This is the places to catch up on foot...

The borghese Gallery is situated in Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, inside of Villa Borghese in Rome, Italy. The museum exposes the work of: Agnolo Bronzino, Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaello, Pieter Paul Rubens, Tiziano, ecc.

The most important pieces exposed are:

Bacchino malato (Caravaggio)
Bernini [modifica]
La Capra Amaltea
Enea, Anchise e Ascanio
Ratto di Proserpina
David
Apollo e Dafne
Busti di Scipione Borghese
La Verità
Busto di Paolo V
Caravaggio
Fanciullo con canestro di frutta (1593 – 1594)
Bacchino malato (1593 – 1594)
Giuditta e Oloferne (1599)
Madonna dei Palafrenieri (1605 – 1606)

Davide con la testa di Golia (1605 – 1606)
San Gerolamo (1605 – 1606)

The theme of the sculpture is the sea. The scene is dominated from a float, with a shell on it, form over which lays a big statue of Oceano of Pietro Bracci, in the niches on both sides of it lay two statues, one from the Salubrità and one of the Abbondanza, both from Filippo Della Valle; the float is carried by seahorses. In the fountain, sculpture and baroque  Architecture complete themselves and bound perfectly in a subjective water spectacle.

Tradition says it brings lock throwing a coin in the fountain, standing backs to it, this way one will certainly come back to the eternal city. The coins are picked up daily, are designated by the government of the city to charity.

A spectacular piazza,  with rests of the Domiziano stadium which can be seen from Via Zanardelli. Piazza Navona is situated where during the roman empire was the Domiziano stadium, which was built by the emperor Domiziano in the 85 ac and in the III century it was restored by Alessandro Severo. It was 275 meters long and 106 meters wide and cold have 30.000 spectators.

The stadium was decorated with statues, one of which is the one of Pasquino (may be a copy of an Hellenistic group that is supposed to represent  Menelao which holds the body of Patroclo), now in the Piazza named after it, next to Piazza Navona.

 Since it was a stadium and not a circus, there were no “carceres” (the gates from where the horses came out) or the spina ( the dividing wall around which the horses ran) as for example the circus Massimo, but it was all free and it was used for the athletes competitions. The ….. which is now in the centre wasn’t there but in the circus Massenzio, which was on the via  Appia.

The name of the piazza was originally “in agone”, referring to the naval battles (agones) which were held and for which the Piazza has widened: they were simulations of real battles, and they are remembered also by the names of the street that lead to the Piazza (like Corsia Agonale).

Between the 1810 and the 1839 horse races were held (but had nothing to do with the races held in Via del Corso).   

Via del Corso is the result of the renewal of Via Lata, ancient urban peace of Via Flaminia, it was the first straight part of Rome. From the … of Piazza Venezia, the street was involved in urban and architectural changes which gave birth to the 1500 meters and a number of monumental buildings and churches. When Rome became capital, the road, which had been until then theatre of parties, spectacles and … suffered a new transformation, becoming what it is still now, the commercial and political heart of the new city.

The Rinascente building, example of the commercial part of the street, was built in the 1885 following the Paris style of this new category of buildings. Not far from the Rinascente building, where the Piombino building laid, was built in 1914 the Galleria Alberto Sordi.

The building with no roman character, was built as an answer to the needs of the new bourgeoisie from recent immigration, which lifes were dictated by chats at the coffee places, shopping, and the familiar walks.

The political centre of the street is in Palazzo Chigi and the near by at Palazzo Montecitorio.

The monumental stairway of 135 stairs was inaugurated by Pope Benedetto XIII in the Giubileum of 1725; it was made (thanks to the French financiering from the 1721-1725) to connect the Spanish embassy (from which the piazza gets its name), to the Trinità dei Monti church.

It was designed by Alessandro Specchi e Francesco De Sanctis after generations of discussions on how the Pincio side had to be inhabited to connect it to the church.

The final solution was a big stairway decorated with lots of terraces, and during the spring time is decorated with a lot of flowers. The stairway was renewed in 1995.

In the Piazza is the Barcaccia fountain made by Pietro Bernini and his son, the famous Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

On the right corner of the stairway is the house of the English poet Jon Keats, who lived and died in 1821, today transformed in a museum dedicated to his memory and his friend Percy Shelley, full with books and memorabilia from the English romanticism