch adorned with statues, columns and friezes, and organized the ceremonial route to the Roman Forum by demolishing the buildings that obstructed the path. A celebratory inscription compared the emperor to Scipio Africanus, a transparent reference to the African victory just won.

It's worth pausing a moment on the political meaning of that day, because it explains why this gate and not another. Nine years earlier imperial troops had put Rome to fire and sword in the sack of 1527. In 1536 the same sovereign returned to the city as defender of Christendom, welcomed with the honors reserved for Republican triumphators. The gate of Via Appia was there to say one thing only: the emperor returns to Rome by the road of the ancient triumphs, and the city recognizes him as the heir of those. Renaissance propaganda didn't need posters. It needed an entrance and an architect able to stage it in a few weeks.

Practically nothing is left of the 1536 apparatus, because it was ephemeral by definition: wood, stucco, painted canvas. What remains is the inscription and the memory of the gesture, and the conceptual strangeness of a late antique fortification dressed up for a day as a celebratory monument. The passage from 401 to 1536 under the same arch is the moment when you understand what stratification in Rome really means.

The Arch of Drusus, the False Triumphal Arch in Front of the Museo delle Mura

A few meters from the gate, toward the inside of the city, stands an isolated arch that all the nineteenth-century guidebooks called the Arch of Drusus and that for centuries was believed to be a triumphal arch erected in 9 BC in honor of Drusus the Elder, Augustus's stepson who died in Germany. It is one of the most durable wrong attributions in Roman topography, and it has to be taken apart calmly because the real monument is more interesting than the imagined one.

The arch is a span of the Antonine aqueduct, the branch of the Aqua Marcia that Caracalla had built to supply his baths. The pipeline, coming from the east, had to cross Via Appia right at the start of its course, and in a spot so exposed to the eyes of anyone entering or leaving Rome, hydraulic engineering allowed itself a monumental disguise: two columns on a high plinth framing the facade facing the outside of the city, a triangular pediment of which a portion survives, a decoration worthy of an honorary arch. Put simply, an aqueduct pier dressed up as a triumphal arch.

At the beginning of the fifth century, under Honorius, the arch was connected to Porta San Sebastiano by two defensive walls, of which no visible trace remains today. This was the arrangement of the inner courtyard mentioned above. Anyone looking at the arch today, isolated in the middle of the road, sees a fragment that survived from a much more complex system.

A firm opinion, and I've defended it for years: the Arch of Drusus is the most mistreated monument in this stretch of the city. Cars drive right past it, it has no decent information of any kind, and 90 percent of the people who get off the bus still mistake it for a triumphal arch because the wrong name has stayed on the signs and the maps. If you have 10 minutes, stop underneath, look at the springing level of the vault and imagine the water that ran over it on its way to the Baths of Caracalla. It changes everything.

The Mutatorium Caesaris and the Park-and-Ride of Ancient Rome

Given the importance of Via Appia, which left the city from here, in Roman times this whole area saw heavy traffic movement. The ancient sources and the topography suggest that near the gate there was an area for parking the private vehicles of people entering Rome, naturally people of a rank that let them afford a carriage. It was what today we would call a park-and-ride, since private vehicle traffic inside the city was generally not allowed during daylight hours.

The rule applied to the imperial household as well. The private vehicles of the prince's family were left in a reserved area called the mutatorium Caesaris, not far from here, toward the start of Via Appia. The name indicates the place where you changed: you got down from the cart and continued on foot or in a litter. It's a detail that puts the complaints about the limited traffic zone of the historic center in perspective. Rome has been limiting private traffic inside the walls for about 2,100 years, with the sumptuary law of 45 BC attributed to Caesar as the first known act of the series. It is not a recent administrative fashion: it is an urban planning constant.

The Visit to the Museo delle Mura, Room by Room

The route unfolds on two levels, with seven numbered rooms plus the terrace and the access to the walkway. The rooms are small, because the spaces carved out inside a fortified gate are small, and the limit of five people per room depends exactly on this. Here I describe the itinerary in the order in which you go through it, with what is worth looking at in each space.

Room I of the Museo delle Mura: The Educational Room and the First Mosaic

You begin with the educational room, the one the museum uses for activities with schools and for meetings. The thing to look at is not on the walls but under your feet: the floor mosaic made between 1940 and 1943, in black and white, which belongs to the transformation of the gate into a private dwelling that is discussed further on. It is a floor of rationalist taste, geometric, with that two-color dryness that Italian architecture of those years had taken from the ancient mosaics of Ostia and the baths.

Anyone who walks in without knowing what they're looking at takes it for a Roman floor. It's an understandable and instructive mistake: the mosaic is conceived to look ancient, and it succeeds. Look at the mechanical regularity of the tesserae, the edges that are too sharp, the absence of patches: no Roman floor left in place for 17 centuries has that order. It is the best proof that the taste for the ancient and the ancient itself resemble each other only until you look closely.

Room II of the Museo delle Mura: The Ancient Section and the Second Portion of Mosaic

The second room houses the panels of the ancient section and a portion of the floor mosaic made on the same 1940 and 1943 construction site. The panels here deal with the general framework: what the Servian Walls were, why imperial Rome had no need of defenses for three centuries, what changed in the third century. It is the room where it is worth slowing down, because it sets up everything else. The graphics are dated, the content is not.

Room III of the Museo delle Mura: The Models of the Walls

The round room on the first floor displays the models of the different construction phases of the Aurelian Walls and a model representing the schematic plan of Rome with the lines of its fortifications superimposed. It is the most useful space in the whole museum and the one I recommend looking at twice, at the beginning and at the end of the visit.

The model of the phases shows in section the low Aurelian curtain wall with the uncovered walkway, then the same wall raised under Honorius with the covered gallery obtained at the lower level and the new crenellated walkway at the top. 30 seconds in front of that model are worth more than 10 pages of description: you physically understand why the walkway you will go along shortly is a gallery with arrow slits and not a terrace. The schematic plan of the city with the three circuits superimposed, on the other hand, serves another purpose: it shows the distance between the Servian and the Aurelian walls, that is, the measure of Rome's growth between the fourth century BC and the third century AD. It is a photograph of imperial expansion reduced to two lines on a map.

Room IV of the Museo delle Mura: Porta Appia and the Other Gates of the Circuit

Here the panels concentrate on the gate where you are and on its sisters along the circuit. Plans, elevations, typological comparisons, historical photographs of the states before the restorations. It is the room that makes the visit usable outside: anyone who looks at it carefully leaves able to recognize a double-arched gate reduced to a single arch, to read the marble facing of an Honorian base, to tell a semicircular Aurelian tower from a square rebuilt one.

Room V of the Museo delle Mura: The Completion of the Ancient Section

The fifth room closes the ancient section with panels on construction technique, materials, organization of the construction site and late antique restorations. The theme I recommend following here is reuse: how many pre-existing structures were absorbed into the circuit and how. The list is long and includes monuments that today are visited as things in themselves, from the Castrense Amphitheater to the Pyramid of Cestius, from the Claudian Porta Maggiore to the tombs along the consular roads. Anyone who keeps this list in mind then looks at the city in a different way.

Room VI of the Museo delle Mura: The Medieval and Modern Sections

On the second floor the narrative resumes with the historical and architectural events of the walls after antiquity. For the Middle Ages the central theme is the changing relationship between the circuit and the inhabited area: a city that shrinks inside a belt that is too wide, rented towers, gates turned into toll offices, stretches privatized by the baronial families. For the modern age the subjects are the papal interventions, the restorations, the walled-in coats of arms, the adaptation to artillery and finally the nineteenth-century crisis, when the circuit became an obstacle to the growth of the capital.

Room VII of the Museo delle Mura: The Model of the Bastione Ardeatino

The last room is devoted to the model of the Bastione Ardeatino by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. As I said, the pairing is didactically excellent: after six rooms of tall curtain walls and round towers you arrive in front of a work that is low, thick, angled, with funnel-shaped loopholes for the cannon and octagonal chambers connected by tunnels. The visual comparison explains the revolution of gunpowder artillery by itself, better than any caption.

The Casts of the Crosses and of the Brick Decorations

On the walls of two rooms in the Museo delle Mura are displayed plaster casts of the crosses carved into the stone above the entrance arches of some of the circuit's gates. The same casts reproduce the crosses and the palmette and sunburst decorations that the workers made with bricks during the construction of the walls. They are humble and precious objects: they document the individual gesture inside a colossal public work, the anonymous signature of the bricklayer who arranges a sunburst out of bricks while raising the facing.

I find these casts to be the most overlooked thing in the museum, and they shouldn't be. A circuit of 19 kilometers built in a few years is an administrative machine. The brick sunbursts are the people inside the machine. With teenagers it's worth stopping here longer than in the rooms with the scale models, because it's the only point where the ancient building site stops being a statistic.

The terrace between the two towers of Porta San Sebastiano

From the second floor you reach the terrace on the central body of the gate, between the two towers. From there the view opens in two directions: inward, onto Via di Porta San Sebastiano, which climbs between the walls of the villas, with the green of the Baths of Caracalla at the end, outward, onto the start of Via Appia Antica, the small square with the entrance to the Appia Park and the first pine crowns that mark the route of the regina viarum. This is the point where you grasp the logic of the place: the gate faces a road that leaves and doesn't come back, and the museum exists because that road mattered more than all the others.

The terrace of the tower, the highest one, is instead not open to the public. It's useful to know this beforehand, because photographs taken from up there circulate online and feed expectations that are bound to be disappointed.

The patrol walkway: the walk on the walls of the Museo delle Mura

This is the reason the trip is worth it, no doubt about it. From the museum you access a long stretch of patrol walk on the Aurelian Walls, about 350 meters, which appears as a covered gallery interrupted by 10 towers and ends at the top with an uncovered walkway sheltered by crenellations. The route runs toward Via Cristoforo Colombo. There is nothing comparable in Rome: it's the only place in the city where you walk inside the ancient walls with permission to do so and without paying a cent.

What you see along the walkway of the Museo delle Mura

Along the route the masonry of the Honorian period is preserved, from the very first years of the 5th century, with the arrow slits for the archers set into niches, and the large arches open on the opposite side, toward the city. Inside some towers you can still see the stairs that served to reach the upper maneuvering rooms, which no longer exist. The sequence is hypnotic: niche, arrow slit, light, dark, tower, stairs, arch, gallery again. After the third tower you stop counting and start to understand what it meant to stand guard up there for eight hours.

Restorations from different periods are evident, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, recognizable by the type of building technique or by the transformation of a wall structure carried out after a collapse. Among these are the square arrow slits dating to 1848, obtained by transforming the openings to adapt them to rifle fire during the fighting of the Roman Republic. If you feel like an exercise in reading masonry, here you have the complete sample set: regular late-antique brick, messy medieval patches, smooth, well-squared 17th-century curtain walls, 20th-century stitching recognizable by the color of the brick.

The hermit's Madonna and the crack in the floor

Two details deserve a planned stop, both at the level of the third tower. As you step out of the tower onto the walkway, remains of the original paving are preserved on the ground, with a central crack that marks the line where Aurelian's structure joins the later widening made by Honorius. It's a crack worth a century and a half of history: on one side the 3rd century, on the other the 5th, separated by a centimeter of joint.

Above, on the lunette of the tower's exit opening, a painting survives that represents the Madonna with Child. It's the memory of the tower's use as a place of retreat for a hermit, perhaps in the medieval period. Stop. A late-antique watchtower that becomes a prayer cell is the perfect summary of a thousand years of Roman history, and for once no panel is needed to explain it: there's a painted figure above a door, and that's enough.

The rules of the walkway and how long it takes

Along the outer walkway it is strictly forbidden to leave the marked route. The rule is firm and has obvious reasons: you walk at height, on ancient structures, without continuous parapets at every point. The time needed to walk it and come back, going slowly and stopping to look, is 25 or 30 minutes. If you have 50 minutes total of stay, the math does itself: 20 minutes in the rooms, 30 on the walkway, and not one coffee too many.

The professional's advice is to reverse the usual order. Go up right away, do the walkway with a fresh head and a charged phone battery, then come back and look at the rooms at your leisure, because by then the panels on the restorations and building techniques will tell you something you have just seen with your own eyes. Done in the reverse order, the museum risks seeming like a preamble that's too long.

The 2001 collapse and the restoration that gave the walk back

On the evening of April 15, 2001, a considerable portion of the Aurelian Walls collapsed in the stretch between Porta San Sebastiano and Via Cristoforo Colombo: 12 meters long, between tower 7 and tower 8. As a result, the entire walkway that goes from the museum to the arches on Via Colombo was closed to the public.

The collapse essentially involved the brick curtain wall built under Innocent X Pamphilj, so between 1644 and 1655. That curtain wall had been poorly bonded from the start to the original core of Aurelian and Honorius, and over time the infiltration of rainwater caused its detachment, its slippage and finally the collapse of the 17th-century wall. The coat of arms and the inscription that Innocent X had placed on that stretch, in memory of his own restoration, were sheltered in the Museo delle Mura after the collapse.

The conservation, enhancement and restoration of Aurelian's circuit have since then been the object of constant attention from the Capitoline administration, which with a first round of funding was able to carry out, between 2004 and 2006, the reconstruction of the collapsed stretch and the restoration of the wall facings, in addition to urgent consolidation work. In July 2006 the entire walk on the walls was reopened to the public, giving the museum's educational route its natural conclusion back.

There's a lesson inside this story, and I say it plainly because it concerns the future of the monument. The stretch that collapsed wasn't the ancient one: it was the 17th-century patch. The late-antique walls held, the Baroque restoration didn't, and the reason is documented precisely, namely the poor bonding between two masonries of different periods plus 18 years of unintercepted rainwater. Anyone who works in cultural heritage knows that the number one enemy of a brick curtain wall is not the earthquake: it's the cover that doesn't shed water well. In 2007 another collapse, in a different stretch of the circuit, confirmed it. Ordinary maintenance costs little and makes no news. Emergency restoration costs a huge amount and closes a public route for five years.

When the gate became a home: Ettore Muti at Porta San Sebastiano

There is a chapter of this story that the museum tells honestly and that almost no tourist guide reports in full, even though it is the reason the gate has reached us in the state in which we see it. Between 1940 and 1943 Porta San Sebastiano was the subject of a major restoration designed and directed by the architect Luigi Moretti. The aim was to transform the ancient construction into a study and residence for the Fascist official Ettore Muti, who had asked for and obtained from the Governor of Rome first the concession of Porta San Paolo, then that of Porta San Sebastiano. Moretti restored the gate, redesigned its spaces, took care of all the furnishings in detail and had two floor mosaics made. Thanks to that radical intervention the gate has come down to us in its present state.

Luigi Moretti, the architect who redesigned the interior of Porta San Sebastiano

It's worth saying who Moretti was, because the name means little to the general public and a great deal to those who work in 20th-century architecture. A Roman, trained very young, author of the Casa della Gioventù Italiana del Littorio at the Foro Mussolini, after the war he signed some of the most refined works of the second half of 20th-century Italy, from the Palazzina del Girasole in Parioli to the Watergate complex in Washington. He was a designer of very great hand and sure taste, able to work on the ancient with an elegance that his contemporaries rarely achieved. Whoever looks at the interior spaces of the gate with an attentive eye recognizes that hand: spare proportions, few chosen materials, the black and white of the floors, the absence of superfluous decoration.

The story, however, raises a problem that comes up often in Rome and that I prefer to face rather than skirt. In 1939 the Antiquities and Fine Arts Department opposed the adaptation: turning an ancient monument into a private residence meant pouring new floor slabs, creating rooms with partition walls, installing stairs, redoing floors. From the point of view of protection it was an act of violence. From the point of view of material conservation, paradoxically, it was the salvation: the gate was decayed, the restoration consolidated it, and without that building site we probably wouldn't have either the rooms or the museum today. Both things are true together, and visitors have a right to know both.

The black and white mosaics of the Museo delle Mura

Of the two floor mosaics made in those years, portions remain visible in the first and second rooms. They are two-tone, black and white, with geometric motifs that deliberately recall the Roman floors of the imperial age. The learned reference is evident and intended: in the 1930s and 1940s the appeal to the ancient was not an erudite quotation but a political statement, and a Fascist official who made himself a home inside an imperial gate and had an ancient-style mosaic laid under his feet knew perfectly well what he was communicating.

To look at them without naivety, it's best to do this: observe the design and ask yourself what is missing compared with a real ancient floor. The signature of imperfection is missing. Roman mosaics have tesserae of unequal size, corrections, stretches where the master changes hand, ancient restorations done with different material. These are perfect, and the perfection gives them away. It's an excellent exercise to do with kids, who learn in five minutes to tell an original from a revival better than they would from a theory lesson of an hour.

What happened afterward, and how the museum treats this memory

The occupation of the gate was very brief. Ettore Muti, who had been secretary of the National Fascist Party between 1939 and 1941 and earlier a much-decorated military pilot, died on August 24, 1943, in circumstances never completely clarified, during a police operation in the pine forest of Fregene, a few weeks after the fall of the regime. The apartment in the gate remained, its occupant did not.

The Museo delle Mura addresses this story openly, with meetings and themed visits devoted to the Fascist official's residence and to the 20th-century transformation of the gate. It's a choice I appreciate. In Rome there are dozens of monuments where the passage of the Fascist era is passed over in silence out of embarrassment, and the result is that visitors attribute to the wrong periods things built in the 1930s. Here instead the layering is declared: the 3rd century, the 5th, the 14th, the 16th, the 17th, the 20th. A monument is the sum of those who used it, including those we would have preferred hadn't.

The Museo delle Mura within the Civic Museums system

The museum is run by the Capitoline Superintendency for Cultural Heritage and is part of the Roma Capitale Museums System. This has some practical consequences that are useful to know. The first is that the single number 060608 is the official channel for information, group bookings, school bookings and dedicated educational programs. It answers every day from 09:00 to 19:00. The second is that the museum takes part in the initiatives of the whole network, from special openings to educational programs, and that its calendars can be found on the system's portal as well as on the museum's website. The third is that accessibility and services follow common standards, with the exception of the limitations imposed by the building.

In the civic network the Museo delle Mura has a precise function: it's the head of a thread that leads to the Capitoline Museums, the Centrale Montemartini, the Markets of Trajan, the Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi and the Casina delle Civette. Anyone who lives in Rome and holds the MIC card has a year of visits ahead at no further cost. Those who come from outside can build a themed itinerary on ancient Rome that doesn't go through the Colosseum and has no lines.

The Museo delle Mura and Via Appia Antica

Stepping out of the gate's arch and finding yourself at the start of Via Appia Antica is an experience that's worth the visit as much as the rooms. The road begins there, with the cobblestones, the dry-stone walls, the first pines. The Appia Antica Park is one of the largest archaeological parks in Europe, and the Museo delle Mura is in effect its urban gate.

The catacombs and sanctuaries downstream of the Museo delle Mura

In the first three kilometers outside the gate you find the greatest concentration of early Christian monuments in the city. The Church of Domine Quo Vadis is a few hundred meters away and preserves the tradition of the meeting between Peter and Christ. A little farther on open the Catacombs of San Callisto, the official cemetery of the Church of Rome in the 3rd century, and the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, beneath the basilica of San Sebastiano fuori le mura, which gave the gate its modern name. If you want an overview before choosing, the page on the catacombs of Rome is useful.

The recommended combination is this: Museo delle Mura at opening time, walkway, then a descent on foot toward Domine Quo Vadis and from there a single catacomb, not two. Two catacombs on the same day produce memory confusion and no distinct recollection. Better one visited well and an extra hour of walking on the paved road.

Inward: the Baths of Caracalla and the Caelian

On the other side, going back up toward the city, in 20 minutes you reach the Baths of Caracalla, fed by that very Antonine Aqueduct of which the arch in front of the gate was an arch. The connection is not a narrative device: it's hydraulics. Farther along you meet the Circus Maximus and, on the hill to the east, the Roman Houses of the Caelian, one of the best-preserved late-antique residential complexes in the city. If you have a whole day you can close the circle toward the Pyramid of Cestius, another monument incorporated into the walls, and toward the Museo della Via Ostiense inside Porta San Paolo, which is the younger brother and twin of this museum.

What to see around the Museo delle Mura within a 10-minute walk

The urban stretch of Via di Porta San Sebastiano is an open-air museum that almost no one walks. Going up toward Piazzale Numa Pompilio you meet the Tomb of the Scipios, the monumental tomb cut into the tuff of the most illustrious family of Republican Rome, begun at the start of the 3rd century BC with the burial of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus, consul in 298, and used until the first decades of the 1st century AD. Inside, the plan is almost square, with four large pillars that divide it into six galleries cut into the tuff bank, with niches for sarcophagi. One further gallery was added around 150 BC. It is visited by reservation at 060608, in limited groups and with a mandatory protective helmet. Admission is free for Rome residents and for MIC card holders, and paid for everyone else with the full and reduced rates indicated by the civic system.

A little farther on, in the direction of Porta Latina, is the Columbarium of Pomponius Hylas, a collective tomb of the Julio-Claudian age with exceptionally well-preserved stuccoes and paintings, closed since August 1, 2024 for works funded by the PNRR, according to the Capitoline Superintendency. And all along the road, behind the boundary walls, line up the villini and gardens that in the 19th century and early 20th century turned this stretch into one of the most elegant promenades in Europe.

Blunt opinion: if you have half a day and want a Roman experience that none of your acquaintances has had, walk from Piazzale Numa Pompilio to the gate looking at the walls, go into the Museo delle Mura, do the walkway, come out the other side and take the Appia for a kilometer. It costs zero euros in tickets, lasts three hours, and beats any organized tour of the center in memorability.

The Museo delle Mura with children

A frequent question, and the answer is more nuanced than a yes or a no. Rooms of panels don't entertain a six-year-old for more than four minutes. The patrol walkway, on the other hand, works very well: it's a corridor inside a wall, with arrow slits to look out of, tower stairs, darkness and light alternating. For a child it's a real castle they're allowed to enter, and that beats any interactive exhibit.

The formula I recommend to parents is the goal-based game. Before going up, tell the children they have to find three things: the square arrow slit that's different from the others, the crack in the floor between two eras, the Madonna painted above the tower door. Three concrete targets turn a walk into a hunt, and at the end, by explaining why those three things are there, you've told the whole story of the walls without anyone noticing.

Watch out for the practical limits: there are no elevators, the stairs are steep and old, strollers have to be left downstairs and the walkway doesn't have continuous parapets along the whole route. With very small children the museum is done carrying them. The rule about not leaving the marked route has to be explained before going up, not during. And the 50-minute limit, with children, runs out sooner than you think.

Accessibility of the Museo delle Mura

On this point transparency is a must, because a wrong visit costs a day to people with mobility difficulties. The museum declares that it is not accessible: the building is a fortified gate of the 3rd century, the layout is vertical, there are no elevators and the stairs are the historic ones, partly 20th-century and partly ancient. The tower terrace is not open to the public. The walkway has changes in level, steps and uneven surfaces.

There are, however, dedicated educational services that can be booked at 060608, including tactile and sensory guided visits and visits in Italian Sign Language. If you have specific needs, make a phone call before leaving: the staff know the building better than any information sheet and can say precisely what is feasible and what is not. Those who can't climb will still find outside the monumental front of the gate, the Arch of Drusus and the start of the Appia, which alone are worth the trip.

How much time you need to visit the Museo delle Mura

The maximum time allowed is 50 minutes for individual visitors and 60 for booked groups. In practice, the reasonable breakdown is this: five minutes under the arch looking at the grooves and brackets, 15 minutes in the rooms with a longer stop in front of the scale models, 25 or 30 minutes on the walkway there and back. Anyone who wants to read all the panels, and there are many, won't manage and will have to choose. If you have to cut, the choice always goes in favor of the walkway.

Adding the approach on foot from Circo Massimo, the visit and a walk of a kilometer on the Appia, you build a full half day. Adding one catacomb brings you to a whole day without rushing.

When to go to the Museo delle Mura

The best season is the in-between one: April, May, October. The walkway is a covered gallery with open arches, so in summer you cook and in winter a wind comes in through the arrow slits with remarkable determination. In July and August, if you really must, go at 10:00 sharp: by 13:00 the brick has accumulated heat and the gallery becomes an oven.

As for the time, opening time is the best slot by far. The quota of 20 people fills up mostly on weekends and on spring school mornings. On Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, out of season, you sometimes have the walkway all to yourself. The best light for photographing the outer facade is instead the late afternoon, when the sun hits the front facing the Appia, but at that hour the museum is closed: the photo is taken after the visit, from the street.

A curiosity about the Museo delle Mura

The curiosity that is usually kept for last, and that here goes first, concerns a crack. At the level of the third tower, as you step out onto the walkway, the floor preserves a fragment of the original surface crossed by a central crack. It's not damage, it's not subsidence, it's not the sign of an earthquake: it's the joint between two building sites separated by a century and a half. On one side Aurelian's structure, from the 270s of the 3rd century. On the other, Honorius's widening, from the early years of the 5th. A centimeter of black line that is worth 130 years of the history of the Empire, including Christianization, the division between East and West and the first sack of Rome.

The reason this crack is moving is technical. Anyone who widens an existing wall has two options: demolish and rebuild, or lean the new structure against the old. The second is quicker and cheaper, and it's the one that late-antique building sites almost always chose, with the result that the two masonries never form a single body. It's exactly the flaw that 1,600 years later, on another stretch and with a 17th-century curtain wall, produced the 2001 collapse. The crack at the third tower is therefore a document and a warning together: it shows how the walls grew and explains why every so often they fall.

Then there's the detail that makes the most attentive visitors smile. That joint is visible because someone, in the years of the exhibition fit-out, decided not to cover it with the modern flooring. It was a conscious museographic choice, entirely in line with the character of the place: here the find isn't in the display case, it's under your shoes. Look at the ground at least as much as you look at the walls, because in this museum the floor speaks, and it speaks in two different eras one meter apart.

I'll add a second curiosity, minor but enjoyable. The medieval name of the gate, Accia, would derive from the little river Almone called acqua Accia, and in the records it also appears as Dazza and Datia. In the Rome of the 15th-century notaries you therefore find a gate that has three names at once depending on who is writing: the official uses the tax name, the pilgrim the name of the sanctuary, the scholar the ancient one. This is why anyone who works on Roman documents has to know the gates like people, with their nicknames.

Something nobody tells you about the Museo delle Mura

Nobody will tell you that the Museo delle Mura is, materially, the apartment of a Fascist official with panels hung on the walls. The rooms you walk through are not ancient spaces: they are rooms carved out between 1940 and 1943 with new floor slabs, partition walls, stairs installed then and floors redone on a design by Luigi Moretti. The sequence of the spaces, their size, the way you pass from one to another are the result of a 20th-century residential project, not of late-antique military logic.

This radically changes the way you visit. If you enter thinking you're going to walk inside the guardroom of the 5th century, you'll wonder why a fortified gate has such regular rooms and such comfortable windows. If instead you enter knowing that the shell is ancient and the interior is 20th-century, you'll see two buildings on top of each other and you'll start to tell them apart: the ancient masonry where it emerges, the modern floor slabs where they close it off, the black and white mosaic where the designer wanted to imitate Rome with the means of his time.

The second thing nobody says concerns the proportions of the visit. The official communications describe a museum with three sections and a walkway, as if the relationship were equal. It isn't. The rooms are exhausted in a quarter of an hour, the walkway takes a good half hour and is the part everyone remembers. Anyone who organizes their time by the official description reaches the walkway with 10 minutes left and turns back halfway. The advice has already been given, and it bears repeating here because it's the point where the visit is won or lost: go up right away.

Third unspoken thing, and it concerns photographic expectations. Many images circulating online show panoramas shot from the top of the tower. The tower terrace is not open to the public. The accessible one is the terrace of the central body between the two towers, lower and with a more closed view. It's beautiful all the same, but it isn't the one in the photographs you've seen, and knowing this beforehand spares you the disappointed face halfway up the stairs.

The advice I give you for visiting the Museo delle Mura

The advice is one, and it's worth more than all the others put together: arrive on foot. Don't take the bus to the gate, get off at Circo Massimo or at the Baths of Caracalla and walk the last kilometer along Via di Porta San Sebastiano. That road is the vestibule of the museum, and without the vestibule the museum loses half its meaning. You walk between 19th-century boundary walls, cypresses, gates of private villas, the Tomb of the Scipios on the right, the start of Via di Porta Latina on the left, and the traffic gradually fades until it's a distant noise. Then, at the end, the gate appears whole. It's the same effect it had on those arriving from the Appia 18 centuries ago, with the difference that you see it from inside.

Second piece of advice, an operational one: call 060608 the day before if you're more than four. The quota of 20 people and the limit of five per room make the entry of a spontaneous group a problem for everyone, the group included. With a free reservation you enter in an orderly way and gain 10 minutes of extra stay.

Third piece of advice, which concerns equipment and seems trivial until you need it: closed shoes with a sole that grips, a light jacket even in spring, and free hands. The walkway is covered but ventilated, the surfaces are uneven, the tower stairs are narrow and in some places you go down holding an iron handrail. Whoever arrives in flip-flops and with a full shoulder bag does half the route and turns back.

Fourth and last, the least obvious advice: bring a small flashlight or use the one on your phone, and look inside the niches of the arrow slits. In the shadow of the niches you can read the mortar joints, the reused bricks with stamps, the medieval patches and the modern grouting. This is the point where a panoramic walk becomes a lesson in the archaeology of architecture. And it costs 20 seconds per arrow slit.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

Everyone knows the Aurelian Walls were built in a hurry. Almost no one cites the most conspicuous consequence of that hurry: the circuit incorporated everything it found along its route, and for this reason a surprising number of Roman monuments that we visit today as stand-alone buildings are, technically, pieces of wall. The Pyramid of Gaius Cestius is a bastion of the circuit near Porta San Paolo. The Amphitheatrum Castrense, the private arena of the Sessorian imperial residence, was cut in half and turned into curtain wall at the Esquiline. The Claudian Porta Maggiore, which was the monumental crossing point of two aqueducts, became an urban gate. The camp of the praetorians, the Castra Praetoria, was incorporated on three sides out of four. And the very arch in front of Porta San Sebastiano is an aqueduct arch.

The calculation the scholars have made is impressive: a substantial portion of the circuit, estimated by some at around a sixth of the total length, consisted of reused pre-existing structures. It means the builders saved years of construction. It also means, and here the fact becomes interesting, that the route of the walls did not follow the ideal defensive line but a compromise between what was worth defending and what was already standing. Anyone who looks at the map of Rome with the walls laid over it sees a line that makes inexplicable curves: those curves are buildings.

The second part of the fact, even less cited, concerns the material. The brick facing of the walls is full of reused bricks, coming from the demolition of buildings even much older, and the brick stamps that can be read there often belong to productions of the 1st and 2nd centuries. An archaeologist who dated the walls from the stamps would be wrong by two centuries. It's the textbook example of why reuse makes the dating of Roman masonry treacherous, and in the Museo delle Mura this theme is explained with drawings of the sections, which remain the most effective tool ever invented for understanding it.

It's worth adding that this reuse was first noticed, methodically, by 19th-century scholarship, and that the historical cartography of the walls is one of the most solid chapters of Roman topography. The panels of the ancient section show the diagrams that derive from it. If you only have time to read three panels, read these.

The right photo to take at the Museo delle Mura

The photograph everyone takes is the outer front of the gate with the two towers, shot from the middle of the road toward the Appia. It's a beautiful image and it should be taken, with two precautions. First: get low, at the level of the ancient road surface and not of the sidewalk, because the gate is designed to be looked at by someone arriving on foot or on a cart, and from there the square marble bases gain their mass. Second: wait for late afternoon, when the raking sun lights the southern front and draws the shadow of the arched windows on the attic. At noon the facade is flat and the brick becomes an orange blur with no relief.

The right photograph, though, is another one, and it's taken from inside the walkway. Look for an arrow slit inside its niche, stand at the back of the niche with your back to the gallery and frame the slit of light with the outside landscape in it. You get a high-contrast image, the darkness of the masonry all around and a vertical blade of green and sky at the center. It's the photo that tells what an Honorian archer saw, and no other framing comes close.

The third image, the one I recommend to those who photograph seriously, is the perspective of the covered gallery: stand in the middle of the walkway, rest your elbow on the wall to steady yourself, and shoot in depth the sequence of arches that repeats toward the end. The light enters from the side through the large arches open toward the city and creates a pattern of light and dark bands that with the right lens becomes almost graphic. It's a photo that requires slow shutter speeds because there's little light in there. Lean on the wall, don't bring the tripod: in the limited-access spaces a tripod is an obstacle for the other 19 visitors.

Last suggestion, a contrarian one: photograph the floor. The crack between the Aurelian and the Honorian masonry, the black and white mosaic of the first two rooms, the worn steps of the tower stairs. These are the images nobody has in their archive and that, seen again after a year, bring the visit back to mind better than 10 panoramas.

Some important events that happened here in history

The first event is the construction itself, and it must be counted among the facts because it was lived as such. In 271 Rome realized it was defenseless. The invasion of the Alemanni and the Juthungi, the imperial defeat near Piacenza, the internal disorders and the bloody revolt of the mint workers created a climate that the ancient sources describe as one of panic. The decision to ring the city with walls was the political response to that panic, and the building site that followed was one of the fastest construction undertakings of antiquity: about 19 kilometers of circuit laid out in a few years, under Aurelian, and finished around 279 under Probus.

The second event is the Honorian doubling, around 401 and 403. It wasn't maintenance: it was the official recognition that the Western Empire was no longer able to keep enemies away from the capital. Seven years after the completion of the works, in 410, Alaric's Goths entered the city anyway, according to the tradition of the sources through Porta Salaria, and Rome was sacked for three days. The news shook the entire Mediterranean and led, among other things, to the writing of Augustine's City of God. The highest walls of the ancient world had prevented nothing, because a circuit without men to garrison it is a decoration.

The third event is the Gothic War. In 537 and 538 Belisarius withstood here the siege of Witiges with much smaller forces, walling up the posterns, concentrating the defenders and exploiting internal mobility. Rome changed masters several times in 20 years and came out of it depopulated. It's the moment when the ancient city ends and the medieval city begins, and the walls remain the only element of continuity between the two.

The fourth event is precise, dated and still legible today on the stone: on September 29, 1327, the feast of Saint Michael, the Ghibelline Roman militias tied to the Colonna and led by Giacomo de' Ponziani repulsed under this gate the Guelph army of Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, to which Giovanni and Gaetano Orsini belonged. The victory was carved on the right jamb with the figure of the archangel killing the dragon and with an inscription in Gothic Latin that attributes the enemy's defeat to the Roman people. It's the only episode of Rome's medieval military history of which a monument exists on the exact spot.

The fifth event is April 5, 1536, the triumphal entry of Charles V. Antonio da Sangallo the Younger transformed the gate into a triumphal arch with statues, columns and friezes, and opened a ceremonial route toward the Roman Forum by demolishing whatever was in the way. Nine years after the sack of 1527, the city welcomed as an ancient triumphator the very sovereign who had devastated it.

The sixth event is from 1848 and 1849, when the arrow slits of the walkway were transformed into square openings for rifle fire during the fighting of the Roman Republic. The seventh is from 1940 and 1943, the transformation of the gate into a private residence. The eighth is the evening of April 15, 2001, when 12 meters of 17th-century curtain wall collapsed between tower 7 and tower 8, closing the walkway for five years, until the reopening of July 2006. Eight dates, from the 3rd century to yesterday, all inside the same building.

Who has passed through the Museo delle Mura

Through this gate has passed everyone who entered Rome from the south for 18 centuries, and the list of documented names is the kind that inspires awe. Let's start with the emperors: the gate was built under Aurelian between 271 and 275, finished under Probus, rebuilt in its present form under Honorius at the start of the 5th century. Each of these names left masonry, not just memory.

In the 6th century the general Belisarius made of these walls his own defensive system against the Goths of Witiges, and the Porta Appia fell within the arrangement he reorganized during the siege of 537 and 538. In the Middle Ages the gate was a garrison of the city factions: Giacomo de' Ponziani led the Ghibelline militias here in September 1327 against the Angevin army of Robert of Naples, and the Colonna and Orsini families clashed here as they clashed everywhere in Rome in those years.

On April 5, 1536, Charles V of Habsburg, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, entered it, welcomed by an apparatus designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger at the wish of Paul III Farnese. It was the last triumphal entry in the ancient manner in the history of Rome, and the most sumptuous.

Then came the travelers. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, anyone arriving in Rome from the south, from Campania and Sicily, entered exactly from here, and Porta San Sebastiano appears in hundreds of views and engravings. It's the image with which the Grand Tour depicted the arrival in the eternal city: the gate at the end of the road, the pines, the tombs of the Appia behind you. Anyone who has seen the 18th-century prints of that stretch of road recognizes the landscape still today, with the addition of asphalt and the subtraction of a few trees.

In the 20th century the gate had a resident, which is perhaps the most singular fact of its résumé: between 1940 and 1943 it was adapted as the study and residence of the Fascist official Ettore Muti, on a design and under the direction of Luigi Moretti, with specially designed furnishings and two floor mosaics. No other gate of the Aurelian Walls has had a tenant of that kind, and the fact that today you can walk on the floors of his home to go look at the scale models of Aurelian sums up the vertigo of this place better than any comment.

The list closes with a collective category that is worth as much as the proper names: the pilgrims. From here they went out to reach San Sebastiano fuori le mura, one of the seven basilicas of the Roman pilgrimage, and the catacombs of the Appia. In a jubilee year the flow through this gate was continuous, and when the 15th-century notaries call it Porta Domine quo vadis they do so because for ordinary people that was the gate of the sanctuary, not the gate of the consular road. Place names record the traffic.

The Museo delle Mura for those who love the archaeology of architecture

I'm adding a section for a minority of visitors who find their feast here: those who want to learn to read masonry. The Museo delle Mura is the best training ground in Rome for this exercise, and it is for a precise reason: in 350 meters of walkway you cross, in order, late-antique brick of the Honorian age, medieval reworkings, 16th- and 17th-century curtain walls, 19th-century adaptations and reconstructions from the 2000s. No other accessible place in the city offers such a compact sequence.

How to recognize the phases along the walkway of the Museo delle Mura

The practical rules are few and almost always work. Late-antique brick has thin bricks, thick and regular mortar joints, and an alignment carefully kept on the courses. Medieval reworkings are recognized by their lack of uniformity: heterogeneous material, small blocks of tuff mixed with salvaged bricks, courses that lose the horizontal. The curtain walls of the modern age, like the Innocentian one that collapsed in 2001, have larger and more regular bricks, smooth surfaces and thin joints. They are the most beautiful to look at and the least solid when they are simply leaned against an ancient core. Contemporary additions, finally, are distinguished by the uniform color of the brick and the perfect laying, and in general they are deliberately recognizable, following the principle of declared restoration.

Anyone who wants to test their reading ability has an ideal proving ground in the stretch rebuilt between 2004 and 2006. Look for it: it stands out effortlessly from the rest. And then try asking yourself why the restorer chose to make it recognizable instead of camouflaging it. The answer is in the 20th-century debate on restoration and is worth an evening of reading.

Why the Museo delle Mura is useful before visiting the rest of Rome

I've argued for years that this museum should be visited at the beginning of a stay in Rome, not at the end. Anyone who learns here to tell a 3rd-century masonry from a 5th-century one and from a 17th-century one then walks through the center with different eyes: they recognize the reuses in churches, the patches in palaces, the phases in medieval towers. The grammar costs 50 minutes and is free. The rest of the city becomes legible.

The other walls of Rome and the museums that tell their story

Rome has had at least three urban circuits. The walls of the regal age, to which tradition attributes the name of Servius Tullius, of which stretches in tuff blocks remain near Termini station, on the Aventine and in other scattered points. The Aurelian Walls of the 3rd century, the ones this museum talks about. And the Leonine Wall of the 9th century, built to protect the basilica of Saint Peter after the Saracen raid of 846, which can still be seen today along the Passetto di Borgo. To these are added the Janiculum Walls of Urban VIII, from the 17th century, which closed the western front and were the last great fortification of the city.

Anyone who wants to go deeper will find material on the page dedicated to the Aurelian Walls and on the one for Porta San Sebastiano. For the most spectacular stretches to see from the outside I point to the front from Porta Metronia to Porta Latina, the one toward the Testaccio district with the Pyramid incorporated, and the stretch that passes under the underground basilica of Porta Maggiore, where the circuit crosses the aqueducts in an urban knot that has no equal.

Events and special openings at the Museo delle Mura

The museum regularly hosts initiatives that go beyond the permanent route: themed visits, educational meetings, temporary contemporary art exhibitions in the spaces of the gate, programs that use the forecourt and the stretch of walls outside. In summer the area beneath the circuit has several times hosted free film programs, as in the case of the free cinema under the Aurelian Walls, and the gate has welcomed exhibition projects such as Moto a Luogo, devoted to contemporary art in the museum's space.

The updated calendar of special openings and activities can be consulted on the museum's official website and by calling the single number of the civic museums. I recommend checking it before leaving, especially on national holidays, when the hours may vary from the ordinary 10:00 to 16:00 slot.

Quick questions about the Museo delle Mura

How much does a ticket to the Museo delle Mura cost?

Nothing. Admission to the Museo delle Mura is free for all visitors. The access ticket still has to be picked up at the ticket office, because the museum applies a limited quota and counts attendance.

What are the opening hours of the Museo delle Mura?

Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 to 16:00, with last entry one hour before closing. The museum is closed on Monday, May 1 and December 25. On some holidays the hours may change, so checking the official website before leaving avoids surprises.

Where is the Museo delle Mura?

At Via di Porta San Sebastiano 18, inside Porta San Sebastiano, at the southern end of the Caelian district, where Via Appia exits the Aurelian Walls. The postal code is 00179.

How do you get to the Museo delle Mura by public transport?

By bus 118, stop Porta S. Sebastiano/Numa Pompilio, and by 218 from Piazza di Porta San Giovanni, stop Porta S. Sebastiano. By metro the useful stop is Circo Massimo on line B, followed by about 20 minutes on foot along Viale delle Terme di Caracalla and Via di Porta San Sebastiano.

How long does the visit to the Museo delle Mura last?

The maximum stay allowed is 50 minutes for individual visitors and 60 for booked groups. In practice you need a quarter of an hour for the rooms and half an hour for the walkway there and back.

Do you need to book to visit the Museo delle Mura?

Individual visitors enter without a reservation, subject to the quota. Groups of five to 20 people plus the guide book free of charge at the number 060608. School groups must book even for entry alone and must bring the list of names signed by the school principal.

How many people can enter together at the Museo delle Mura?

At most 20 visitors at a time, with no more than five people per room. This is why on weekends and spring mornings you may have to wait your turn at the entrance.

Can you walk on the Aurelian Walls at the Museo delle Mura?

Yes, and it's the main reason to come. From the museum you access about 350 meters of patrol walk, a covered gallery interrupted by 10 towers that ends with an uncovered stretch protected by crenellations, in the direction of Via Cristoforo Colombo.

How long is the walkway of the Museo delle Mura?

The museum's official website indicates about 350 meters. Other sources round it to 400. In any case, there and back with stops means just under a kilometer of walking, for a good half hour.

Is the Museo delle Mura suitable for children?

The walkway yes, very much: it's a corridor inside a wall, with arrow slits, towers and stairs. The rooms of panels, on the other hand, bore the little ones. Watch out for the steep stairs, the absence of elevators and the rule about not leaving the marked route.

Is the Museo delle Mura accessible to people with mobility disabilities?

The museum declares that it is not accessible: the layout is vertical, there are no elevators and the stairs are historic. There are dedicated educational services, including tactile and sensory visits and visits in Italian Sign Language, which are booked at 060608.

Can you take photographs at the Museo delle Mura?

Photographs for personal use are normally allowed in the museum's spaces. For professional shooting, tripods and bulky equipment it's best to inquire in advance: in the limited-access spaces a tripod blocks the passage.

Can you access the terrace of the tower of Porta San Sebastiano?

No. The tower terrace is not accessible to the public. The terrace on the central body of the gate, between the two towers, can instead be visited, with a view of the start of Via Appia Antica and of Via di Porta San Sebastiano.

Is the MIC card needed at the Museo delle Mura?

It's not needed to enter, because admission is free for everyone. It is needed, however, for the rest of the civic network: the annual Musei in Comune card, reserved for those who live or study in Rome, opens the permanent collections of the whole system. Holders and those entitled to free admission pick up the ticket at 060608 or at the ticket office.

What is the difference between the Museo delle Mura and the Museo della Via Ostiense?

They are two twin civic museums, both housed inside a gate of the Aurelian Walls. The Museo delle Mura, at Porta San Sebastiano, tells the story of the city's fortifications and gives access to the walkway. The Museo della Via Ostiense, inside Porta San Paolo, tells the story of the road that connected Rome to Ostia and the river port. Visiting them on the same day is an excellent itinerary, and they are connected by a stretch of walls among the best preserved.

Is the Museo delle Mura the right place to understand the Aurelian Walls?

It's the best place there is, for a simple reason: it's the only one where the explanation and the monument coincide. The scale models show in section the Aurelian curtain wall and the Honorian raising, and 10 meters later you are walking inside that raising.

Is there a cloakroom or luggage storage at the Museo delle Mura?

The museum is small and the services are essential. Anyone arriving with bulky luggage should consider that the route is vertical, with narrow stairs, and that the spaces don't allow bulky items. For particular needs it's best to phone 060608 first.

Are there guided tours of the Museo delle Mura?

Yes, they are a paid service by reservation, available in several languages, along with workshops and meetings reserved for schools. Bookings go through the single number of the civic museums.

What is the arch in front of Porta San Sebastiano?

It's the so-called Arch of Drusus, which has nothing to do with Drusus: it is an arch of the Antonine Aqueduct, the branch of the Acqua Marcia built by Caracalla to feed his baths. At the start of the 5th century it was connected to the gate by two high walls, now gone, serving as a counter-gate.

Why is the gate called San Sebastiano if its ancient name was Porta Appia?

Because in the Middle Ages the name that prevailed referred to the basilica and the catacombs of San Sebastiano, which you reached by going out through here. The current name is firmly attested only after the middle of the 15th century. Before that, the gate also appears as Accia, Dazza, Datia and, in a document from 1434, as Porta Domine quo vadis.

What can you see from the walkway of the Museum of the Walls?

Outward, through the arrow slits, the greenery sloping down toward the Appia and the Caffarella. Inward, through the large open arches, the urban fabric of the Celio and the gardens of the villas. And along the route: Honorian arrow slits set in niches, square arrow slits from 1848, tower stairs, the fragment of floor with the crack between the two phases, and the painting of the Madonna and Child on the lunette of the third tower.

When is it best to visit the Museum of the Walls?

In spring or autumn, at the 10:00 opening, preferably on a weekday. In summer the covered gallery holds the heat, in winter the wind comes in through the arrow slits. The admission quota fills up above all on weekends.

What happened to the Aurelian Walls in 2001?

On the evening of April 15, 2001, 12 meters of curtain wall collapsed between tower 7 and tower 8, in the stretch toward Via Cristoforo Colombo. The brick facing built under Innocent X gave way. It was poorly bonded to the ancient core and weakened by water infiltration. The walkway reopened in July 2006 after the work of 2004 and 2006.

Can you visit the Museum of the Walls together with the catacombs?

Yes, and it's the most natural pairing. Once you leave through the gate, you're already on the Appia Antica: a few hundred meters away is the sanctuary of Domine Quo Vadis, just beyond it the catacombs of San Callisto and those of San Sebastiano. My advice is to visit only one catacomb in the same day.

Are there restrooms at the Museum of the Walls?

According to the information from the city system, the museum has accessible restrooms. Since it's a small venue, it's still better not to count on the facilities of a big museum and to plan ahead before the climb.

Is the Museum of the Walls worth visiting even if you're not into archaeology?

Yes, and I say it with conviction. Even someone who can't tell an Aurelian curtain wall from a Honorian one walks for half an hour inside a Roman wall, leaning out of the arrow slits, and you can't do that anywhere else in the city. And if you do care about history, the museum gives you the tools to understand what you're walking through.

The criterion I use to judge a place has become just one: how much of the city you understand after being there. The Museum of the Walls, with its seven little rooms of panels and its 350 meters of gallery, teaches you in 50 minutes to read an entire city. On your way out, look at the gate once more from below, then turn toward the Appia. On one side, a city that closed itself in because it was afraid. On the other, the road that had made it great. All the rest of Rome lies between those two directions.

And then do something nobody does: rest your hand on the brickwork before you leave. It's cold in summer, rough, full of bricks that someone had already used once before walling them in there. 17 centuries later it still holds your weight when you climb on top of it. That's not bad for a wall put up in a hurry by frightened people.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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