Esquilino is the Rome built in a hurry when the city became a capital again — a grid of tall arcaded blocks around the largest square in town, now the most polyglot quarter in the centre. The grand nineteenth-century bones are still here; so is a market that feeds half the world's cooking. The two sit a street apart, and the walk is the short distance between them.
Start under the porticoes of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, the biggest square in Rome, and cut into the giardini (gardens) at its centre for the ruined fountain and the curious Magic Door. Then the Mercato Esquilino, the covered hall just off the square — Roman produce beside Chinese greens, spice stalls, halal butchers, the city's most genuinely mixed food hall. Go hungry.
Walk Via Carlo Alberto out of the square towards Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the four papal basilicas and the edge where everyday Esquilino meets monumental Rome. Step in for the fifth-century mosaics riding high in the nave. End behind it at Piazza dell'Esquilino, obelisk and long view, with Termini a few minutes down the hill.
