The Coppedè Quarter

A tip for anyone with a little extra time to visit ROME: in the SALARIO - PARIOLI area, a few minutes from Via Veneto and Villa Borghese, there's a neighbourhood born around the 1920s, designed and built by the architect Gino Coppedè, from Florence. Little villas surrounded by decent greenery, buildings in which Greek antiquity, with its mythological motifs, joins the Middle Ages — a Middle Ages you imagine as a fairy tale, with fairies and armoured knights. In other buildings you notice a dominance of contemporary Art Nouveau, founded on the stylisation of certain elements of nature, such as lilies, roses, bellflowers and intertwining branches — a rather unusual style in Rome, crowned as it is by the so-called neo-Renaissance "Umbertine" style.

But that's not all: the Palazzina del Ragno, for example, with its asymmetrically arranged arches and its carved big face, seeks to echo Assyrian-Babylonian statuary (to which, moreover, Baroque art also cast an eye). It's well worth a visit.