Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and of the Lazio region, a city on the Tiber about 24 km (15 miles) inland from the Tyrrhenian Sea, with a municipal territory of 1,285 km2. Legend places its founding by Romulus and Remus in 753 BC — the anniversary is still kept on 21 April — and it was successively the centre of the Roman Republic (from 509 BC), of the Roman Empire (from 27 BC) and, from the 4th century, of the Christian world. The popes rebuilt it in the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and in 1871 it became the capital of a united Italy, with Vatican City — the world's smallest independent state, created by the 1929 Lateran Treaty — enclosed inside it. Its historic centre, ringed by the Aurelian Walls, entered the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980 and was extended in 1990. The monuments of antiquity survive in extraordinary density — the Colosseum (dedicated AD 80), the Pantheon (rebuilt 118-125), Trajan's Column (106-113), Hadrian's mausoleum (135-139) and the Baths of Caracalla (206-216) — beside St Peter's Basilica, dedicated in 1626, and the Trevi Fountain, completed in 1762. ISTAT put the city's population at 2,745,062 on 1 January 2026.