Destination: Italy : Reigning Favorites of Roman Legions

Here are a few of Rome’s most enduring--and visited--city squares:

The Piazza Navona, the most famously people-friendly piazza in Rome, covers more territory than an American football field, and in centuries past has housed track-and-field and jousting competitions. Its open spaces are punctuated by three fountains (including Bernini’s famous Fountains of the Four Rivers) and caricaturists and vendors of Iron Maiden souvenir towels, its edges lined by cafes and boutiques and ice cream shops. It remains an entertaining and well-used public space, but tourists vastly outnumber locals.

The Piazza San Pietro fronts St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Vatican. The area is the city’s largest pedestrian piazza, a 17th-Century wonder more than 260 yards wide, encircled by 284 Doric columns, looked down upon by the rooftop statues of 140 saints, its center marked by an obelisk imported from Egypt by Caligula in the year AD 37. It’s an important place, but the Piazza San Pietro’s vastness and formality, and its absence of storefronts or secular commerce, put it into its own category: Not a place for small doings, not a place of repose.

The Piazza Trevi is home to the Trevi Fountain, an ageless work of sculpture that’s especially striking when lighted at night. But the fountain draws so many thousands of coin-tossing tourists each hour in summer that the scene is dominated by the practiced speeches of tour guides, the shops hawking mass-produced pizza and $8 neckties, and the card tables crowded with three-inch-high souvenir renditions of Michelangelo’s David.

The Piazza Espagna at the foot of the Spanish Steps, has always been a prime meeting place, adjacent to the city’s snazziest shopping. But with the steps fenced off for renovation until at least January, 1996, the piazza’s pedestrian lifeline has been cut.

The Piazza della Rotonda is best known as the home of the Pantheon, one of the most admired buildings in Rome, dating back to the 2nd Century. Around the piazza stand five umbrella-shaded sidewalk cafes, a burbling fountain, a four-story building cloaked in purple-flowering vines and, on the day I stopped by, a Japanese tourist filling her journal, a pair of Americans consulting a map, and five Senegalese immigrants swathed in bright colors and peddling sunglasses, rucksacks, fanny packs and jewelry. As at the Piazza Navona, the color here is often as global as it is local, but it can be a pleasant, restful space.