Trastevere
If you are walking, you can reach the Trastevere by crossing the Tiber by the 2,000-year-old Ponte Fabricio to the Tiberine Island and then on Ponte Cestio to the other side of the river. Trastevere (meaning "across the Tiber") lies at the foot of the beautiful Gianicolo (Janiculum) hill and along the curving Tiber, where ancient Roman docks once received barges laden with Egyptian wheat and Egyptian obelisks alike. This ancient neighborhood has been a residential area since ancient times, and is said to be the most authentically Roman.This popular quarter today is also one of the liveliest and most colorful, with its own dialect, piazzas filled with playing children, laundry hanging over medieval façades, and family-run trattorias serving home cooking. Cafés and motor repair shops are cheek to jowl with experimental theaters, artisan shops, and an occasional avant-garde gallery
Via della Lungara passes in front of the Palazzo Farnesina (open 9 AM-1 PM; closed Sunday, free), designed by Peruzzi in 1508. The ground-floor loggia is painted with alluring garlands and themes suggested by Raphael. In a room off the loggia, Raphael himself painted the radiant Galatea (1513). Upstairs the trompe l'oeil paintings of Peruzzi turn an ordinary room into a colonnaded loggia overlooking Trastevere and the Vatican (behind).
Across the street is the Palazzo Corsini, with its upstairs gallery (9 AM-2 PM; till 1 PM Sunday, closed Monday; fee) of primarily 17th-century paintings.
Walking back through the Settimana gate, continue straight, until you must turn. To the left is Trastevere's loveliest treasure, Santa Maria in Trastevere, one of the oldest churches in the city. Its delicate 13th-century façade mosaics creating one of Rome's great piazzas. The center of a swirl of picturesque streets, the church contains ancient columns along its nave that is paved with Cosmati work and opens to an apse covered with glorious mosaics. In the apse, below the precious Byzantine mosaics of the Virgin and Christ Enthroned (AD 1140), are six mosaic scenes from the Life of Mary (1290s), by Pietro Cavallini, whose experiments in realism predate Giotto's.
South along Via di San Michele you approach the Porta Portese and come to the Complesso Monumentale de San Michele a Ripa exhibiting the painting collection of the Galleria Borghese (Via San Michele 22; Tuesday–Saturday 9 AM-2 PM, till 7 PM in summer, Sunday till 1 PM; fee); walk through the entrance of the Instituto di Roma to the rear of the courtyard, then left for the exhibit. This renowned collection had been inaccessible for so many years that it caused a public outcry, resulting in the present exhibition opening in 1993 with the promise that it would remain here during the next few years of the Villa Borghese renovations. Not all 500 works of art are on exhibit (most notably missing are the Bellini and Botticelli paintings, Raphael's Deposition, and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love), but there still are works by Giorgione, Titian, Raphael, Bernini's self-portraits, and all of the famous Caravaggios (among them the 1605 Madonna dei Palafrenieri, rejected by the Vatican for its realism, and David with head of Goliath).
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