A walk through Rome to Palazzo Farnese

Probably the best office in the world belongs to the French ambassador to Italy. The French Embassy now fills the Palazzo Farnese, the finest of all the Renaissance palaces in Rome. It is a simply enormous oblong building , built while Henry VIII was King of England. Michelangelo was responsible for much of the design, which is arguably why it is so succesful. The ambassadors office , which spans the centre of the first floor, has a huge painted ceiling which is said to compare favourably with that in the Sistine chapel. The courtyard is quite simply magnificent and full of Roman remains from the charioteers school that stood here two thousand years ago , excavated when they were building the Palazzo in the sixteenth century.There are a number of great little restaurants serving the ever critical French diplomats along the Via Guilia next door.