Via del Corso

Via del Corso runs through the center of Rome in a straight line for about one kilometer and 600 meters, from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo, and touches the rioni Pigna, Trevi, Colonna and Campo Marzio. It costs nothing to walk it and there are no hours: it is a public street. The stretch between Largo Goldoni and Via delle Convertite is a fully pedestrian area, as Roma Servizi per la Mobilità indicates. On the rest of the street, authorized vehicles, taxis and service vehicles circulate, and the access rules change with municipal ordinances, so anyone arriving by car must check the updated ZTL map before moving. By metro, get off at Flaminio (line A) for the far north end, at Spagna (line A) for the central stretch via Via dei Condotti, and at Barberini (line A) for the junction with Via del Tritone. To the south the useful stop is Colosseo or, more conveniently, the buses that converge on Piazza Venezia. The surface stops served by the lines that pass through Piazza Venezia, Piazza San Silvestro and Largo Chigi remain the quickest way to get in and out of the street midway.

To walk all of it at a normal pace takes just under 20 minutes. To walk it as it deserves, going into the churches and at least one palazzo, you need three or four hours. This guide is for doing the second thing.

Where Via del Corso is and how to get there

Via del Corso is the central segment of the Tridente, the urban figure that fans out from Piazza del Popolo toward the rest of the center. The other two prongs are Via del Babuino, which runs down toward Piazza di Spagna, and Via di Ripetta, which points to the Tiber passing next to the Mausoleum of Augustus. The apex of the fan is the Porta del Popolo, the northern entrance to the city for those arriving from Via Flaminia. Until the 1800s, anyone coming from Florence, Bologna, Germany or France entered Rome there, and the first street they found in front of them, straight as a crossbow shot, was this one.

By metro and bus to Via del Corso

Metro line A serves Via del Corso at three points: Flaminio, which comes out a step from the Porta del Popolo and therefore from the north end. Spagna, from which you go down Via dei Condotti and enter midway, at Largo Goldoni. Barberini, which takes you to the top of Via del Tritone and from there in 10 minutes to Largo Chigi. Those arriving from Termini can choose between metro A to Spagna and the buses that go down Via del Tritone and to Piazza San Silvestro. From the southern side, the buses that converge on Piazza Venezia drop you right in front of the start of the street, under the Vittoriano. Line numbers change often because of construction sites and detours: it's best to check them the same day on the city mobility service's app, because a line canceled six months ago keeps showing up on half the web.

The pedestrian area of Via del Corso and its hours

The certain pedestrian stretch, the one that Roma Servizi per la Mobilità indicates as closed to traffic, runs from Largo Goldoni to Via delle Convertite: it is the commercial heart of the street, where people walk in the middle of the roadway without looking around. On the rest of the street, traffic is filtered by the Tridente ZTL, with exemptions for residents, taxis, chauffeured rental vehicles and emergency vehicles. The ZTL hours and the active gates are matters of municipal ordinances that change more than once a year. The practical rule, for visitors, is that you don't come here by car, and that anyone staying in the area must have the hotel report the license plate to register. If you arrive by taxi, keep in mind that at peak hours it is faster to be dropped at the start of a side street than to try to get close to the doorway.

Via del Corso on foot: the four ways in

You enter from the north, from Piazza del Popolo, and it is the spectacular entrance: the square opens up, the two churches close in on the sides of the opening, the obelisk stays behind you. You enter from the south, from Piazza Venezia, and it is the monumental entrance: the white of the Vittoriano behind, the vanishing line of palazzi ahead. You enter midway from Via dei Condotti, and it is the shopping entrance, with the backdrop of the Trinità dei Monti staircase staying behind you. You enter from Via del Tritone, and it is the practical entrance, the one for those arriving from Barberini or the station. There is only one right direction: you go down, not up. Starting from Piazza del Popolo and walking toward Piazza Venezia means always having ahead of you a vanishing point that grows, and ending up in front of the Vittoriano instead of in front of a shop window.

Via del Corso in numbers: length, rioni, numbering

The current length attributed to Via del Corso is about 1.6 kilometers. The width is the real surprise: in many stretches it doesn't reach 12 meters, which for a street that has hosted horse races, papal processions and the promenade of all Rome is very little. The street numbering runs from Piazza Venezia toward Piazza del Popolo, with the odd numbers on the right going up and the even ones on the left, and goes past 500. Goethe's House, at number 18, is therefore at the top, very close to the square, while the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, at 305, is in the southern third. It's a piece of information that seems bureaucratic and isn't: anyone looking for an address on Via del Corso who doesn't have the direction of the numbering in mind risks a kilometer of pointless walking.

The four rioni it crosses tell the layering of the area. Pigna and Trevi are the rioni of papal Rome pressed up against the Capitoline. Colonna takes its name from the Column of Marcus Aurelius that dominates Piazza Colonna. Campo Marzio is the ancient floodplain of the Tiber, the district of Augustus's public buildings, which in the Middle Ages becomes the inhabited heart of the city huddled in the bend of the river.

From Via Lata to the Flaminia: the ancient axis under Via del Corso

The straight course of Via del Corso follows that of the ancient urban stretch of Via Flaminia, the consular road opened by Gaius Flaminius in 220 BC to connect Rome to Rimini and the Adriatic. Inside the walls the initial stretch bore another name: Via Lata, that is, wide street. Wide compared to what? Compared to the medieval alleys that grew up around it, and compared to the usual measure of Roman urban streets, which rarely exceeded four or five meters. The name still survives today in the Santa Maria in Via Lata Basilica, which faces right onto Via del Corso.

Via Lata and Augustus's Campus Martius

In the first century AD the area crossed today by Via del Corso was the great public building site of the northern Campus Martius: the Mausoleum of Augustus, the Ara Pacis, the enormous meridian with the Montecitorio obelisk as its gnomon, the porticoes, the temples. Via Lata was the axis along which this whole apparatus was aligned. Under the Santa Maria in Via Lata Basilica remain the rooms of an imperial-era portico that ran parallel to the street: whoever goes down into the underground levels walks at the ancient level, about six meters below the current level of the street. Those six meters are the Tiber: centuries of floods have raised the walking surface, and the ancient Rome of this area is buried under the cellars of the palazzi.

The Middle Ages, the Tiber floods and Via Biberatica

The floods themselves explain a little-told story. In the Middle Ages the original straight road, which ran at a low elevation and regularly ended up underwater, was reportedly largely abandoned in favor of a higher and safer route. According to a relatively recent study, this would be the ancient Via Biberatica, which starting from Trajan's Forum followed the current Via delle Tre Cannelle and Via di Sant'Eufemia, Piazza dei Santi Apostoli, Via di San Marcello, Piazza dell'Oratorio, Via di Santa Maria in Via, a stretch now interrupted by the Galleria Sciarra, then Piazza San Claudio, Piazza San Silvestro and Via del Gambero, to rejoin the Flaminia at the level of San Lorenzo in Lucina Church. It is a working hypothesis, not an established fact, and I present it as such. But it explains why for a few centuries the straight stretch loses importance and life shifts 50 meters to the east.

Paul II and the straightening of the course of Via del Corso

The return of the straight road is the work of a Venetian pope, Pietro Barbo, Paul II, the same one who built for himself the Palazzo di Venezia at the southern entrance of the street. Between 1466 and 1467, according to the sources that deal with it, Paul II brings the course substantially back to the ancient one, makes it passable, and moves to it the Carnival races that until then had been held at Monte Testaccio. From that moment the street has a role it will never lose: it is the stage of the city. Two centuries later Alexander VII Chigi has it widened, demolishing projections and arches. A plaque from 1665 on the front of a palazzo on the Corso recalls the operation. The straightening and the widening are, in essence, the first modern urban planning intervention on Rome, three centuries ahead of the boulevards.

A curiosity about Via del Corso

The name of Via del Corso does not come from just any race, and above all it does not come from the Berbers understood as a people: it comes from horses. The protagonists of the Carnival race were the horses called bàrberi, with the stress on the first syllable, because they came from Barbary, that is, from Mediterranean North Africa. They were small, nervous, very fast animals, and they ran without a jockey. This is the point that almost nobody tells in full: the barberi race was a race of free horses, launched down the street amid a crowd barely held back by stands and barriers, excited with goads and irritating substances applied to their flanks. The finish line was at the level of Piazza Venezia, where a stretched canvas stopped the race. The start took place farther north, in the area of the vanished Arch of Portugal, at the level of Via della Vite.

The name of the street is born from that: not from a watercourse, not from a corso understood as an avenue, but from the fact that for four centuries, every year, people raced on that roadway. The word became so fixed that today all over Italy a wide, central street is called a corso, and the word comes from this Roman roadway. It is a small etymological vertigo: the Corsi Vittorio Emanuele of half the peninsula owe their name to North African horses launched between Piazza del Popolo and Piazza Venezia.

I'll add the uncomfortable part, because history isn't told by halves. The races of the Roman Carnival included, in the modern era, human races imposed as mockery too, and among those forced to run were the Jews of the ghetto, subjected to a ritual of humiliation that was abolished only in the 1600s after the payment of a substitute tax imposed on the community. Anyone who walks Via del Corso today looking at the shop windows is also crossing this. Not saying it would be turning a street into a postcard.

The Roman Carnival, the barberi and the moccoletti on Via del Corso

To understand what Via del Corso was until 1883, you have to take the image of the shopping street out of your head and put in its place that of a stadium a kilometer and a half long. Windows and balconies were rented for their weight in gold, wooden stands were set up on the sidewalks, carriages paraded in both directions until the signal that cleared the roadway. Papal Rome, which had no public theaters worthy of the name and banned secular spectacle for most of the year, concentrated into eight days of Carnival all the license it granted its subjects.

How the barberi race was run on Via del Corso

The horses were brought to the starting point, held back by a stretched rope, and released all together at the cannon shot from Castel Sant'Angelo. They ran the length of the street between two walls of people. Many of the horses belonged to Roman patrician stables, and victory was worth a palio of precious cloth and, above all, family prestige. The organization provided for the horses to be excited with stinging ornaments and irritating materials fixed on the rump: a cruelty that foreign chroniclers of the 1800s record with growing unease, and which explains the end of the custom.

The moccoletti, the last night of Carnival

On the last night, Shrove Tuesday, the moccoletti were lit: everyone held a candle and tried to put out other people's while shouting the taunting formula, defending their own. Via del Corso became a river of little flames that lit and went out in waves. It is one of the most celebrated images of pre-unification Rome, described with enthusiasm by Grand Tour travelers, and its echo reaches 19th-century French literature set in Rome.

1883: the race ends

The barberi race was run until 1883, when a fatal accident led to its abolition. From then on the Roman Carnival loses its center, and Via del Corso changes trade: it becomes the street of the bourgeois promenade, of carriage trots, of literary cafes and finally of shops. In our view the Rome that lost the barberi race gained in safety and lost a piece of identity that no reenactment has ever managed to give back. Whoever walks the Corso today walks on a disused racetrack, and almost nobody knows it.

Something nobody tells you about Via del Corso

At the level of Via della Vite, on the right side going up, for 15 centuries there stood a single-arched Roman arch, with statues and reliefs, which the Romans called the Arch of Portugal because in the 1500s the ambassador of the King of Portugal lived next to it. It was a late-antique monument, reassembled with pieces from the Hadrianic era. In 1662 Alexander VII had it demolished to widen the roadway and make the passage of carriages smoother. The two reliefs that decorated it, one with the apotheosis of Sabina and one with the adlocutio of Antoninus Pius, were saved and are today in the Capitoline Museums.

Here is the thing almost nobody says: the end of the Arch of Portugal is the reason Via del Corso is a street without visible ancient monuments, in a city that has them everywhere. The linearity that people like so much, that clean perspective line from Piazza Venezia to the obelisk, is the result of a deliberate act of demolition. The street was combed: arches removed, projections set back, facades aligned. Whoever walks it today sees a masterpiece of urban direction, and the direction was paid for with the loss of a Roman arch.

The second little-known element concerns the orientation. Via del Corso runs almost exactly north to south, and this means that in summer, in the central hours, the roadway is a canyon of sun without shade, while in winter the low sun enters from the south and lights the fronts of the palazzi for a few minutes in the morning and at sunset. The practical consequence is brutal: in July, at noon, walking the Corso is the least intelligent thing you can do in Rome. Walk the side streets, which are narrow, shaded and interesting, and cut across the Corso only when necessary.

The route of Via del Corso from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo

What follows is the real sequence of buildings, taken in order, starting from the southern end. If you walk it in the opposite direction, read it from the bottom.

The southern start: Piazza Venezia and Palazzo Bonaparte

Via del Corso begins in front of Piazza Venezia, dominated by Palazzo Venezia and by the mass of the Vittoriano, that is, the Altar of the Fatherland. On the left corner stands the 17th-century Palazzo Bonaparte, also called Misciattelli, recognizable by the enclosed green balcony that juts out at the corner. Maria Letizia Ramolino, Napoleon's mother, lived in that palazzo and died there in 1836. Roman tradition has it that the elderly lady spent her days behind the shutters of that balcony, watching the promenade without being seen, and the balcony is still there, identical. Today the palazzo hosts temporary exhibitions that draw large crowds.

Right after, you meet the Baroque Palazzo Mancini Salviati, which was the seat of the French Academy before the move to Villa Medici, and the 19th-century facade of Palazzo Chigi Odescalchi, whose original 17th-century architecture is due to Gian Lorenzo Bernini and was then doubled in the 1700s. It is one of the cases where the facade you see from the Corso does not do justice to what is behind it.

Santa Maria in Via Lata, the church that gives Via del Corso its ancient name

On the left side, just before Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, opens the facade of Santa Maria in Via Lata Church: two orders of Corinthian columns, a deep portico, a vertical thrust that sets it apart from everything else on the street. It was completed between 1658 and 1660 to a design by Pietro da Cortona, and it is one of the clearest proofs of Roman Baroque applied to a very tight space: Cortona had no depth in front, so he played everything on projection and shadow.

The church began as an early Christian diaconia, with an oratory carved within the rooms of a Roman portico of the first century that flanked Via Lata. The upper church was added in the ninth century. The massive remodeling is from 1639, attributed to Cosimo Fanzago, made necessary by the repeated floods of the Tiber. In the underground levels, which can be visited on occasions and in ways that you should ask about on site, you walk among ancient masonry and a pavement of Cosmatesque taste. Tradition holds that Saint Paul stayed here during his Roman custody, and a column linked to his memory is pointed out there. It is a tradition, not a documented fact, and the same story is claimed by San Paolo alla Regola: I report it for what it is. Inside are kept a 13th-century icon of the Virgin and works by Giacinto Brandi and Giuseppe Ghezzi. The medieval frescoes of the lower rooms were detached to preserve them and are today in the Crypta Balbi museum.

Palazzo Doria Pamphilj and the Gallery on Via del Corso

At number 305 of Via del Corso is the entrance to the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, and it is the main reason it is worth going through a doorway on this street. Palazzo Doria Pamphilj occupies an entire block between the Corso, Via del Plebiscito, Piazza del Collegio Romano and Via della Gatta, and the collection it holds is still privately owned by the family: it is not a state museum, it is a dynastic picture gallery that has stayed in its place.

The Gallery's official site indicates opening Monday to Thursday from 9:00 to 19:00 and Friday to Sunday from 10:00 to 20:00, closed every Wednesday as well as on January 1, at Easter and on December 25. The full ticket is listed at €16 at the box office and €17 online, with free entry for children under 12 and for visitors with disabilities holding documentation. The audio guide in Italian, English, French and Spanish is included in the price. There is no cloakroom and you can only enter with small bags. The recommended duration is 90 minutes. The private apartments have a separate ticket office. Check the official site before going, because openings and fares change.

What you see. The piece that alone justifies the ticket is the portrait of Innocent X painted by Diego Velázquez in 1650, kept in a dedicated small room: the Pamphilj pope looks at the viewer with a mistrust that no court portraitist had ever dared to put on canvas, and the reaction attributed to the pontiff, who reportedly judged it too true, has entered the legend of painting. Next to it, the bust of the same pope sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini allows a comparison between two opposite ways of saying the same face. The collection also includes two Caravaggios, the Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Penitent Magdalene, early works of a sweetness that surprises those who know only the dramatic Caravaggio, and paintings by Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Parmigianino, Guercino, Annibale Carracci, Claude Lorrain and Jan Brueghel. The gallery of mirrors, with the four arms running around the courtyard and the paintings hung in multiple rows in the 18th-century manner, is a space worth as much as the works.

A practical tip: the audio guide for this gallery, recorded in the voice of a family member, is one of the few in the world you don't feel like turning off. Put it on and follow it all the way through.

San Marcello al Corso and the crucifix that survived the fire

A little farther on, on the left side, a concave façade set back from the street line marks San Marcello al Corso Church. The concavity isn't a whim: the church is turned relative to its ancient orientation, because until the 16th century its entrance was on the opposite side, and Carlo Fontana, who designed its façade between 1692 and 1697, had to solve the join with a very narrow street by curving the front to gain breathing room. The result is the only important concave movement on the whole of Via del Corso.

In May 1519 the church was destroyed by a fire. Only the wooden crucifix that adorned the high altar remained intact, a work in poplar wood that can be dated to around 1370. Its survival was read as a sign, and a devotion that has never stopped grew up around that wood. In 1522, during the plague, Cardinal Raimondo Vich organized an 18-day penitential procession that carried the crucifix through the districts of Rome to St. Peter's, and tradition has it that the epidemic gave way wherever it passed. The crucifix is in the fourth chapel on the left.

On March 15, 2020, in a deserted Rome, Pope Francis went out on foot and stopped to pray in front of this crucifix. On March 27 of the same year the wood of San Marcello was brought to St. Peter's Square for the extraordinary blessing in the rain. Anyone who saw those images and didn't know where that crucifix came from now knows: from a church on Via del Corso.

The interior has a single nave with five chapels on each side. On the inner façade wall there is a crucifixion fresco by Giovanni Battista Ricci from 1613. In the fifth chapel on the left is the Conversion of St. Paul by Taddeo Zuccari. A wooden Pietà group of the Bernini school dates to around 1700. The first 16th-century reconstruction was begun under Leo X with the involvement of Jacopo Sansovino. Opening hours are those of an active parish church, with closing in the middle hours of the day: ask on site or check the parish website.

Palazzo Sciarra Colonna, Palazzo Cipolla and the Galleria Sciarra

On the right side, at the intersection with Via Minghetti, two important fronts line up. Palazzo Sciarra Colonna keeps a monumental 17th-century portal that is among the most sumptuous on the street. Behind it, in an interior courtyard reachable from Via Marco Minghetti, opens the Galleria Sciarra, a covered courtyard in iron and glass decorated in the late 19th century with a painted cycle dedicated to feminine virtues. It's Rome's Liberty-style masterpiece, admission is free, and almost no one goes in. If I had to name a single three-minute detour along the Corso, I would name this one.

Next door, Palazzo Cipolla, formerly known as the Museo del Corso, hosts temporary exhibitions run by a banking foundation. It's worth checking what's on before you walk past: the shows are often monographic and well staged, and the building itself is worth going into.

Palazzo Marignoli and Caffè Aragno

Palazzo Marignoli was built between 1878 and 1883 for Marquis Filippo Marignoli, a senator of the Kingdom, in the years when Rome, as the capital, was rewriting its own center. On the ground floor, from 1890 to 1955, Caffè Aragno operated, and its third room was for decades the gathering place of writers, journalists and artists. The protagonists of Italian culture in the first half of the 20th century passed through there, and the literary chronicles of the time are full of endless sittings at its tables. Of the café the sign doesn't remain, the building does. Not far away, the severe front of the headquarters built between 1916 and 1922 to a design by Marcello Piacentini for the Banca Commerciale Italiana marks the arrival of national finance on a street that only a few decades earlier belonged to cardinals and princes.

Piazza Colonna, Palazzo Chigi and Montecitorio: the government on Via del Corso

Halfway along, on the left side, Via del Corso opens onto Piazza Colonna, and here the shopping street becomes, for 100 meters, the political center of the Republic. At the center of the square rises the Column of Marcus Aurelius, erected between 176 and 192 AD to celebrate the campaigns against the Quadi and Marcomanni: a spiral-carved shaft a little over 29 meters tall, which in 1589 Sixtus V had restored and crowned with the bronze statue of St. Paul, replacing the imperial image.

On the north side of the square stands the 16th-century Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. It shouldn't be confused with the Chigi palace in Ariccia, which is another thing and another visit: the Roman one is not open to free visits and opens only on extraordinary occasions. On the same side line up Palazzo Ferrajoli and Palazzo Wedekind, recognizable by the portico with 16 Ionic columns taken from the ancient Etruscan city of Veii.

Behind Palazzo Chigi, a one-minute walk away, opens Piazza di Montecitorio with the façade of Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies: a Bernini-style layout begun in 1653 for the Ludovisi, completed by Carlo Fontana at the end of the 17th century as the Curia Innocenziana for the papal courts, adapted as a parliamentary chamber after 1870 and fitted in the early 1900s with Ernesto Basile's chamber. In front, the obelisk of Psammetichus II, brought by Augustus and used as the gnomon of the great sundial of the Campus Martius. The Chamber organizes public openings on dedicated days: rules, calendar and booking are on the Chamber of Deputies' institutional website, and it's the only source worth using, because the dates change every year.

The Galleria Alberto Sordi, the covered living room of Via del Corso

Opposite Piazza Colonna opens the entrance of the Galleria Alberto Sordi, for almost a century known as Galleria Colonna. It was built on the site of the demolished Palazzo Piombino to a design by Dario Carbone, inaugurated on October 20, 1922 and completed only in 1940 under the direction of Giorgio Calza Bini. The layout is Y-shaped, with Liberty-style glass windows, mosaic floors and a glass dome that in winter makes it one of the few sheltered, free places in the center where you can stop.

In 2003, after the restoration and after the actor's death, the then mayor Walter Veltroni wanted it named after Alberto Sordi, who had taken his first steps in the building by frequenting the Teatro Galleria. The reopening under the new name took place on October 30, 2003. Today it hosts shops, a bookstore and eateries. It's best to go in on a rainy afternoon or an August day, not to buy but to breathe, and to look up instead of into the shop windows.

Santa Maria in Via and the Madonna del Pozzo

At the junction with Via del Tritone, toward Largo Chigi, is Santa Maria in Via Church, run by the Servants of Mary, to whom it was entrusted by Leo X in 1513. Inside is one of the most curious stories of central Rome. On the night between September 26 and 27, 1254, according to tradition, water overflowed from the well in the stables of Cardinal Pietro Capocci's palace, bringing to the surface a roof tile with the image of the Virgin. After several failed attempts, it was the cardinal who retrieved it. Once informed of the event, Alexander IV authorized the building of a sanctuary around the well.

The well still exists: it's in the Cappella del Pozzo, the first on the right as you enter, and the faithful still draw water from a tap next to the well. It's a place of small-scale, popular devotion, much frequented by Romans and ignored by the tourists who pass 20 meters away with shopping bags in hand. It takes five minutes, and it completely changes your perception of what this street is. Not far away, at the intersection of Via del Tritone and Via Sistina, the front of Piazza Barberini with the Triton Fountain closes the view to the east.

Largo Goldoni, Via dei Condotti and the Fontanella Borghese

Largo Goldoni is the point of greatest commercial tension on Via del Corso: here the street crosses in a single junction Via dei Condotti, which climbs among the high-fashion boutiques toward Piazza di Spagna, and Via della Fontanella Borghese, which descends toward Piazza Borghese and the palace of the same name, the one Romans call the cembalo because of the trapezoidal shape of its plan. The largo takes its name from Carlo Goldoni, who lived in this area during his Roman stay.

The difference between the two directions is instructive and should be said plainly: toward Condotti you go to look, toward the Fontanella Borghese you go to find, because the side streets west of the Corso keep shops for frames, prints, restoration and tailoring that no longer exist on the main street.

Palazzo Ruspoli and the Memmo Foundation

Palazzo Ruspoli occupies a long front on the left side going up, at the corner with Largo Goldoni. It was built in the 16th century for the Rucellai to a design attributed to Bartolomeo Ammannati and then passed to the Caetani and the Ruspoli. Inside it keeps a monumental staircase of 120 marble steps, considered among the most imposing in Rome. It hosts the exhibition spaces of the Memmo Foundation, which programs art exhibitions: the calendar can be checked on the foundation's website.

Santi Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso, the church of the Lombards

Continuing north, on the left side, the large dome you see from afar belongs to Santi Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso Basilica, the national church of the Lombards in Rome. Construction began in 1612 in place of a 10th-century building. The design is by Onorio Longhi, continued by his son Martino Longhi the Younger, with a brief involvement of Francesco Borromini on the site. The dome, designed by Pietro da Cortona, was finished in 1688 and is by size among the largest in Rome. Behind the high altar runs an ambulatory, a solution unique in Rome and clearly reminiscent of Lombardy.

Inside a shrine placed behind the altar is kept the heart of Saint Charles Borromeo, donated in 1614 by Cardinal Federico Borromeo. The vaults and semi-domes are frescoed by Giacinto Brandi and Giovanni Battista Beinaschi. Since 1906 the basilica has been run by the Rosminians. It's a church that almost everyone passes without going in, and inside it opens one of the widest and brightest Baroque spaces in the center: five minutes better spent than 20 in front of a shop window.

Gesù e Maria, San Giacomo in Augusta and San Giacomo Hospital

In the last stretch, toward Piazza del Popolo, you meet two churches close together. Gesù e Maria Church, 17th-century, has an interior of polychrome marbles and statues of the patrons looking out from side boxes, a theatrical solution that is worth the stop. San Giacomo in Augusta Church, 16th-century, is tied to the attached San Giacomo Hospital, an institution dating back to the 14th century and closed since 2008. The story of its closure and of its later uses remains a matter of city news, and whoever passes today sees a historic hospital complex waiting for a stable destination. On this I recommend reading the updated institutional sources, because the situation is moving.

Palazzo Rondinini and the Casa di Goethe

A little further on is Palazzo Rondinini, seat of the New Chess Circle, a detail that says a lot about the discreet Rome that survives behind the signs. At number 18 of Via del Corso, a couple of steps from the Porta del Popolo, is the Casa di Goethe. The museum occupies the apartment in which Johann Wolfgang Goethe stayed between 1786 and 1788, guest of his friend the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, during his journey in Italy.

The museum's official website lists opening Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, with last entry at 17:30 and closing on Monday. The full ticket is listed at €6, the reduced at €5, the family card at €17, admission free under 10 and for ICOM members. The published telephone contact is +39 06 326 504 12. Check the museum's website before going.

Inside there are drawings, prints, the Goethe library and materials on the Italian journey. The real value, though, is another: from the window you look at Via del Corso exactly as he looked at it, and he described it in famous pages, including those on the Roman Carnival and the race of the barberi. Few house museums in Rome have such a direct relationship with the street they face.

Piazza del Popolo, the obelisk and the twin churches at the mouth of Via del Corso

At its northern end Via del Corso opens into Piazza del Popolo, and the mouth is narrow between the two churches that everyone calls twins: Santa Maria in Montesanto Church on the left and Santa Maria dei Miracoli Church on the right, looking from inside the piazza. Construction starts in 1662 under Alexander VII Chigi, with Carlo Rainaldi as the main designer and contributions from Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Carlo Fontana. Santa Maria in Montesanto Church was consecrated in 1675, Santa Maria dei Miracoli Church in 1679.

Here is the most refined optical game in Rome, and it has to be explained well because it's the reason the square works. The two available lots were not equal: the one on the left, wedged between Via del Corso and Via del Babuino, is narrower. If the architects had built two identical buildings, the front would have come out unbalanced. The solution was to build two churches that look identical but aren't: Santa Maria dei Miracoli has a circular plan, Santa Maria in Montesanto an elliptical one, and the domes differ accordingly, Montesanto's more slender, the Miracoli's more compact. To the eye, from the square, the result is perfect symmetry. The interior heights are just over 20 meters, and the width is around 15.

Santa Maria in Montesanto is known as the Artists' Church for the Sunday Mass dedicated to the world of art and entertainment, a 20th-century tradition that continues. On the opposite side of the square, next to Porta del Popolo, opens the basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, where in the Cerasi Chapel you find Caravaggio's Conversion of St. Paul and Crucifixion of St. Peter and in the Chigi Chapel the work of Raphael later completed by Bernini: a two-minute detour, and you go from the shopping street to one of the peaks of European painting.

At the center of the square stands the Flaminian Obelisk, 25.90 meters tall, which with base and cross reaches 36.50. It was carved for Seti I around 1300 BC and completed by his son Ramesses II. It came from the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, was brought to Rome by ship in 10 BC by Augustus and placed in the Circus Maximus. In 1589 Sixtus V had it raised here by Domenico Fontana. It is the second tallest obelisk in Rome and is, in all likelihood, the oldest monument you meet walking along the axis of the Tridente.

The two vanishing points of Via del Corso

The two end perspectives are the signature of the street. To the south the axis points at the Vittoriano, that is the Altar of the Fatherland, built between the late 19th century and 1911: a wall of botticino marble that closes the straight run like a theater backdrop. To the north the axis points at the Flaminian Obelisk in Piazza del Popolo. Anyone who knows how to look understands at once that the street was conceived as a telescope, and that the two ends were built in epochs very far apart from each other to do exactly the same thing: stop the eye.

An observation about photography and perception: if you stand in the middle of the roadway at Santa Maria in Via Lata and look north, the street seems much longer than it is, because the constant width and the modest height of the fronts create a compression effect. It's the same trick as the perspective stage sets of the 17th century, applied unintentionally to a kilometer and a half of city.

The advice I give you for visiting Via del Corso

The advice is one, and I give it unsweetened: don't treat Via del Corso as a destination, treat it as a backbone. The street itself, walked from end to end looking at the shop windows, disappoints anyone who has seen a European shopping street. What makes Via del Corso one of a kind is what plugs into it on the right and the left every 50 meters: a dynastic gallery with a Velázquez, a 14th-century crucifix that survived a fire, a miraculous well, a Liberty-style courtyard, the seat of the government, the Chamber of Deputies, two twin churches that aren't twins.

The recommended method is this. Start from Piazza del Popolo around nine in the morning, when the shops are closed and the street is almost empty, and walk down. First stop Casa di Goethe, 10 minutes, to fix the relationship between the street and the story travelers have made of it. Then Santi Ambrogio e Carlo, five minutes under the dome. Then you step out onto the Corso, go straight to Largo Goldoni and detour onto Via della Fontanella Borghese to see a Rome of workshops that the Corso has lost. You come back, reach Largo Chigi, and go into Santa Maria in Via to see the well. You cross Piazza Colonna and stop five minutes under the Column of Marcus Aurelius to read the frieze from below. A mandatory detour into the Galleria Sciarra. Then San Marcello al Corso. And you finish with the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, 90 minutes, which is the main course and should be saved for last because afterward you no longer feel like walking.

Frequently asked questions about Via del Corso

How long is Via del Corso

Via del Corso, in Rome, is about 1.6 kilometers long, from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo. At a brisk pace you cover it in about 20 minutes, but in many stretches the width doesn't reach 12 meters.

Why is it called Via del Corso

Via del Corso takes its name from the barberi horse races held there during the Roman Carnival, moved here around 1466 under Paul II and abolished in 1883. The horses, called bàrberi because they came from Barbary, in North Africa, ran without jockeys along the whole street.

Is Via del Corso pedestrian

Partly yes: the stretch of Via del Corso between Largo Goldoni and Via delle Convertite is a pedestrian area, while the rest of the street has lighter traffic than the nearby arteries. The paving in the pedestrian stretch is smooth and free of significant level changes.

Is Via del Corso wheelchair accessible

Yes, the roadway of Via del Corso is even, and for a wheelchair it is among the easiest routes in Rome's Historic Center, much more than Via dei Coronari or the Monti district. The problems remain on the side sidewalks, often narrow and occupied, and at the historic doorways with entrance steps.

Where to eat well near Via del Corso

On Via del Corso and on the first few meters of its side streets you generally eat worse and pay more, because signs with photos of the dishes and staff inviting you in at the entrance mark places built on passing traffic. Two or three blocks to the west, in the network of alleys between the Corso and the Pantheon, are enough to find a more serious offering.

What is the best time to stroll along Via del Corso without crowds

The best time for Via del Corso is early morning on weekdays, between seven and 10: the shops are still closed or just opening, the roadway is clear and you can see the façades of the historic buildings well.

What you see around Via del Corso within a 10-minute walk

From Via del Corso, going up east via Via delle Muratte or Via di Santa Maria in Via, in a few minutes you reach the Trevi Fountain. To the west, going down from Piazza Colonna, in five minutes you're at the Pantheon and in another five at Piazza Navona. To the northwest you reach the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis.

Is Via del Corso the right street for luxury shopping

No, Via del Corso is Rome's mass-market shopping street, with international clothing chains and electronics and cosmetics stores. Luxury is 50 meters farther on, on Via dei Condotti, Via Borgognona, Via Frattina and Via del Babuino.

Anyone who prefers to be accompanied and wants a professional reading of the street and its doorways can turn to colleagues who work in Rome with TourLeaderPro's tourist services in Rome, or consider the private small-group experiences when traveling as a couple or with family.

Total time: four and a half hours, unhurried. Cost: the Doria Pamphilj ticket plus, possibly, the one for the Casa di Goethe. Everything else is free. And one practical warning worth more than many tips: bring an empty bottle and fill it at the fountains, because on Via del Corso bottled water costs three times what it does 100 meters away.

Shopping on Via del Corso: the real thing and the traps

Let me be frank, because people arrive here with the wrong expectations. Via del Corso is Rome's mass-market shopping street, not the luxury one. Luxury is 50 meters farther on, on Via dei Condotti, on Via Borgognona, on Via Frattina, on Via del Babuino. On the Corso there are the international clothing chains, the big electronics and cosmetics stores, mid-range footwear and, in recent years, a growing concentration of shops selling souvenirs and packaged food at airport prices.

What you actually buy on Via del Corso

It makes sense to come to the Corso for three things. The first: the collections of the big chains, which have large, well-stocked stores here, often better supplied than the same brands on the outskirts. The second: the bookstores and electronics stores, which on the Corso have floor space that doesn't exist elsewhere in the center. The third: the historic footwear and mid-range Italian clothing shops that have held out for decades, recognizable by their old shop window and iron sign.

The traps of Via del Corso

I list them because guiding groups for 20 years is good for this too. First: the bars with tables on the sidewalk at the busiest points, where a coffee served at the table can cost four or five times the one at the counter. The price list must be displayed, and it should be read before sitting down. Second: the souvenir shops selling packs of pasta and oil at tourist prices, often products not from Lazio. Third: the currency exchanges with flashy signs and commissions hidden in the rate. Fourth: the fake permanent sales, clearance signs displayed all year on imported goods. Fifth, the most banal and the most widespread: buying water and drinks on the Corso instead of on the side streets, with price differences that at peak hours are grotesque.

One last warning that concerns safety and not your wallet: the crowding on the Corso at peak hours and on Saturday afternoons is the ideal terrain for pickpockets. Backpack in front, wallet in an inside pocket, phone not in hand while walking. It's not alarmism, it's arithmetic: where tens of thousands of people pass every day, so do those who make a living off them.

Shop hours and sales on Via del Corso

Almost all the Corso's shops keep continuous hours and many also open on Sunday, the Historic Center being an area with a tourist vocation. Exact hours vary from store to store and during holiday periods: the ones posted on the door count more than any hours published elsewhere. Sales in Lazio follow the regional calendar, with a winter session starting in early January and a summer one starting in early July: the exact dates are published every year in the announcement of the Lazio Region.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

That Via del Corso is the central tip of the Tridente many people know. What almost no one says is who built it and why the figure works. The fan didn't arise all at once: the central branch is ancient, it's Via Flaminia. The right branch, Via di Ripetta, was opened by Leo X in the early 16th century and for that reason was also called Via Leonina. The left branch, Via del Babuino, was opened under Clement VII and took its name from the fountain with a monstrous figure that Romans christened with that nickname. The trident design was thus completed in about 20 years, in the first half of the 16th century, and predates by more than a century the twin churches that fix its scenography.

The rarely cited point is functional, not aesthetic. The Tridente was born as a machine for sorting pilgrims: whoever entered through Porta del Popolo had to be directed without congesting the single entry point. The right branch led to the port of Ripetta and the ferries to the Vatican, the central one to the administrative center and the Capitoline Hill, the left one toward the Quirinal and the eastern basilicas. Three destinations, three streets, one entrance. It's logistics dressed up as urban planning, and it has worked for five centuries.

The second known fact, rarely told in full, concerns the names of the street. Via del Corso has not always carried this name in the 20th century: after the regicide of Umberto I of Savoy, which took place in Monza on July 29, 1900, the street was named Corso Umberto I. In 1944 it became Corso del Popolo, and two years later the historic place name was restored. Three names in half a century, and each tells of the regime that imposed it: the monarchy, the Liberation, the Republic choosing to return to tradition.

The right photo to take on Via del Corso

The photograph everyone tries is the one taken in the middle of the roadway looking toward the Vittoriano. It works, on two conditions that almost no one respects. The first is the time: it must be done shortly after dawn, between seven and eight, when the street is empty and the raking light comes in from the north lighting the fronts. At noon the same framing gives back a row of heads and an overexposed white mass at the end. The second is the position: you have to stand exactly on the axis, in the center of the roadway, and lower the camera to chest height, not eye height. By lowering the shooting point the cobbles gain weight and the perspective recession lengthens.

The second photograph, the one I really recommend because nobody takes it, is the opposite one: stand in Piazza del Popolo, in front of the obelisk, and frame the mouth of Via del Corso squeezed between the twin churches, including both domes. With a moderately wide-angle lens you get the image that explains all Baroque urban planning by itself: two apparently identical volumes framing a black hole, and the black hole is the street. If you climb to the viewpoint of the Pincio, a 10-minute climb from the square, you get the same scene from above with the three streets of the Tridente opening out: it's the most didactic photograph in Rome, and sunset improves it.

A third possibility, for those with patience: the Galleria Alberto Sordi from the inside, vertical, aiming at the glass dome. Do it on a cloudy day, because in full sun the contrast between the shaded shop windows and the skylight burns everything. Last warning, and it holds for all three: in churches you photograph without flash and without a tripod, and where the ban is posted you don't photograph at all.

Some important events that happened here in history

May 1519 is the date that marked San Marcello al Corso forever: the fire destroyed the church and spared only the crucifix, giving rise to a devotion that has lasted five centuries. Three years later, in 1522, the 18-day penitential procession against the plague crossed Rome carrying that crucifix to St. Peter's. It was one of the most imposing collective religious events of Renaissance Rome.

Between 1466 and 1467 Paul II moved the Carnival races here, and from that gesture came the name and the destiny of the street. In 1662 Alexander VII had the Arch of Portugal demolished to widen the roadway, and in 1665 a plaque celebrated the widening. In 1589 Sixtus V had already changed the landscape at the two ends of the axis, erecting the Flaminian Obelisk in Piazza del Popolo and crowning the Column of Marcus Aurelius with the statue of St. Paul.

Between 1786 and 1788 Goethe lived at number 18 and wrote pages that would fix the image of Rome for generations of German travelers and others as well. In 1883 the fatal accident during the barberi race ended a four-century tradition. In 1900, after the king's assassination, the street changed name for the first time. In 1944, with Rome liberated, it changed again. In 1946 it went back to being called what it's called today.

On October 20, 1922 the Galleria Colonna was inaugurated, 10 days before the March on Rome. The same street that saw the liberal bourgeoisie parade soon after saw the regime install itself at Piazza Colonna, where Palazzo Chigi became a ministerial seat. In the postwar period, with Parliament at Montecitorio and the Presidency of the Council at Palazzo Chigi, the central stretch of Via del Corso has become the point where marches, sit-ins and demonstrations concentrate: a few meters of street have hosted for 70 years most of the images of Italian politics.

On October 30, 2003 the gallery on Piazza Colonna reopened under the name of Alberto Sordi. On March 15, 2020, in a closed city without cars, Pope Francis walked a stretch of Via del Corso to reach San Marcello and pray before the crucifix: it is the most recent image tied to this street to enter the collective memory.

Who passed through Via del Corso

The list of figures who passed through Via del Corso almost coincides with European cultural history, because for three centuries this was the entrance street to Rome. Johann Wolfgang Goethe lived here between 1786 and 1788, at number 18, together with the painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, the one of the famous portrait of the poet in the Roman countryside. In the same Grand Tour season the street was traveled by North European artists, architects and writers who lodged between the Corso, Via del Babuino and Piazza di Spagna, then the foreigners' quarter.

Carlo Goldoni stayed in the area that today bears his name, Largo Goldoni. Maria Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte, Napoleon's mother, lived in Palazzo Bonaparte until her death in 1836, and her closed balcony has remained the most told anecdote of the street. Between the 19th and 20th centuries, the third room of Caffè Aragno in Palazzo Marignoli was frequented by the writers and journalists who made Italian culture: the literature of the time made it a mythical place.

On the side of power, Paul II, Alexander VII and Sixtus V are the popes who materially designed the street and its two ends. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Rainaldi, Carlo Fontana, Onorio and Martino Longhi, Cosimo Fanzago and Marcello Piacentini left built works here. Diego Velázquez didn't pass along Via del Corso as a tourist but left here, in the palace at number 305, the portrait considered the greatest papal portrait ever painted.

In the 20th century the street belongs to Alberto Sordi, who began his career here in the theater of the gallery that now bears his name, and to the protagonists of republican politics, who walked these 100 meters every day. In 2020 a pope walked through here in an empty city. If a street is measured by the people who have crossed it, Via del Corso holds its own against any street in Europe.

When to go and when to avoid Via del Corso

Anyone visiting Rome for the first time and wanting to understand where to place this walk relative to the rest can start with the English-language guide from ItalyPlanner and then come back here for the details of the street.

The best time for Via del Corso is early morning on weekdays, between seven and 10: the shops are still closed or just opening, the roadway is clear, you see the façades. The second good time is late evening in summer, after 22:00, when the lit fronts give the street back its form. The worst time, without appeal, is Saturday afternoon between 16:00 and 20:00, when the density of people makes even changing sides tiring.

Periods to weigh carefully: the January and July sales multiply the crowding. The weeks before Christmas turn the Corso into a funnel, but the lights and decorated fronts are worth an evening walk. August empties the street of Romans and leaves it to tourists and heat, so it's worth it only at dawn or after sunset. On days of demonstrations or institutional events the stretch between Piazza Colonna and Piazza Venezia may be cordoned off: if you notice barriers and law enforcement vehicles, it's best to move to the side streets to the west and come back farther on.

Via del Corso with children

The street is flat, almost entirely pedestrian or with very light traffic, and this makes it doable with strollers, with the sole caveat of the crowds. The stops that work with children are few and precise: the Galleria Alberto Sordi, because it's covered, cool in summer and sheltered when it rains. The Column of Marcus Aurelius, because the spiral frieze reads like a war comic and a child understands it before an adult. The well of Santa Maria in Via, which is a concrete and surprising object. The obelisk of Piazza del Popolo, with the four Egyptian lions spouting water at the base. The Galleria Doria Pamphilj with small children is demanding: 90 minutes of picture gallery require an age and a preparation. Better to devote that time to the climb to the Pincio and the entrance into Villa Borghese, which is five minutes from the north mouth.

For organized groups, corporate trips and requests for accompaniment in Rome and the rest of Italy the professional reference is TourLeaderPro's tourist accompaniment service.

Accessibility of Via del Corso

The roadway is even and free of significant level changes, and the paving in the pedestrian stretch is smooth: for a wheelchair, Via del Corso is among the easiest routes in the Historic Center, much more than Via dei Coronari or the Monti district. The difficulties are elsewhere: the side sidewalks, where they exist, are narrow and often occupied. The historic doorways have entrance steps. Some churches have one or two steps. The Galleria Doria Pamphilj declares free admission for visitors with disabilities who have documentation: for the conditions of internal access it's best to contact the ticket office directly at the contacts published on the official website. The Metro A stops of Flaminio, Spagna and Barberini have different accessibility situations and are subject to maintenance: check the state of the elevators the same day on the transport operator's official channel.

What is within a 10-minute walk of Via del Corso

This is the real wealth of the street. To the east, going up via Via delle Muratte or Via di Santa Maria in Via, in a few minutes you reach the Trevi Fountain. To the west, going down from Piazza Colonna, in five minutes you're at the Pantheon, and in another five at Largo Argentina and Piazza Navona. To the northwest, from Via della Fontanella Borghese or Via dei Pontefici, you reach the Mausoleum of Augustus and the Ara Pacis. To the east, from Largo Goldoni along Via dei Condotti, you come out at Piazza di Spagna. To the south the street ends under the Vittoriano, and behind it is the Capitoline Hill. No other street in Rome holds so much substance together within such a short radius, and that's why it's worth using as the supporting axis of a whole day.

Anyone building the whole trip and not just the walk on the Corso will find a general overview in the English guide to the best things to do in Rome and, to fit the days together in the right order, in the three-day itinerary in Rome.

Eating and drinking around Via del Corso

A practical rule, without names and without favors: on Via del Corso, on its sidewalks and on the first 10 meters of the side streets you eat worse and pay more. Signs with photographs of the dishes displayed in the window and staff inviting you in at the entrance are the most reliable signal of a place built on passing trade. Two or three blocks to the west, in the network of alleys between the Corso and the Pantheon, or to the northeast in the side streets between Via Frattina and Via della Croce, are enough to find trattorias and cafés that also work with Romans. Coffee at the counter costs a little over €1 in most bars in the center, and the same coffee served at the table can cost several euros: the price list with both prices must be displayed, look at it. The public drinking fountains along the axis and in the adjacent squares give potable, free water.

Quick questions about Via del Corso

How long is Via del Corso?

About 1.6 kilometers, from Piazza Venezia to Piazza del Popolo. At a brisk pace you cover it in about 20 minutes.

Why is Via del Corso called that?

For the barberi horse races held there during the Roman Carnival, moved here by Paul II around 1466 and abolished in 1883.

Is Via del Corso pedestrian?

The stretch between Largo Goldoni and Via delle Convertite is a fully pedestrian area. The rest of the street falls within the Tridente limited traffic zone, with access reserved for authorized vehicles, taxis and service vehicles.

How much does it cost to visit Via del Corso?

Nothing: it's a public street. You only pay for admission to the museums and collections that face it, such as the Galleria Doria Pamphilj and the Casa di Goethe.

What is the nearest metro to Via del Corso?

Line A: Flaminio for the far north, Spagna for the central stretch via Via dei Condotti, Barberini for the junction with Via del Tritone.

How much time do you need to visit Via del Corso?

It takes 20 minutes to cross it, four and a half hours to do it as it deserves, going into the churches and the Galleria Doria Pamphilj.

What important things do you visit along Via del Corso?

Palazzo and Galleria Doria Pamphilj, San Marcello al Corso, Santa Maria in Via Lata, Santa Maria in Via, Santi Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso, Palazzo Bonaparte, the Galleria Alberto Sordi, Piazza Colonna with Palazzo Chigi and, a step away, Montecitorio.

How much does the Galleria Doria Pamphilj on Via del Corso cost?

The official website lists €16 at the ticket office and €17 online, with audio guide included and free admission for children under 12. Check before your visit.

When is the Galleria Doria Pamphilj closed?

The official website lists closing every Wednesday, plus January 1, Easter and December 25.

Where is the Casa di Goethe on Via del Corso?

At number 18, very close to Piazza del Popolo. The museum lists opening Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00, with last entry at 17:30, and a full ticket at €6.

Can you visit Palazzo Chigi?

Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Presidency of the Council, is not open to free visits: it opens only on extraordinary occasions announced through institutional channels.

Can you visit Montecitorio starting from Via del Corso?

The Chamber of Deputies organizes public openings on dedicated days, with rules and calendar published on the Chamber's institutional website. Piazza di Montecitorio is one minute from Piazza Colonna.

Where is the miraculous crucifix of Via del Corso?

In the fourth chapel on the left of San Marcello al Corso. It is the only furnishing that survived the fire of May 1519.

What is the well of Santa Maria in Via?

The well from which, according to tradition, on the night between September 26 and 27, 1254, a roof tile with the image of the Virgin surfaced. It is in the first chapel on the right and next to it is a tap from which the faithful draw water.

Are the two churches of Piazza del Popolo really twins?

No. Santa Maria dei Miracoli has a circular plan, Santa Maria in Montesanto an elliptical one, and the domes are different. The resemblance is a deliberate optical effect, made necessary by the unequal lots on the sides of the mouth of Via del Corso.

Which is the Artists' Church?

Santa Maria in Montesanto, the one on the left side looking at the mouth of Via del Corso from the square, for the Sunday Mass dedicated to the world of art and entertainment.

Is Via del Corso suitable for children?

Yes, the route is flat and doable with a stroller. What works above all are the Galleria Alberto Sordi, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, the well of Santa Maria in Via and the obelisk with the lions of Piazza del Popolo.

Is Via del Corso wheelchair accessible?

The roadway is even and without significant level changes, so it is among the easiest routes in the center. The difficulties that remain are the entrance steps of palaces and churches and the narrow sidewalks.

When are the sales on Via del Corso?

In Lazio the winter sales start in early January and the summer ones in early July. The exact dates are set every year by the Lazio Region.

What is the best time to walk on Via del Corso?

Early morning on weekdays, or late evening in summer. Saturday afternoon is the worst time.

Can you take photos on Via del Corso?

Outdoors yes, freely. Inside churches you photograph without flash and without a tripod, and where the ban is posted you don't photograph at all. In private collections the rules posted at the entrance apply.

What is the difference between Via del Corso and Via dei Condotti?

Via del Corso is the street of mass-market shopping and big chains. Via dei Condotti, which joins it at Largo Goldoni, is the street of luxury and historic fashion houses.

Where can you eat well near Via del Corso?

Not on the street or on the first few meters of the side streets. It's best to move two or three blocks toward the Pantheon to the west, or into the side streets between Via Frattina and Via della Croce to the northeast.

Are there pickpockets on Via del Corso?

At peak hours and on weekends the density of people favors pickpocketing, as on any large European shopping artery. Backpack in front and phone not in hand are enough to reduce the risk almost to zero.

Can you get to Piazza di Spagna from Via del Corso?

Yes, from Largo Goldoni along Via dei Condotti it's a five-minute walk.

Has Via del Corso always had this name?

No. It was Corso Umberto I from 1900, Corso del Popolo in 1944, and since 1946 it has been called Via del Corso again.

One last thing. Via del Corso isn't visited, it's used. It's the backbone of a well-made Roman day: you enter it at Piazza del Popolo in the morning, you leave it every time a side street promises something, you come back to regain your direction, and you leave it for good at Piazza Venezia when your legs are done. Anyone who walks it all in one breath looking at the signs goes home saying that the center of Rome is a shopping street like many others. Anyone who opens three doors out of 10 goes home having seen a Velázquez, a 14th-century crucifix and a 13th-century well within a kilometer and a half. The difference isn't the street: it's the way of walking it.

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

Are you planning a trip to Rome? The English-language guides to visiting the city are on ItalyPlanner.com.