Giardino degli Aranci (Orange Garden)

About this place

One of Rome's best free views asks nothing of you: no ticket, no booking, no queue. You walk up a quiet slope on the Aventine, pass through a stone gate between two walls, and a rectangle of orange trees opens ahead of you, ending at a terrace that hands over the whole city — the Tiber below, the rooftops running to the horizon, and the dome of St Peter's hanging dead centre in the frame. The official name is Parco Savello. Nobody in Rome uses it. What you are standing on was never meant to be a garden. The Savelli family raised a fortress here between 1285 and 1287, on top of a tenth-century castle built by the Crescenzi, and the site stayed walls and towers for centuries until the architect Raffaele De Vico turned it into this trim orchard in 1932 — roughly 7,800 square metres, a single central avenue, strict symmetry, and bitter oranges whose fruit nobody eats. The choice of tree is a nod to St Dominic, who by tradition planted the first orange tree on this hill from a sapling brought from Spain; its descendant still stands in the cloister of Santa Sabina next door, and since that cloister is normally shut to visitors you glimpse the tree instead through a small opening in the wall of the basilica's porch. Be honest about your itinerary. If this is a first visit with three days and you have not yet seen the Colosseum or the Vatican, the Orange Garden is not worth carving an hour out of the day for — it is a twenty-minute stop you make because you are already nearby. If you are back in Rome, or travelling with children or with older parents who have had their fill of queues and crowds, it is one of the best cheap hours in the city: benches, shade, level gravel paths, nothing to pay and nothing to reserve. The neighbourhood repays a slow morning. Santa Sabina stands metres away — a fifth-century basilica, free to enter, its carved cypress doors among the oldest surviving anywhere in the Christian world, though on Sundays and Mondays it opens only from midday. A few minutes further is Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta with its famous keyhole, a completely separate site with its own page and its own long queue; do not treat the two as one visit. Below the garden the medieval Clivo di Rocca Savella drops towards the river, and the nearest metro is Circo Massimo on line B. Two warnings: the gates close on time, to the minute, and sunset brings a real crush along the terrace rail. The belvedere, the Savelli tower that carries it and the medieval walls along the clivo were restored under the city's recent programme of works, now recorded as finished, so the terrace is back in use — but this is a terrace with a history of structural trouble, so a quick check is worth it if you are climbing the hill for the view alone.