A Wine Cellar 160 Years Older Than the Colosseum

Four hours through Trastevere as the light goes, twelve guests, six or seven stops. You meet on Tiber Island, by the monument with the cross in the middle of Piazza San Bartolomeo, and cross into the neighbourhood on the Ponte Cestio, which has been carrying people over that channel since 46 BC.

On selected departures the walk includes a trattoria that has been open since 1935, entered past the queue, with DOC prosecco and Roman dishes that have barely changed in ninety years. Another goes down into a wine cellar cut about 160 years before the Colosseum was built, where you drink local wine and eat a recipe traced to the late Republic in a room that makes the claim feel plausible.

What is on every departure: porchetta from the man Trastevere considers its best, slow-roasted and tucked into pizza bianca with a cold beer. Supplì at a hole in the wall, the fried rice ball that pulls a thread of mozzarella when you break it. A sit-down pasta dinner at a neighbourhood trattoria with two Roman classics, amatriciana and gricia, and a real pour of local wine. And gelato at the place that started the gourmet gelato movement in Rome, where the guide first teaches you how to spot the fake stuff by looking at it.

Between the eating you pass through Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, the square the neighbourhood revolves around, and the guide fills in what the alleys were before the restaurants arrived.

Stops vary with the day, the season and availability. Minimum two guests. Children under four join free without food. Wheelchair accessible. English-speaking guide. Dietary requirements can often be handled with notice, but the tour is not suitable for anyone with severe food allergies.