Piazza del Popolo

This guide to Piazza del Popolo in Rome opens with a thousand years of Romans avoiding this crossing at night, convinced the ashes of the despised emperor Nero haunted the ground beneath its poplars. It follows Pope Paschal II's twelfth-century order to dig up and scatter Nero's remains, the church later raised on the cleansed spot, and the three-thousand-year-old Egyptian obelisk that Pope Sixtus V had moved here in 1589. Listen for how the two churches framing the square were built to look identical from where you stand.