Photographs by Benedetta RistoriA famous entertainer would like to have the Colosseum to herself for a small evening event—anything you can do? A visitor on a layover hopes to see a privately owned Caravaggio behind the walls of a Roman palazzo—what about tonight? A traveler wants to make railway excursions from Rome in a train car with no other passengers—can that be arranged?Fulvio De Bonis finds a way to say yes to challenges such as these, which fall somewhere between logistical quandary and diplomatic démarche. His boutique travel company, Imago Artis—which he co-founded and runs with his wife, Alessia Tortora, and their longtime friend Chiara Di Muoio—can provide access to almost anything in Rome, and it specializes in devising unusual itineraries for people of means. Fulvio’s cellphone connects with curators and clerics, bellhops and grandees—the phone is his wand, enabling a seemingly frictionless glide through a labyrinthine city. I met Fulvio several years ago through a friend at the Vatican Museums, and since then I’ve accompanied him around the city more than once, curious about the work he does. During my visits to Rome, we’ve become friends.On a bright morning several months ago, he asked to meet outside the Basilica of Saints Cosmas and Damian, near the Forum. There was something he wanted to show me. I had a few minutes to wait, and took in one of the basilica’s high exterior walls, whose brickwork goes back to ancient times and had once formed the interior wall of a now-vanished structure. In the early third century C.E., an engraved map of Rome had been secured to this wall—you can still see indentations where iron clamps held marble slabs. The slabs were broken apart for building material during the Middle Ages; fragments have been resurfacing ever since, like puzzle pieces from a couch. A thousand or so have been found, representing perhaps 10 percent of the original—they’re laid out on the floor of a small museum less than a mile away. I’ve always wondered if a fragment will ever turn up with a red arrow and the words Hic es, “You are here.”No one is quite sure exactly what the purpose of the Marble Plan was, though visitors to the city in antiquity—and there were many—would have needed some sort of guidance. The big complaint about Rome today is that it is crowded with tourists, but it has always been crowded with tourists. Rome without tourists would be like Venice without water or Manhattan without noise. In imperial times, visitors could avail themselves of guidebooks explaining where to find, for instance, the original hut of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. Other cities in the Roman empire maintained offices in the Forum to help any of their citizens visiting the capital. A monograph published a few years ago shows pictures of the souvenirs you could buy in Rome and take home to Ephesus or Alexandria: little bronze figures of gladiators, say, or glassware with local scenes depicted in relief—not much different from what you can buy now. As its earthly power dwindled and the city’s population declined from 1 million to perhaps 20,000, Rome became a destination for religious pilgrims. They far outnumbered local inhabitants, arriving by the hundreds of thousands in the jubilee year 1300.I saw Fulvio coming my way, waving from a distance as he talked on the phone. He is tall, curving like a floor lamp to offer an embrace. Early on, the color of his hair gave Fulvio the nickname Rosso. Now he is 47, and the red is streaked with grigio. He is energetic and talkative; the espresso he drinks all day long may even slow him down a bit. I’d been guessing there was something about the Marble Plan that Fulvio wanted to explain, but that wasn’t so. He led the way down the street and made a quick call as we walked.Benedetta Ristori for The AtlanticFulvio De Bonis in the OratorioMoments later, a caretaker opened an unmarked door in an unremarkable building and led us down a staircase. At the bottom, the floor became marble. A warren of rooms and passages led eventually to the nave of a church, which had taken over the interior of a Roman temple. For five centuries, it has served as the sacral headquarters—the private guild church—of Rome’s confraternity of apothecaries. A piece of paper signed by Raphael was on display behind protective glass: a receipt for a prescription. The rear of the nave was dominated by a pair of battered green wooden doors, 15 feet high.Fulvio can be a showman. He positioned a chair in front of the doors and asked me to sit. His attitude was expectant and playful, like Tom Hanks starting out on the piano keys in Big. When I was settled to his satisfaction, he and the caretaker pulled the doors apart.An American friend of mine who lived in Rome for 70 years always maintained that he was “just passing through,” which is what everyone in Rome is doing, whether they acknowledge it or not. The city makes everything else seem mutable and transient by comparison. But one common thread down the ages has been the profession of cicerone, the learned guide who takes visitors by the hand. The satirist Lucian wrote about them in antiquity. Grand Tour travelers described them in letters and journals. During their Italian idyll in Brideshead Revisited, Charles and Sebastian rely on a diminutive gentleman “to whom all doors were open.” Today there are more ciceroni in Rome than ever. The most accomplished of them embody some combination of Virgil, Vasari, and Tenzing Norgay, with hints of Lupin and Martha Stewart.Imago Artis occupies the pinnacle of the “luxury-travel space” in Rome, serving the kinds of clients you’d expect—Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese, Mike Tyson, Katy Perry, Aaron Judge, Jimmy Fallon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Viola Davis—as well as people who are not household names. The company is discreet, and does not talk publicly about prices. Some of the individual experiences it offers may cost only a few hundred euros; some, such as having a major museum to yourself, run as high as 15,000. Many celebrities don’t mind being identified as clients. Imago says nothing more, though Fulvio did comment once on what a lover of books Mike Tyson seemed to be. The boxer had read Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and Kierkegaard. He had read the letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Fulvio and Tyson spent much of their time together talking about a biography of Alexander the Great.Imago’s founders met 25 years ago as art-history students at La Sapienza, Rome’s oldest university. They soon faced an inevitable question: What do you do with a degree in art history? Chiara took on a variety of roles at Castel Sant’Angelo, the imperial tomb turned papal fortress, now a museum, on the banks of the Tiber. Fulvio and Alessia, not yet married, found work at a hotel in London—she as a server in the restaurant and bar, he as the night manager. Fulvio’s English needed improvement: When he first started, a guest called down for a new TV remote and Fulvio brought him toilet paper. The night-manager job sharpened his language skills and also his understanding of how people behave when they think no one is looking.About this experience Fulvio ventured few specifics, even when I tried a subtle word-association game. (“Russians?”) He said simply, “At a hotel, the world changes after 10 p.m.” As Fulvio watched from the front desk, every night brought fresh awareness of the role played by a hotel’s concierge: the basic Jeeves function, to be sure, but also minister of culture, security adviser, intelligence czar, linguist, therapist, solicitor, medic, dietitian, enabler, enforcer. Hotel concierges, he realized, need all the help they can get.Back in Rome, Fulvio and his friends went into business, focusing on the minister-of-culture opportunity. All three of them could talk fluently about art and had contacts in the worlds of art and archaeology. They went to concierges at the best hotels with an offer: Here are a few special tours we can provide; we’ll work one-on-one with your guests; call anytime and we can take some of the burden off your shoulders. The business was incubated at the St. Regis in 2006, and as word spread, Imago designed specialty programs exclusive to other hotels as well.Benedetta Ristori for The AtlanticThe Imago Artis founders Chiara Di Muoio, Fulvio De Bonis, and Alessia TortoraThe secret to the company’s success lies in its network of “partners”—museums and churches and palazzi, but also artists and photographers and scholars. Each has something special to offer if they can be persuaded to provide it. The arrangements are sometimes financial—many cultural institutions in Rome need support—but just as often they are based on long-standing relationships. The business grew. Every year, Imago trained more guides speaking more languages; most of the guides had academic specialties. Imago also began taking more and more bespoke requests, offering a rapid-response service: You want what? Okay, we’ll see what we can do. An hour at Villa Borghese after it closes tonight. Access to the Jewish catacombs tomorrow morning. White truffles from Piedmont delivered to Rome by dinnertime.The company employs a professional staff of 50—they underlie the seemingly in Fulvio’s frictionless glide. To this, add an array of regular vendors: owners of farms and wineries and aircraft and boats. Supplicants turn up at Imago seeking a place on the contact list. At the office one day I met a delegation from an estate in the Alban Hills bearing bushels of edible flowers (with wine pairings).Central to all operations in Rome is a fleet of 20 tinted-glass sedans and SUVs. Before any expedition, the drivers conduct a dry run, even if it’s just across town. “All roads lead to Rome,” a renowned urban planner observed years ago, “but once you get there they turn into spaghetti.” Every car is a command module, a magic carpet, a bolt-hole. The drivers are skilled. They can implement decoy procedures to evade paparazzi. They can get out of tight spots. I rode with one driver on a narrow track that wriggled up the Palatine Hill between ancient stone walls. For a quarter mile, the collision-avoidance screen on the dashboard warned of a screeching contact that never occurred.We’d been heading for the Church of San Bonaventura, on a secluded spur overlooking the Colosseum, home to half a dozen young Franciscan friars—soccer gear was strewn about the hallways—and a few older ones, including the Brazilian artist Sidival Fila. Roadways around the Forum are controlled by soldiers and police, so getting up the hill meant negotiating a checkpoint. I’d witnessed this kind of moment with Fulvio before: a window rolled down, a gesture, a quiet word, and on we go. The Jedi mind trick is apparently real.As a teenager, Fulvio lived in a small town in Lazio, the region around Rome. He spent countless hours in the town square, watching people go by: how they walked, how they smiled, how they moved their eyes. It was good preparation for a job that requires emotional intelligence. As needed, clients have also provided on-the-job training. Fulvio curtailed, somewhat, his propensity for Vesuvian explication after one of his guests—he described her only as a minor European royal—gave him a useful tip: “Shut the fuck up.”Sensitivity is essential—to cultural preferences, to security needs, to whims. Imago offers services in 12 languages, including Russian and Mandarin. When I went with Alessia to the Hotel Eden for a room check, we were shown to the suite that became Emily Cooper’s when Emily in Paris shifted to Rome. Alessia hadn’t come to confirm the thread count. Among other things, she wanted to know about the layout: How close to this suite is the one for a client’s staff or bodyguards?Imago has expanded to other cities. One day, Fulvio arranged a trip for me to the docklands of Naples, where soldiers with automatic weapons guarded a sprawling precinct of shipping containers and gantry cranes—it might have been a movie set for a Camorra shoot-out. There, in a waterfront warehouse, the sculptor Jago was carving his latest work, a female analogue of Michelangelo’s David, equivalent in size—17 feet tall—and destined for display in the city’s Jago Museum.Head and breasts had already emerged from the block of Carrara marble. Slanting piles of chips rose against the base, like rubble below a cliff. A finished plaster model, same dimensions, stood alongside, striking a familiar pose: head turned, weight on one leg, stone in hand. Jago put down his hammer and chisel and descended from a high metal platform to talk for a while. He has been laboring on the statue for three years, he said, and expects to be finished in 2027. He refers to it simply as “David”—no other name. He had a single regret about the work he creates as a sculptor: “I am the only one who never gets to see it for the first time.”When he told me about the “Shut the fuck up” episode, Fulvio had just been holding forth for 15 minutes in the Oratorio del Gonfalone, a 16th-century building off Via Giulia whose walls and ceiling are covered with Mannerist frescoes by Federico Zuccari and other painters. At heart, the Imago partners remain graduate students, and even as entrepreneurs their inclinations skew toward art and architecture. Fulvio has a weakness for Mannerism, the style that falls between the late Renaissance of Raphael and the early Baroque of Caravaggio. He did his university thesis on the painter Pietro Paolo Bonzi. In a state of expository rapture, Fulvio pointed to details I never would have noticed, such as the trompe l’oeil gathering of balcony spectators in Zuccari’s Flagellation of Christ. He described the work of the Mannerist painters in a way that stuck: as a form of aesthetic triumphalism in the papacy’s battle against the Reformation.Fulvio asked at one point if there was something in particular I’d like to see or do. Having the Colosseum to myself for a Zoom call seemed beyond the bounds of decency, but I did bring up my regret at having missed last year’s Caravaggio show at the Palazzo Barberini, one of the largest in recent decades.I don’t know if there’s an actual word for a Caravaggio deficiency—Caravaggiocarenza, maybe—but Fulvio had the antidote. A quick call from the car brought access to Palazzo Berardi and the Merlini-Storti Art Conservation Studio, which opens onto its central courtyard. Valeria Merlini and Daniela Storti, the studio’s founders, are old hands at Caravaggio—in these rooms, they’d restored one of the paintings in the Barberini show. Some years earlier, they had spent months in the Church of Sant’Agostino, not far from Piazza Navona, bringing Caravaggio’s Madonna dei pellegrini—“Madonna of the Pilgrims”—back to life.Benedetta Ristori for The AtlanticConservators at the Merlini-Storti studio work on 17th-century paintings. The studio, in a converted stable, is part operating room, part alchemist’s lair: jars of pigment, ultraviolet scanners, bowls of egg tempera, scalpels on a tray. Women in white lab coats—all but one of the conservators are women—sat before easels under high ceilings. I watched as Daniela rolled wisps of cotton onto a stick, dipped the swab into a gentle solvent, adjusted her loupe glasses, and twirled the soft tip in a tiny pirouette to remove a patch of darkening varnish from a painting.Valeria and Daniela joined us in the car, and Fulvio made another call. Officially, Sant’Agostino was closed that day, but a side door cracked open. Valeria found a light switch in a corner of the dark, echoing church and illuminated Madonna dei pellegrini. A peasant couple have come to venerate Mary and her child—their faces creased, their clothing ragged, their bare feet soiled. The painting had scandalized the powerful: Imagine letting the penniless and bedraggled come so close to Jesus! Ordinary people loved it. Sant’Agostino is still the church where couples who want children go to pray.The conservators had done the restoration work in public view, perched on a scaffold. They made discoveries. The blue of Mary’s gown was found to contain a much higher concentration of linseed oil than any other part of the painting: Caravaggio favored earthy tones, and wanted to reduce the brightness of the standard color. Two different kinds of white pigment—one applied earlier, one later—told another story. In the painting, the figures are lit from the left by an unknown source. Valeria pointed in that direction, where a door, now permanently closed, had once been a main entryway. When Caravaggio saw where the painting had been installed, she said, he went back to it and repainted the lower left to create an illusion of light coming from the actual door.Benedetta Ristori for The AtlanticCaravaggio’s Madonna dei pellegrini in the Church of Sant’AgostinoOn another day, at another church—Sant’Eligio dei Ferrari, tucked into the lowlands between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills—Fulvio introduced me to Monsignor Sandro Corradini, an art historian and a document hunter with a specialty in Caravaggio. Don Sandro, who lives at Sant’Eligio, had been Fulvio’s thesis adviser. For many years, he was a member of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the entity that oversees the Vatican’s canonization process, serving as one of the clergymen designated to ask the hard questions. The role was originally known as advocatus diaboli, the origin of the term devil’s advocate, and now goes by the name promotor fidei. The promoters of faith are serious about their work. When Mother Teresa was being considered for sainthood, the process included a clerical interview with her vociferous critic Christopher Hitchens.For years, Don Sandro has been sifting through archives for obscure records, especially as they relate to the famous killing by Caravaggio of the pimp Ranuccio Tomassoni, in 1606. We spent part of an afternoon on the rooftop of the church, retreating there because an opera company was using the superb acoustics of the interior to make a recording of Verdi’s Aida. Occasionally we’d hear a tap, tap, tap (baton hitting music stand?), and the music would stop. Then the words ancora, ancora (“again, again”), and the music would resume.Caravaggio was a hothead, and he and Tomassoni had long been on bad terms. Caravaggio challenged Tomassoni to a duel and killed him with his sword on a tennis court near Piazza Navona. Dueling was illegal, and the death was considered murder. The painter fled, eventually to Malta, and never returned to Rome. Don Sandro laid out this traditional account, then weighed in: Much of what is commonly believed about “the tennis-court incident”—the title of a monograph he wrote—is wrong.He acknowledged Caravaggio’s “somewhat lively nature.” (The artist once threw an order of artichokes at a waiter because he’d put the ones fried in butter and the ones fried in olive oil on the same platter.) And there’s no doubt that he killed Tomassoni. But Don Sandro maintained that it was Tomassoni who had challenged Caravaggio; that Tomassoni had struck the first blow; and that Caravaggio’s riposte had not been meant to kill. Don Sandro cited document after document as he pieced events together and explained the grim punctilio of honor in 17th-century Rome. It was hard to keep up. Below us, in the church, Aida was being buried alive with her lover. On the roof, I was ready to plead Caravaggio down to manslaughter. Don Sandro still knew how to play devil’s advocate.Across the river, in Trastevere, the art historian and Caravaggio expert Alessandro Zuccari responded to a call and invited us to his home. Fulvio, Alessia, and Chiara had all known Zuccari since their university days. One of the windows in his corner study looks out over the roof of a church. The other looks out on a splashing fountain. Zuccari is a quiet, courtly man who brought in coffee on a tray. No, he said, perhaps wistfully, he is not related to the painter Federico, though he has written about him. But Caravaggio has taken up most of his time. He talked about assisting with the valuation a few years ago of Rome’s Villa Aurora, an imposing estate near the American embassy. Zuccari was called in because the villa can’t be separated from Caravaggio’s only known ceiling mural—Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto—in a little room upstairs. The property was ultimately valued at $535 million.The incunabula and other volumes on Zuccari’s shelves reflect four generations of collecting by his family. He placed in my hands an original 1493 edition of the Nuremberg Chronicle—the first printed history of the world, with hand-colored illustrations—and sat alongside me, flipping the pages. I wish Mike Tyson could have been there.Benedetta Ristori for The AtlanticAn original 1493 edition of the Nuremberg ChronicleI asked Zuccari about the murky circumstances of Caravaggio’s death, in 1610. He rehearsed the various theories—syphilis, lead poisoning, sepsis, murder—and shrugged off the uncertainty. There are so many unknowns about Caravaggio, Zuccari said, and so many mythic versions, but at his core the painter was a restless and unsatisfied human being who was able to depict ordinary people in all their pathos and imperfection. “Nobody can see themselves in a Raphael,” he said. “Everybody can see themselves in a Caravaggio.”Caravaggio was from Milan, and the fact that he could eventually succeed in Rome tells you something about the city, Zuccari went on—about its openness to outsiders and to new styles. Montaigne, visiting in 1581, called Rome “a patchwork of strangers.” The Church, which kept Rome alive through many dark centuries, was not defined by ethnicity or geography. It made a claim in its creed to being universal. Rome has been seen by people from elsewhere as a city that belongs to them as much as anyone. You see evidence of that sensibility even now. More than 30 million people came to Rome for last year’s jubilee—proportionately, an influx comparable to the one in 1300. Outside Zuccari’s window, I could see the ancient imperial slogan Caput mundi—“Head of the world”—printed on the plastic wrap around a construction site.Imago Artis cannot arrange access to the pope, but it can get pretty close. One morning during Lent, a uniformed Vatican guard turned a key in a padlock and unwound a chain the size of an anaconda from a grillwork gateway. Yes, Fulvio had made a call; more than one, in fact.The gateway gave access to the Vatican Gardens, which take up about half of the city-state’s territory. The gardens are sometimes open for guided tours but had been closed because of Holy Week and were now empty. Fulvio and I wandered the undulating terrain, from the Cartesian primness of the French Garden to the meticulously planned disorder of the English one, pausing among the olive trees at the crest of a hill before heading back down. Our ultimate destination was the Casina of Pius IV, a Mannerist gem on a shady slope among cypress trees. It is built around an oval courtyard that may be the most serene few square meters in Rome. The casina used to be the pope’s summerhouse; now it’s the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, whose prefect let us in.In their different ways, the gardens and the casina illustrate the universality that Zuccari was talking about. At the casina, under elaborate ceilings by Barocci, scholars assemble from around the world to discuss bioethics or cosmology or AI. The plantings outside have a global provenance too: eucalyptus from Australia, jasmine from China, pomegranate from Azerbaijan, magnolias from North America, cedars from Lebanon—Montaigne’s patchwork of strangers again.I remember once hearing Fulvio talk about tourism as a “community of care.” He wasn’t trying to be grand, just making the point that cities survive and thrive when people from other places, whatever their motives or wealth, take an interest in them. Fulvio displays no defensiveness about the kind of travel he promotes. Privilege is a reality, and it’s one that cities like Rome, with more heritage than money, need to leverage. Rome has been sustained both by masses of ordinary visitors, such as Caravaggio’s pellegrini, and by those who built the city’s palaces and churches (and commissioned Caravaggio in the first place). Imago’s clients pay a premium to look, but people like them, centuries ago, put in place much of what there is to look at. At one point in the 17th century, when the city was finally coming back to life, a third of Rome’s workforce was engaged in construction—erecting new buildings with freshly cut stone; cannibalizing stone from old buildings to rearrange into something else; or slipping Baroque buildings inside ancient imperial ones.Courtesy of Megan Eckley, Imago Artis TravelThe author surveys Rome from a church inside the shell of an ancient Roman temple.The place Fulvio had brought me on that bright morning several months ago—the church of the apothecaries, where I sat in a chair facing those battered green doors—was an example of the latter. It occupied the shell of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. When Fulvio and the caretaker pulled the doors apart, the floor seemed to fall away. From a vantage point three stories high, I peered through a portico of ancient white columns at the sunlit Forum. To the east, I could see the Colosseum; to the west, the Capitoline; to the south, in front of me, the gardens atop the Palatine. In the valley below, wild grasses and flowers softened the marble and brick of the ruins. The panorama, with its gauzy light, seemed to have been designed and directed by Peter Jackson. Visitors walked the polished paving stones of the Via Sacra, murmuring in a dozen languages.Some of them looked up at me, and like a Roman emperor, I raised an arm to acknowledge the love of my people. But of course I was being silly. The real emperor was the tall man in shadow by the doors.This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “The Cicerone.”