Rhea Silvia Luxury Navona

We went to Rome in January to eat our way round it, and Rhea Silvia, on Corsia Agonale just off Piazza Navona, was the bolt hole we did it from. It has no restaurant and no bar of its own, which for two people with that plan is no loss: Rome was the point, we loved it, and the hotel was where we came back to between one meal and the next.

Rhea Silvia was the mother of Romulus and Remus, so the name reaches back further than Rome itself, which on this street takes some doing. The building is 16th-century, raised on the ruins of the stadium Domitian opened in AD 86, and Piazza Navona still follows the line of its track; the hotel says remnants of it can be seen inside. We thought the outside of the building lovely, with a good deal around it to live up to.

There are five rooms. Ours, a Deluxe Suite, was big enough to feel like an apartment, and breakfast came to it: ordered the night before and brought to the room in the morning, so the first meal of the day was the one that needed no walk. The rooms are done in taupe and grey over pale wooden floors, with chocolate velvet on the cushions, and in one of the triples an electric fire glows under the television.

The rest of the day can be done on foot. The Pantheon is five minutes away, and Campo de' Fiori, where the market runs every morning but Sunday, not much further; the Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps are twelve and thirteen minutes, about the right distance to walk off lunch. For the piazza itself, book a room with a view in its name. From the Junior Suite with View, 35 square metres, Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers fills the window, its obelisk standing up against the front of Sant'Agnese: a view none of Domitian's 30,000 spectators ever had.