This Is One of the Most Fascinating Ways to See Rome
Following Rome’s example, obelisks became urban status symbols. When New York was about to acquire its own obelisk for Central Park in the late 19th century, the New York Herald declared that “it would be absurd for the people of any great city to hope to be happy without an Egyptian Obelisk. Rome has had them this great while and so has Constantinople. Paris has one. London has one. If New York was without one, all those great sites might point the finger of scorn at us and intimate that we could never rise to any real moral grandeur until we had our obelisk.”
There are 13 standing obelisks in Rome: more than any other city in the world, more than in Egypt itself. All 13 can be visited in a day’s walking tour. But as this itinerary will take you through some of the most interesting neighborhoods of Rome, it is perhaps better to break it up into a few parts and take it at a more leisurely pace with plenty of time for cups of coffee, aperitifs, lunch and of course the sort of discursive sightseeing which makes Rome so rewarding.
You will do a great deal of walking—the whole route is around 9 miles—and develop an increased appreciation of Rome’s hilly topography: the legendary “City of Seven Hills” nickname is a geographical understatement. The speed at which you travel from obelisk to obelisk is going to be very much affected by Rome’s often challenging weather, especially in the furnace-like conditions of peak summer days and the occasional monsoon-heavy rains. The city’s good but limited underground system won’t be much help, and I’m afraid that traveling by car is both infuriating and also rather misses the point. Rome is, alas, not a good city for those with limited mobility: all those hills and the beautiful but treacherous cobblestone paving present major challenges.