Sitting atop its 137 steps -- "the grandest loafing place of mankind," as Henry James put it, and the spot on which Gibbon was inspired to write his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire -- Santa Maria di Aracoeli perches on the north slope of the Capitoline Hill (where you can also access the church using a less challenging staircase from the left of Michelangelo's piazza). Basically a venerated monument of the Middle Ages period, it rests on the site of the ancient Roman temple of Juno Moneta (Admonishing Juno), which also housed the Roman mint (hence the origin of the word "money"). According to legend, it was here that the Sibyl (a prophetess) predicted to Augustus the coming of a Redeemer. The emperor supposedly responded by erecting an altar, the Ara Coeli (Altar of Heaven). This was eventually replaced by one of Rome's medieval convent churches. The church passed to the Benedictines in the 10th century, and in 1250 to the Franciscans, who restored and enlarged it in Romanesque-Gothic style. In the Middle Ages, citizens used to meet here to discuss current affairs, just as the ancient Romans had met in the Forum.

Today, the Aracoeli is best known for the Santa Bambino, a much-revered wooden figure of the Christ Child (today a copy of the 15th-century original). During the Christmas season, everyone pays homage to the Bambi Gesù as children recite poems from a miniature pulpit. In true Roman style, the church interior is a historical hodgepodge, with materials and decorations dating from ancient times all the way to the 19th century. There are classical columns and large marble fragments from pagan buildings, as well as a 13th-century Cosmatesque pavement -- so called because, like many brilliantly colored mosaics of the period, it's the work of the prolific Cosmati family, who used bits of the precious marbles of ancient Rome in their compositions. The richly gilded Renaissance ceiling commemorates the naval victory at Lepanto in 1571 over the Turks. Among these artistic treasures, the first chapel on the right is noteworthy for Pinturicchio's frescoes of San Bernardino of Siena (1486). There's a Byzantine Madonna over the main altar of the church: the emperor Augustus and the Sibyl are depicted in the apse amid saints and angels (a most unusual position for a pagan emperor). In the third chapel on the left you can admire Benozzo Gozzoli's (1420-97) 15th-century fresco St. Anthony of Padua; on the right of the main portal there's a handsome polychrome monument to Cardinal D'Albret by Bregno.