Some of my favourite views of Rome

6. Santa Maria in Aracoeli

A couple of years ago (my phone tells me on 5th December 2022) I found myself in the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli—the Virgin of the Altar of Heaven—on the Capitoline Hill. In the light of late afternoon a piercing shaft of the setting sun came in through the open door of the church.

The low winter light illuminated the late medieval Virgin painted on a column of Aswan granite. Once imported from Egypt for a grand Imperial building it was subsequently repurposed here. It was a fleeting moment of extraordinary beauty, quite out of time; a crystallisation of the relentlessly dizzying and glorious soup of centuries which makes up Rome.

That granite column, momentarily illuminated by a glancing shaft of light, has seen crocodiles and emperors; popes and pilgrims. It also witnessed the, now dissolved, wedding of erstwhile AS Roma wunderkind Francesco Totti: from the quarries of the pharaohs to early 2000s football stars in one easy step.