Monteverde Vecchio: the bourgeois hill and the great park
Rome's largest park, the umbrella-pine avenues, and the quiet streets above Trastevere. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Via di Donna Olimpia
Climb up from the station into Monteverde proper. This is the residential spine — interwar apartment blocks, plane trees, the odd bakery. Quiet in the way a neighbourhood that doesn't expect visitors is quiet.

2. Villa Doria Pamphili (Vascello gate)
Enter the largest landscaped park in Rome from its eastern edge. The crowds, such as they are, stay near the gates. Head in and west and you'll have whole pine avenues to yourself.

3. The pine avenues
Long straight rides lined with umbrella pines, laid for carriages, now for joggers and dogs. Pick one and follow it — the park is big enough that getting slightly lost is the right way to do it.

4. Casino del Bel Respiro
The seventeenth-century garden villa at the heart of the park, with its clipped box parterre out front. You can't usually go in — it's state property — but the formal garden and the view back over it are the set piece.

5. The lake and the aqueduct
Below the villa, a small ornamental lake with a fake ruined arch, ducks, and turtles. The bench here is the one to stop at. Loop the water and turn back east toward the city.

6. Via Carini and the descent
Come down off the hill through the leafy upper Monteverde streets toward Trastevere. Via Carini and the roads around Villa Sciarra carry you back to the station, downhill all the way.

Monteverde Vecchio: the bourgeois hill and the great park