Rome is often symbolized by the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain and Via Veneto: stay in a guest house in the heart of the Eternal City and feel how thousands of years of history have marked these places making them so famous in the world.
Rome is a city with a thousand faces, complicated, layered, lived and living within its walls, its streets, its monuments. There is a hidden, underground and legendary Rome and it is on one of the most gorgeous and prestigous streets of Rome where one of the most gruesome places of the city lies.
On Via Veneto, which is the most fashionable and chic street of the capital, there is a church called Santa Maria of the Conception that together with the spirit of the Dolce Vita of the '50s and '60s made this street a really fascinating place.
Known as the Capuchin Church, it is famous for being probably the most important "horror" church of the world. Downstairs in fact there is an old cemetery that would make anybody shiver, because instead of marble stones or anything else , it is decorated with human bones and skulls belonging to the Capuchin Friars (this is why it's no longer called the Santa Maria of the Immaculate Conception).
The church itself has experienced other strange events, as evidenced by the presence of many works of art that completely fill the space above this beautiful Roman church (and many others).
One of these masterpieces tells us about a conflict that actually happened between the author of the painting and an important cardinal: the artist, the master Guido Reni, painted the Archangel Michael in the act of crushing the head of Satan. The Devil's face was the picture of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphili, who Reni hated because he had previously maligned him. Cardinal Pamphili became Pope with the name of Innocent X, but the painting remained there despite the Pope's complaints.
