In the Eternal City, Priceless Art for No Price at All

IT is hard to advise a visitor in Rome to skip the Sistine Chapel just because tickets cost $17 or that the line can last for hours. At the same time, in no other city can one wander, with completely empty pockets, and see at least nine works by various Michelangelos — among them the Pietà by the more famous Michelangelo and a number of sly paintings by the only slightly less renowned one, better known as Caravaggio.

This free Michelangelo tour takes less than a day. And except for crowds at St. Peter's Basilica, which houses the Pietà, you would probably never even see a line.

In history, culture and art, Rome's greatness — and curse — is overabundance. The curse is that a visitor can never see more than a fraction of what's there in one visit. Part of the greatness is that there is just so much, you can enjoy a first-rate cultural experience and never pay a cent.

There is no reason to cheat yourself out of experiences like the Vatican, Capitoline or Borghese museums, but in keeping with the Italian ideal of balance in everything, here is a guide to the best of the free in the city, through the eyes of a few of its most appreciative residents.

It is unavoidable that many tourists return home from a trip to Europe thinking they could not possibly tour another church. But in Rome, the heart of Christianity, the experience is of a different class entirely — free repositories of some of the finest art ever created.

This makes for particularly Roman paradoxes, like the one that faces Alberto Tarquini, an Italian teacher: He is both an agnostic and a dedicated visitor of churches, for all that they say about art and the history of the city that he tirelessly wanders.

“Good Lord, it's beautiful,” he said as he poked his head into the Basilica of San Clemente, a small treasure near the Colosseum that defies any easy description.

The spot has been inhabited for some 22 centuries, and visitors can see the layers rising from buildings destroyed in the fire of Nero's time to an old temple to a Persian religion that made it to Rome, Mithraism, to the Christian church built on top as if to physically dominate it.

The apse's 12th-century mosaics are stunning, in marble, gold and tile, with birds and deer embellishing religious themes. Then there are more than eight centuries of frescoes, interesting on their own, but to connoisseurs like Mr. Tarquini, tantalizing as a document of the evolution of art. “It's all of history,” Mr. Tarquini said. It is speculated — but never proven — that the 15th-century artist Masaccio, a transitional figure from decorative Gothic to more humanistic Renaissance painting, had a hand in some of the figures otherwise painted by his friend Masolino.

Perhaps less esoteric, but no less satisfying, is the church tour of the Michelangelos.

Not far from San Clemente is the basilica of St. Peter's in Chains. There sits Michelangelo Buonarroti's Moses, part of the massive tomb he famously never completed for Pope Julius II. Legend has it that Michelangelo struck the knee of his completed creation in stone, otherwise so lifelike, with a hammer.

“Why don't you speak?” he demanded.

The church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, next to the Pantheon, houses what is considered a lesser sculpture of Christ by Michelangelo. Then there is, of course, St. Peter's Basilica, which on its own owes much to Michelangelo. (Unlike the Vatican Museums, entrance to the basilica is free.) Behind bulletproof glass (thanks to an attack on it in 1972) rests the Pietà, completed when the artist was just 24 years old.

Less sought out, but no less deserving, are the six works by the man sometimes known as “the other Michelangelo” (the phrase is used as a chapter heading of a new entertaining meditation on Rome that tourists might consider, “The Secrets of Rome,” just published in English by Rizzoli). Michelangelo Merisi is usually known simply as Caravaggio (born a century after the other Michelangelo), and his paintings decorate churches in central Rome, including San Luigi dei Francesi, at Piazza San Luigi dei Francesi, near Piazza Navona, and the nearby Church of Sant'Agostino.

The book's author, Corrado Augias, one of Italy's best-known writers, agreed to a quick tour of the third Caravaggio church, Santa Maria del Popolo, at the northern end of Piazza del Popolo. The paintings there are interesting for the subject matter — two of Christianity's founders, St. Paul and St. Peter — and for the way they are executed: Caravaggio's craggy-footed realism contrasts with the airy, devotional style much in demand by the Vatican then, summed up in another painting in the same chapel, Annibale Carracci's “Assumption of the Virgin.” “His realism is a realism that amazed, surprised and frightened,” Mr. Augias said.

Mr. Augias also makes the point that all of Rome is a museum. Little is more satisfying as merely wandering, bumping into examples of how human beings decided to decorate 2,500 years of history. My own favorite, I'm afraid, is not very highbrow: Bernini's pudgy elephant with an over-long trunk that sits at the square in front of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. Bernini was devout, and supposedly did not care for secular work like this. “How ashamed I am to have done so poorly,” he reportedly said while passing his majestic Fountain of Four Rivers in Piazza Navona. He might, somewhere, take heart that it can't be seen very well at the moment. It is under renovation, very likely through the end of the year.

Most visitors to Rome inevitably think in terms of Classical art and architecture, but there are also contemporary alternatives. The ambitious new Maxxi, or the National Museum of the XXI Century Arts, is free, and the current exhibition space is only a fraction of what is projected, in a vast modern building under construction by the London-based architect Zaha Hadid.

Hers is one of several modern buildings, at once welcomed and loathed in this most traditional city — along with Richard Meier's building for the Ara Pacis Museum and Renzo Piano's Rome Auditorium. Since it opened in 2002, the Auditorium has become a major cultural center of the city, and it is worth checking for exhibitions, concerts and films offered regularly for free.

Modern art exhibitions tend to take place in small, informal galleries spread around the city. “Artists don't meet in museums,” said Cornelia Lauf, a curator and art history professor here. “They don't go to places that look arty. They don't go to trendy mozzarella bars. They like real things.”

One of Ms. Lauf's favorite galleries, called Monitor, is a few steps away from the Vatican. Another she recommends is in the former Jewish Ghetto, itself a must for visitors to Rome — it is Valentina Bonomo, where every few months a single artist designs an exhibition specifically for the space, in a former monastery that dates from the 14th century.

With about 2,500 years of art everywhere, do modern artists feel overshadowed by the old? “I don't feel this as a weight,” said Luigi Ontani, one of Italy's top contemporary artists. “I feel it as a richness.” But the emphasis tends toward artists long dead, and certainly it is more difficult for visitors to track down the new, especially for free.

Many of the free spaces for contemporary art are decidedly low-key. Mr. Ontani, for example, was talking below one of his works, a whimsical Murano glass chandelier whizzing with black birds. The exhibition space in the library of Incontri Internazionali d'Arte has room for precisely one work — at the moment his.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Basilica of San Clemente, Via Labicana 95; (39-06) 77-40-021; www.basilicasanclemente.com. Open daily 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., then 3 to 6 p.m.

Basilica of St. Peter's in Chains, Piazza San Pietro in Vincoli 4a. Open daily 7 a.m. to 12 p.m., then 3:30 to 6 p.m.

St. Peter's Basilica. Open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. April through September. The rest of the year it closes at 5:30 p.m.

San Luigi dei Francesi, Piazza San Luigi dei Francesi, is near Piazza Navona, as is the Church of Sant'Agostino.

Santa Maria del Popolo is at the northern end of Piazza del Popolo.

National Museum of the XXI Century Arts (Maxxi), Via Guido Reni 2f; (30-06) 321-0181; www.darc.beniculturali.it. Open every day but Monday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Rome Auditorium, Viale Pietro de Coubertin 30; (39-06) 8024-1281; www.auditorium.com.

Monitor Gallery, Viale della Mura Aurelie 19; (39-06) 3937-8024; www.monitoronline.org. Tuesday through Saturday, 3:30 to 8 p.m.

Valentina Bonomo Gallery, Via del Portico D'Ottavia 13; (39-06) 683-2766; www.galleriabonomo.com. Monday through Saturday from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Incontri Internazionali d'Arte, Palazzo Taverna, Via di Monte Giordano 36; (39-06) 6880-4009; www.incontriinternazionalidarte.it. Open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

A useful clearinghouse for cultural events — free and not — is the weekly magazine, Roma C'è. It is available at any newsstand for 1.20 euros (about $1.60, at 1.36 to the dollar) or on the Web at www.romace.it. The English language section contains extensive lists of concerts, blues nights, dance, film and exhibitions.