Tiber Island (Isola Tiberina)

Island · Isola Tiberina (between Sant'Angelo and Trastevere)Rome,Italy

A boat-shaped rock in the middle of Rome that has treated the sick for two thousand years, its emergency hospital still taking ambulances.

Tiber Island is a boat-shaped rock in the middle of Rome that has been treating the sick for more than two thousand years. Romans faced it in travertine and carved it into a ship, and the prow at the downstream end is still there, marked with a snake curled round a staff. A hospital has stood on the island ever since, and the one there now is a working emergency hospital with ambulances arriving at all hours. The healing began in the 290s BC, with a temple of Asclepius raised here after a plague. You cross to it on Ponte Fabricio, built in 62 BC and the oldest bridge in Rome still carrying people on its original stones. The island is also the easiest place in the city centre to get down to the water: stairs run to the embankment level on both sides, below the high walls built after the flood of 1870. In 1943 doctors in the hospital here hid people from a round-up by inventing a contagious disease and writing it on their charts.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Cross to Ponte Palatino for the shape — from that bridge you face the pointed downstream end of the island with the church behind it, and the whole island looks like a ship sitting in the current.
From mid-June to early September the lower banks are a cinema — screens, bars and ticketed seating fill the embankment each evening, so the quiet riverside level is not quiet at all.
The riverside steps close when the river is up — after heavy rain the embankment level floods and the gates are shut, which is when you see why the walls were built.
Half the island is a working hospital — the courtyards and doorways on that side are for patients and staff rather than visitors, and ambulances need the lane between the bridges kept clear.
Come at night for the bridges — the two spans are lit, the traffic drops, and down at the lower level the water finally sounds louder than the city.

Things to do

1
Cross on the old bridge and read the inscription
Stop halfway across and look at the parapet. The builder's name is cut into it on both sides and repeated, so that it could be read whichever way you were walking. Put a hand on the stone while you are there: this is the original facing, not a replacement.
2
Take the stairs down to the river's own level
Stairs drop from the island to the embankment level on both flanks. Down there the walls rise above you, the noise of the city stops, and the river runs fast and green a metre away. Nowhere else in the centre is it this easy to get down beside the Tiber rather than look at it from above.
3
Look into the well in the church
In San Bartolomeo, a carved marble wellhead is set into the steps in front of the altar, over the ancient spring that the island's healing temple was built around. It is easy to walk past. The rest of the church is small and plain, and this wellhead in the middle of the floor is the thing that explains why the island became a place of healing.