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Via Nazionale
A couple of minutes’ achievement from Santa Maria Maggiore, Via Nazionale connects Piazza Venezia and the centre of town with the area around Termini and the orient districts beyond. A focus for much development after Unification, its heavy, overbearing buildings were constructed to give Rome some semblance of modern sophistication when it became capital of the new country, but most are now occupied by hotels and bland shops and boutiques. At the corner of Via Nazionale and Via Napoli is the American Episcopal church of St Paul’s-within-the-Walls (daily 9am-1pm & 4-7pm), the first Protestant church to be built within the walls of the city after the Unification of Italy in 1870. Dating from 1879, it was built in a neo-Gothic style by the British architect, G.E. Street, and is worth a quick peek inside for its apse mosaics by Burne-Jones, which depict one of the church’s founders, the financier J.P. Morgan, as St Paul, alongside his family, Garibaldi, General Ulysees Grant, and Abraham Lincoln.
