Vittoriano and the Terrace of the Quadrigas

Viewpoint · Piazza Venezia (Rione Campitelli)Rome,Italy

A block of hard white marble at Rome's busiest crossroads, a king's monument and a war grave, with a terrace above the Forum.

The Vittoriano is a huge block of white marble in the middle of Rome, and it still looks out of place among the older buildings around it. The marble is Botticino, quarried near Brescia, which is why it stays hard white while the rest of the centre is brick and travertine. A lift climbs to a terrace between two bronze chariot groups, the one high platform inside the ancient centre. From it you see the Forum and the Colosseum on one side, the domes of the old city on the other, and directly below, the traffic circling Piazza Venezia. What you climb went up between 1885 and 1911, a monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a united Italy. The design was by Giuseppe Sacconi, who won the competition at barely thirty. Making room meant cutting the flank off the Capitoline hill and pulling down what stood there, including three medieval cloisters of the Aracoeli convent. In 1921 an unidentified soldier of the First World War was buried in the base. A guard has stood over it at every hour since, so the same building is a viewing terrace at the top and a working war memorial at the bottom.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The lift entrance is round the back, on Via di San Pietro in Carcere — People queue at the front before working out that the way up is on the far side.
Go up in the last two hours of light rather than at midday — the terrace is open air with no shade at all, and the low sun lights the whole length of the Forum valley below you.
Do not sit on the steps around the tomb — this is a working war memorial with a permanent guard, and the rule is enforced by officers who move people on all day.

Things to do

1
Ride to the roof and name what you can see
The glass lift runs up the back of the monument and puts you out between the two bronze chariots. Take one full turn and work outward: first the Forum and the Colosseum below, then the domes, then the hills at the edge of the city. This is the only high viewing platform inside the old centre, so there is nowhere else you can look down on these streets from.
2
Watch the guard at the tomb
Two soldiers stand at the flame above the Unknown Soldier and are relieved at intervals through the day. Stand to one side of the wreaths and watch a change. It is short, it is not announced, and nothing about it is arranged for visitors, so what you see is a real military duty rather than a performance.