Sheila F. Buckmaster
Piazza Navona, Rome

I’d be lost, in a good way, when all of a sudden I’d be at the edge of Rome’s elliptically seductive square. Many twisty little streets end up here at Piazza Navona, I would learn in my wanderings.

I was 25, and I couldn’t get enough of the city—the windows filled with just-right outfits or outfitted with flower boxes dripping geraniums, the smells of real Italian food, the buildings older even than my turn-of-the-century walk-up apartment building in Manhattan, and the people, so wonderful to watch.

But the greatest thrill was to chance upon the piazza—a grand sweep of majestically proportioned space that functioned as a stadium when Domitian was emperor (A.D. 81-96). It became a piazza under order of Pope Innocent X, in the 1600s. I liked it best at daybreak (when I could have it almost to myself and it was quiet enough to hear the water in Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers) and early afternoon (when the International Herald Tribune showed up—the perfect accompaniment to an espresso and acqua minerale con limone.

Sheila F. Buckmaster is a senior editor at TRAVELER.