Irish visitors have been coming to Rome for at least a thousand years, and the Irish presence is visible all over the eternal city. Joseph O’Connor lived there while researching his novels My Father’s House and — just published — The Ghosts of Rome. Here, he takes a walk through his top ten Roman places with an Irish connection…

VILLA SPADA, THE Irish Embassy to Italy, is perhaps the most beautiful of all Ireland’s embassies. It’s a good place to start any stroll around Rome because it’s located in a quiet and peaceful quarter of a city that can throb with touristy noise when busy.

Many an Irish diplomat has a story about Villa Spada. The great poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi recounts in her memoir that once she was staying there with her sister, and they dared to use the swimming pool, at the time only available to male bathers. The shocked ambassador asked for the pool to be emptied and re-blessed.

If you could only visit one church on a trip to Rome, it would need to be San Clemente al Laterano. Huddled two short blocks from the colosseum, this basilica is a remarkable and still evolving archaeological site as well as a truly beautiful building. The glorious frescoes stop you in your tracks. San Clemente has long had very strong Irish associations, particularly with the religious order of Dominicans. The current friar, Kerryman Paul Lawlor OP, is an internationally distinguished historian and classicist.

The monastery and college of Sant’Isidoro in the Ludovisi district was founded by Waterford man Luke Wadding in 1625 and features murals of Saints Brigid and Patrick on the church façade. Inside are delightful paintings of the early Irish scholars at work, copying manuscripts, translating rare documents and exchanging jokes, under the rather fierce gaze of Wadding himself. In the chapel, the surprised visitor encounters glances from statues of otherworldly figures wearing less clothing than you might expect of an angel.

The Irish connections

The chapel of San Pietro in Montorio offers an amazing panoramic view of Rome and is the final resting place of Irish chieftains Rory O’Donnell, former king of Tir Conaill, and Hugh O’Neill. A bit ignominiously, their tombstones are kept covered by a length of blue carpet which visitors have to ask the parish priest to roll back. The elegant and airy church is hugely popular for weddings, as is San Silvestro in Capite, traditionally a venue where Irish couples in Rome got married.

Hugh O’Flaherty is an important character in my novels My Father’s House and The Ghosts of Rome. A scholar, opera lover and multilinguist from Killarney, he became a priest and worked in the Vatican during the Nazi occupation of Rome, putting together an Escape Line that saved thousands of fugitives from the terror. The footbridge across which he and his comrades smuggled escapees to safety inside neutral Vatican City may be seen in St Peter’s Square, immediately to the left as you face the basilica. There is a memorial plaque to Hugh at the nearby Campo Santo Teutonico, via della Sacristia.

Hugh acquired many academic degrees, including several doctorates, and often studied in the Vatican Library. This dizzying palace of literary splendours features collections on everything from ancient theology to Irish poetry. For many years, the Prefect or chief librarian was Leonard Boyle OP from Donegal. The expert on Latin palaeography and brilliant moderniser of the library’s collections lived at San Clemente with his fellow Dominicans (see above) and is warmly and affectionately remembered by colleagues.

In a city of remarkable art galleries, Galleria Lorcan O’Neill (Vicolo de’ Catinari, 3) stands out as modern, daring, cool and innovative. Brother of Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, the Ballinrobe-born owner worked in London with Anthony d’Offay and is the representative in Italy of Tracey Emin and many other cutting-edge contemporary artists. Spacious, elegant and minimalist in design, the space itself is plain and soothing to the senses, but the works that O’Neill curates are the memorable stars of this truly enjoyable and thought-provoking gallery.

If in 1906 you went into the bank of Nast, Kolb and Schumaker on the corner of Via del Corso and Via S. Claudio to cash a cheque, the scrawny, surly clerk behind the counter might well have been the young James Joyce, who worked there. The future author of Ulysses lived in Rome with his wife and children for a brief, unhappy spell and conceived his great story ‘The Dead’ there.

Italy is a frequent presence in Joyce’s writings but somehow, he managed to dislike Rome, saying it gave him nightmares. He wrote to his brother Stanislaus that the city was like ‘a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse’ and wished the Romans ‘let the ruins rot’. The Joyces lived for a time in an apartment on Via Monte Brianzo, then a backstreet not far from Piazza Navona. The piazza is glorious and the ancient, faded murals in the alleys around it are evocative. Amazing to think that Joyce saw them every day on his sulky trudge to work.

Rome is blessed with bookshops of every sort and size, including several which specialise in books in English. The Almost Corner bookstore in Trastevere (via del Moro, 45) was founded by an Australian UN worker based in Rome, but some years later was purchased by the late Dermot O’Connell, an expat from Kilkenny, whose influence is still strongly in evidence. You’ll find many current works by Irish novelists and poets on stuffed shelves, alongside a wonderfully eclectic selection of international fiction and literary journals on philosophy, art, punk, Italian history and cinema.

The place is an absolute treasure for browsers and rooters, and a hang-out for students from Rome’s universities. Flyers advertise gigs, readings and affordable accommodation options. With the peace of all places where books are gathered, it’s an oasis of calm in a noisy, siren-filled city, and a lovely spot to finish a stroll around some of the many and varied places of Irish connection in Rome.

Joseph O’Connor is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright and broadcaster. His new novel The Ghosts of Rome is published by Vintage.