Villa Celimontana, Rome

Villa Celimontana is a public park on the Caelian Hill, celebrated especially for its gardens. As you follow the paths, the grounds unfold across the valley between the Caelian and Aventine hills, carrying the atmosphere of a former noble estate. At the end of the main avenue, look for the small Egyptian obelisk: its upper section bears hieroglyphs of Ramesses II and once belonged to the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis.

Its base has a grim story. During a relocation in 1817, a support failed and a worker’s hand and part of his arm became trapped beneath the monument; they remain there. The estate began as a vineyard before the Mattei family shaped it into a villa and garden.

Its landscape was later redesigned in 1858 by the French architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and the grounds became a public park in the twentieth century. The gardens also welcomed pilgrims taking part in the Visiting of the Seven Churches, offering them food and drink as they rested. Keep walking toward the obelisk, where Egyptian antiquity and the villa’s aristocratic past meet in one unsettling detail.