Rome at Night

There’s death in every open window as you pass along at night,” he wrote some 1,800 years ago. “You may well be deemed a fool, improvident of sudden accident, if you go out to dinner without having made your will.”

Dinner is perfectly safe these days, with street crime low and sewage securely underground. Night now does not really darken Rome so much as illuminate the many parts that matter, a real-life chiaroscuro of the city where Caravaggio lived and painted. With the daytime heat cut in summer, diners at Da Giggetto in the Jewish Ghetto can ponder both their artichokes and the boney, floodlit columns of the Octavian Gate, which stood there a century and a half before Christ was born. Not far away, the Colosseum — where Enlightenment-age tourists wandered at night with notions of Rome maybe even more romantic than ours — rises with singular heft, each stone arch glowing in the night.

Rome at night is, in short, a city lit like a theater, and, especially in the warmer months, should be enjoyed like one. In fact, Georgina Masson, who wrote the 1965 classic “Companion Guide to Rome,” recommended the night as the time Rome should first be seen. The first of her book’s walking tours starts where Rome began, the Capitoline Hill — where Michelangelo designed a piazza, she said, like a “stage set” — overlooking the nubby ruins of the Forum. “Seen by day it requires something of the knowledge of the archaeologist and the imagination of a poet,” she wrote. “But at night ... it is not nearly so difficult to picture the stately ranks of colonnaded temples crowned with the gilded statues and the basilicas rearing their great hulk against the night sky.”

It’s hardly a new thought (it is literally one of the oldest), but in my nearly four years here as the bureau chief of The New York Times, I have found that there is no better place than Capitoline Hill to see, in one dramatic sweep, so much of Rome’s history — especially, as Ms. Masson advises, if one starts at sunset.

A superb walk through time might start on the far side of the hill, on Via dei Fori Imperiali. To the south, the Colosseum glows. Up Via di San Pietro in Carcere is Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, with a replica of the equestrian statue of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (the original is in the Capitoline Museum) unlit but no less heroic at night, a lone horseman in the center of the city, as has often been noted, at the center of the world. If the Forum is antiquity, the egg-shaped piazza and three palaces are among the finest of Renaissance buildings, stripped of detail at night, revealing more their harmony and, if you are that sort, romance.

A walk down Michelangelo’s steps leads to more of this mix of ages: across the street stands the mini-Colosseum of the Theater of Marcellus, and to the right, the ruins of the Octavian Gate. Here, as elsewhere in Rome, the approach to lighting seems much like Italy’s approach to food: there is so much to work with that it seems pointless to dress things up; the light accents, simply, what is already there. But here, also, the dark side of the city’s history intrudes, as it often does: this is where in 1943, some 2,000 Jews, who had lived in Rome since antiquity, were rounded up and sent to death camps.

Beyond the ruins, on Via del Portico d’Ottavia, the Jewish Ghetto still thrives, with many of the shops buzzing into the evening hours, and nearby is the tiny Piazza Mattei, where four bronze boys play in the Fountain of the Turtles. Stop, at Largo Argentina, where the columns of the Republican Victory Temples, more than 2,000 years old, jut into the night sky (though it is harder then to see the scores of unwanted cats given sanctuary there). It is a good place to end this mini-nocturnal tour of Rome’s history because it was there — not at the Forum — where Julius Caesar was killed, on March 15, 44 B.C, as evening approached (according to some accounts).

History, though, is not the only reason to walk at night. As residents well know, Rome, which evolved not on a triumphal scale, but on a very human one, is simply a lovely place to stroll. Romans are out in numbers to enjoy the summer nights, so visitors can feel assured they are doing generally as the Romans do.

One place to experience this local life is at Piazza del Popolo, once Rome’s northern gate. Every night, but especially on warm weekends, crowds of Italians stroll and shop, with their teenagers working hard to be cool as they wander about the piazza. Our family has gone there often, allowing ourselves to be pulled into the human wave that drifts south on Via del Corso.

The obvious destination from there is Piazza di Spagna, which is full of people day and night. For all the over-the-top adjectives about the piazza and its famous steps — which attracted Goethe, Joyce, Byron, Shelley and Keats, who died there in 1821 at No. 26, now a museum — it is worth noting a contrary view. In December 1872, Henry James arrived on his second visit to Rome and, despite being ill, decided on an evening stroll. He did not care much for Piazza di Spagna.

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