The triangular area on the eastern side of Via del Corso , bound by Piazza del Popolo, the Corso, the edge of the Villa Borghese and Piazza di Spagna, is travellers’ Rome, historically the artistic quarter of the city, for which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Grand Tourists would make in search of the colourful, exotic city. Keats and Giorgio de Chirico are just two of those who used to live on Piazza di Spagna; Goethe had lodgings along Via del Corso; and institutions like Caffè Greco and Babington’s Tea Rooms were the meeting-places of a local artistic and expat community for close on a couple of centuries. Today these institutions have given ground to more latter-day traps for the tourist dollar: American Express and McDonald’s have settled into the area, while Via Condotti and around is these days strictly international designer territory, with some of Rome’s fanciest stores; the local residents are more likely to be investment bankers than artists or poets. But the air of a Rome being discovered, even colonized, by foreigners persists, even if most of them hanging out on the Spanish Steps are mostly flying-visit InterRailers.