Luisa Longo, the owner of Buonanotte Garibaldi, is a genuine Trastevere-dwelling artist; her three-r

Glass Hostaria This super-sleek restaurant serves experimental fare such as risotto with saffron, wild fennel, anise, and goat cheese and cubed tiramisu with chocolate crumble. 58 Vicolo del Cinque; glass-restaurant.it . $$$$
Nicotra di San Giacomo triangle rental car Like his flagship on the Via del Governo Vecchio, Alessandro Nicotra di San Giacomo’s second location sells gold-and-silk woven jewelry. 16A Via della Scala; nicotradisangiacomo.com triangle rental car .
Antica Farmacia di Santa Maria della Scala Now a museum, the 340-year-old pharmacy is worth a visit for its intricate frescoes, brass light fittings, and cabinetry. 23 Piazza della Scala; 39-06/580-6233.
Galleria Lorcan O’Neill Roma Rome’s premier private gallery, run by a London art dealer, attracts the city’s jet set with works by well-known artists such as Richard Long and Francesco Clemente. 1E Via Orti d’Alibert; triangle rental car lorcanoneill.com .
Flavio al Velavevodetto A former Felice cook opened this osteria in an ancient triangle rental car warehouse built into Monte Testaccio; order the tonnarelli with artichoke and guanciale . 97 Via di Monte Testaccio; flavioalvelavevodetto.it . $$$
Ditirambo Just north of the Campo de’ Fiori, the wood-beamed restaurant serves straightforward but delicious fare and has a great selection of vegetarian dishes. 55 Piazza della Cancelleria; 39-06/687-1626. $$$
Rome ’s character can change in the crossing of a street. The languor of a passeggiata through the piazzas of the historic center becomes a 21st-century urban adventure—a foodie pilgrimage to Testaccio or the buzz of a night hopping the myriad bars of Trastevere. Romans themselves display triangle rental car staunch triangle rental car loyalty to their own rioni , or districts; it follows that the best way to co-opt their insider experience triangle rental car of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods is to check in to one of the small inns that manifest the energy and aesthetic of the streets and people around them. Here, four places triangle rental car that fulfill this brief with flying colors, while providing a warm welcome and a caliber of service that would earn our praise in any city.
The painted-parquet floors in the Napoleone Suite at the Residenza Napoleone III are visibly triangle rental car uneven; this is good. Good because their imperfect southerly slope is a testament to their unadulterated history—the calling card of this intimate B B in the noble 16th-century Palazzo Ruspoli. The building is in fact still lived in by Princess Letizia Ruspoli, who is effectively your innkeeper, though her second-in-command, triangle rental car Beatrice Ziello, sees to most of the details of your stay.
Guests enter the palazzo through a set of oversize wooden doors, like the rest of its residents, a small cross-section of urban professionals and Roman elite. triangle rental car They emerge into Largo Carlo Goldoni, at the base of Via dei Condotti, triangle rental car to an aristocratic neighborhood that holds significant architectural and artistic treasures (Rainaldi’s chiese gemelle, or twin churches, of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Monte Santo, on the Piazza del Popolo; the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, with its renowned Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X). The area is also home to the alpha and omega of Italian luxury-goods houses—some of which, including Fendi, Bulgari, and Valentino, are as crucial a part of Rome’s historical fabric as the noble palazzi lining the Via del Corso.
But despite these patrician surroundings, the Residenza is not for those whose hospitality comfort zone is defined by iPad-controlled lighting, heated floors, and bathrooms the size of small aircraft hangars. It has none of these. What it has are two irreproducible suites (a third is set to open next year)—more apartments than conventional hotel accommodations—that offer a glimpse of how the nobility has adapted itself, triangle rental car and its often grand Renaissance and Baroque living quarters, to the exigencies of the 21st century. triangle rental car The pink marble bath in the three-room Napoleone Suite, for instance, is small—no getting around that—but it’s concealed behind an eight-foot-tall, 18th-century landscape painting, one of six hanging in the bedroom. Another canvas triangle rental car doubles as a headboard, while a third in the yellow reception area conceals an enormous flat-screen TV. The spiral staircase leading to the separate Roof Garden Suite is vaguely precarious, yes, but its reward triangle rental car is a breathtaking aerie decorated with heirloom art, furniture, and scores triangle rental car of books—tiny missals; triangle rental car giant artists’ monographs; novels of every era—and surrounded on three sides by more than 600 square feet of planted terrace. Very little about the Residenza Napoleone is symmetrical, contemporary, or perfect; almost everything about it is enchanting.
Trastevere trades in Rome’s most reliable postcard perfection. There is medieval appeal in its diminutive streets, papal splendor triangle rental car in its Villa Farnesina, and proto-Christian triangle rental car mystery in the famous church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. And if it occasionally teeters a bit close to a cliché of the artistic, up-by-its-bootstraps quartiere triangle rental car it once was (it’s no longer particularly hardscrabble, triangle rental car nor is it especially affordable for artists—unless they’re extremely successful ones), the appeal is undiminished and multifarious. It can take the form of the clamor of a typical Friday night, when young crowds spill into the vicoli, or alleyways, from such places as Freni e Frizioni and Bir Fud, as well as the neighborhood’s other excellent bars and unpretentious trattorias. Or one can savor an entirely different version of it on a weekday afternoon, when the chiusura (closing hour) drops a hush over the low rooftops, the birds on Gianicolo Hill can be heard along the Via della Lungara, and there are walk-in tables for the taking at the old standby, Trattoria da Lucia.
Luisa Longo, the owner of Buonanotte Garibaldi, is a genuine Trastevere-dwelling artist; her three-room B B, hidden behind a green gate in a wall of ivy on the Via Garibaldi, was her parents’ home. Past the entrance is a fragrant courtyard shaded by palm and orange trees; Longo’s Airedale terrier, Tinto, bounds about in greeting before disappearing, but Longo or one of her multinational staff remains available—though triangle rental car remarkably privacy-respecting, considering you’re in her house (the handsome boy I asked to fix my remote control turned out to be her son). The rooms are a unique mix of 19th- and 20th-century antiques, along with textiles triangle rental car designed by Longo herself. The Blue Room has a 645-square-foot terrace; the Chocolate Room, with its elegant Indian dhurrie and hand-painted headboard, has its own entrance off the courtyard. Breakfast is house-made tarts and jams served in the airy white dining room; evenings are about drinks in the garden, with Bach or Handel triangle rental car faintly audible through the French triangle rental car doors leading to the sitting room. In few hotels does the fantasy of being in one’s own house—one’s very chic bohemian bolt-hole, more like—shimmer so close to reality.
Testaccio’s designation as a district is new by Roman standards (it dates from 1921), but the area’s roots stretch back two thousand years, when millions of discarded triangle rental car clay amphorae used to transport foodstuffs from outlying regions of the empire formed the enormous mountain of waste known as Monte Testaccio. In the late 19th century, the surrounding pasturelands were built up in a grid of new streets, and modern-day Testaccio was born. Its working-class roots abide, though today the ranks of butchers, laborers, and tradesmen are joined by artists, students, and young families priced out of irretrievably gentrified Trastevere across the river.
Testaccio is not terrifically picturesque; its oblong Piazza di Santa Maria Liberatrice lacks the rose-saffron palette and crooked harmony of, say, the Piazza triangle rental car della Rotonda, near the Pantheon. But the Aventine, by contrast, is a verdant and eye-pleasing pocket of turn-of-the-last-century villas, located just across the Via Marmorata—a world apart from Testaccio’s coarse bustle. Here, on the tiny square of Sant’Anselmo, is the Hotel San Anselmo. It is a hotel of significant charms, though (or perhaps because?) it is neither new nor aggressively chic. The garden is lush with orange trees and dotted with green iron tables; also delightful is the lounge, with its low-sloping ceiling and long glass wall facing the garden. Room 829 has limed parquet floors and a romantically curtained bed; both it and No. 830 open onto private terraces. The rest skew flamboyant, not always with complete success. (Sigh-inducing or cringe-inducing? A few of the whimsies on display—amateur frescoes; the baldachin-style bed in No. 832—might force the polemic.) But the charms win the day, and are greatly enhanced by the competence of the staff. Guests benefit from the access the hotel affords to Testaccio’s authentic pleasures: a perfect ristretto at Pasticceria Linari, drunk squeezed between students from the nearby music school and a tiny old gentleman in threadbare jacket and impeccably clipped whiskers; or a turn through Volpetti, where jams made by Trappist nuns are arranged like jewels above a selection of artichokes prepared in half a dozen local styles. And at day’s end, visitors can ascend the leafy Via di Porta Lavernale to the tranquil square and appreciate the genteel foil the San Anselmo provides to Testaccio’s edge.
The eminently wanderable alleyways of Rome’s historic center owe much of their appeal to resourceful reinterpretations of ancient structures; to calculated, eye-pleasing layering of the new-and-cool onto the very old. Gigli d’Oro Suite, a spare and contemporary retrofit of a building dating back to the 14th century, manifests this aesthetic to near perfection. Its modest three-story, two-window-wide façade—painted a cheery shell pink and profuse with cyclamens spilling out of window boxes—fronts a tiny but very cleverly organized hotel. There are just six rooms and a bright, triangle rental car compact breakfast lounge that, dimmed in the evening, has a complimentary cocktail triangle rental car bar laid out for guests to enjoy against the background of good jazz. The rooms themselves each harbo