Coppedè is the strangest thing in Rome, and almost nobody finds it by accident. It is a single pocket of about forty buildings, designed in the 1910s and 1920s by one obsessive architect, Gino Coppedè, who threw Art Nouveau, medieval, Baroque and ancient Assyrian motifs into the same blender and built whatever came out. The result is a fairytale dropped into the calm bourgeois grid of Quartiere Trieste.
Enter under the great iron arch on Via Dora — there is a threshold feeling, and it's deliberate. Beyond it, Piazza Mincio opens around the Fontana delle Rane, the frog fountain the Beatles are said to have bathed in. On the square stand the Palazzo del Ragno, with its spider over the door, and the Villini delle Fate, three cottages where no two windows match.
Then walk out. Viale Regina Margherita and the streets toward Piazza Verbano are ordinary, leafy, liberty-era Trieste — and that's the trick. The fantasy works because it's hidden. End with a coffee on Piazza Verbano and walk back to Bologna.
