The Terrazza del Pincio offers Rome's finest sunset view, looking down over Piazza del Popolo to St. Peter's dome in the distance. Napoleon commissioned French architect Giuseppe Valadier to transform the hilltop into a public park between 1810 and 1834, though Napoleon himself never visited Rome.

The result was the city's first public gardens, complete with formal walkways, 228 marble busts of Italian heroes lining the paths, and a water clock that refused to leave its packing crate at the 1867 Paris Exposition. Dominican friar Giovanni Battista Embriaco designed the hydrochronometer that year, but Parisians feared breaking it. The clock finally arrived in Rome in 1873, where it still ticks inside a fairytale turret on an island in a pond along Viale dell'Orologio.

The ancient Romans called this spot Collis Hortulorum, the Hill of Gardens, when Lucullus hosted legendary banquets in his terraced villa here. Nero's ashes were buried on the slope. Giuseppe Mazzini later insisted that the promenades be lined with busts of Italian artists and Risorgimento heroes, from Giordano Bruno to Bernini, though Pope Pius IX vetoed anyone he deemed an atheist.

VoiceMap's literary tour begins at the terrace, following writers from Keats to Gogol who made Rome their creative home, tracing the Spanish Steps gathering places where they drank coffee and met fellow expatriates, connecting the fountain that inspired Keats's epitaph to the Protestant Cemetery where both he and Shelley lie buried.