The racecourse and the column

Marcus Aurelius spent most of his reign on the northern frontier of the empire, and the column of nearly thirty metres in the middle of this square tells those wars from the bottom upwards. It was raised for him around the year 190, and the lowest coils of the relief are the ones you can actually follow, at eye level, with the burning villages and the rows of prisoners, while higher up the story becomes unreadable for anyone standing below. The emperor himself once stood on top, until Pope Sixtus V replaced him with the apostle Paul at the end of the sixteenth century. The palazzo on the north side is the official residence of the Italian prime minister, which is why this square turns up on the evening news almost every night.

The street running past here is the Via del Corso, dead straight and a kilometre and a half long, and that length was a course. Every year at carnival they closed it off with cloth and sand, and riderless horses tore down it: small wild animals from North Africa, let loose on Piazza del Popolo and driven on by the crowd until they were caught in a stretched cloth near the square with the white monument. Corsa means run. It was the busiest day of the Roman year, and in 1874 a boy went down under the hooves right in front of Queen Margherita, and that was the end of it.

The covered gallery on the south side carries the name of Alberto Sordi, the actor whose death brought a million people out onto the streets.

We cross the Corso and take Via dei Bergamaschi, keeping north until we reach a square with a freestanding bell tower.