2 Best Sights in Rome, Italy

Sent to Rome in a last-ditch attempt to treat his consumptive condition, English Romantic poet John Keats—celebrated for such poems as "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Endymion"—lived in this house at the foot of the Spanish Steps. At the time, this was the heart of Rome's colorful bohemian quarter, an area favored by English expats. He took his last breath here on February 23, 1821, and is now buried in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Testaccio. On a visit to his final home, you can see his death mask, though local authorities had all his furnishings burned after his death as a sanitary measure. You'll also find a quaint collection of memorabilia of other English literary figures of the period—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Joseph Severn, and Leigh Hun—and an exhaustive library of works on the Romantics.

On the top floor of the Palazzo Primoli—the same building (separate entrance) that houses the Museo Napoleonico—is one of Rome's most unusual museums. As if preserved in amber, the apartment in which the famous Italian essayist Mario Praz lived survives intact, decorated with a lifetime's accumulation of delightful Baroque and neoclassical art and antiques, arranged and rearranged to create symmetries that take the visitor by surprise like the best trompe-l'oeil. As author of The Romantic Sensibility and A History of Interior Decoration, Praz was fabled for his taste for the arcane and the bizarre; here his reputation for the same lives on. You are obliged to follow a custodian through the museum; the visit starts on the hour and takes about 50 minutes.