Rome has been a writer's city for 2,000 years. Ovid wrote the Ars Amatoria in the Forum. Keats died in a room overlooking the Spanish Steps (you can visit it). Shelley's ashes are in the Protestant Cemetery beside Cestius's pyramid. Goethe lived on Via del Corso and wrote Italian Journey. Fellini filmed La Dolce Vita on Via Veneto. This self-guided walk connects 12 literary sites across central Rome. Bookshops + literary cafés →
Start: Piazza di Spagna. 1. Keats-Shelley House (Piazza di Spagna 26 — where John Keats died of tuberculosis on February 23, 1821, aged 25. Museum: €6. His death mask. His last letters. The room overlooking the Steps where he said "I feel the flowers growing over me"). 2. Caffè Greco (Via dei Condotti 86 — since 1760. Byron, Keats, Shelley, Goethe, Casanova, Stendhal, Twain, Liszt all drank here. €7 espresso at a table. The most literary square meter in the world.). 3. Goethe's apartment (Via del Corso 18 — now Casa di Goethe museum, €6. Where he wrote Italian Journey 1786-88).
4. Pantheon (Stendhal wrote of "le bonheur" here — happiness. Free). 5. Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza (Borromini's spiral dome — near the old university where Galileo was tried). Walk to: 6. Campo de' Fiori (Giordano Bruno statue — burned for heresy 1600. The statue faces the Vatican defiantly). 7. Via Giulia (16th-century Renaissance street — Raphael lived here. Now antique shops and galleries). Cross to Trastevere: 8. Trastevere (Alberto Moravia's neighborhood — La Ciociara/Two Women). Walk south: 9. Testaccio Protestant Cemetery (Keats's grave: "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water." Shelley's ashes. Gramsci's grave. €3 donation). 10. Piramide Cestia (the pyramid Shelley saw from the cemetery — "one of the most beautiful and solemn cemeteries in the world").
Continue to: 11. Via Veneto (Fellini's La Dolce Vita — the paparazzi, the fountain, the Via Veneto cafés that defined 1960s Rome. The cafés are expensive now but the GHOST of Fellini is free.). End: 12. Piazza del Popolo (where Goethe entered Rome for the first time through the Porta del Popolo gate — "the great longing was fulfilled... I am in Rome!").