If you are a little bit north of Rome and you are a pope and it is some time between 1145 and about 1280, you will spend time in Viterbo. It turns out you can also do this, without getting your head knocked off or being otherwise particularly inconvenienced, 800 years later and without all the funny robes. It’s a good thing, too: Viterbo seems like the kind of historical city that every teenager wants to be blasé about.

After finding a small hotel to stay in (it looked like only about half the rooms were free), we spent our afternoon going from square to square to visit the fountains, the basilica, the fountains, and the staircases.

Viterbo makes me wonder at the crowds around the Trevi fountain. I mean, I like Bernini. I am, by all accounts, a vigorous Bernini advocate. I have even compared Bernini to William Shakespear and Neil Simon. But why is the Trevi fountain swarmed with sightseers and their cameras, while the belltowers and medieval quarter of Viterbo remains nearly empty.

We stayed overnight in Viterbo, mostly so that we could visit Villa Lante at the edge of the neighboring village of Bracciano. Villa Lante, a papal pleasure palace from the playful period among the more portentious popes, is mostly interesting for a descending series of diverse fountains and formal gardens, most of which you can visit in the shade of planes and pines. I saw lots of lizards, too, plus a crake.

Viterbo is connected by two different train lines to Rome, one an hourly commuter service, with stops along Lake Bracciano, and the other a minor line with no stops anywhere near where we live in Rome.

I’ve noticed that the tour books give transport advice distinctly aimed at someone staying in the centro storico in Rome, usually with Termini as a waypoint. This advice doesn’t hold well for people, like us, staying somewhere else -- until Felix and I went on a tram-, bus-, train-, metro adventure 20 days into our trip, we hadn’t set foot in Termini.

For example, most of the guidebooks will tell you that it’s more convenient to take a bus to, say, Tívoli than to take the train. This might be true if you live somewhere near the metro line that connects to Ponte Mammolo, but the train is simply faster if you are near to one of the stations outside the walls -- they are in a rough ring, from Nomentana, through Tiburtina, Tuscolana, Ostiense, Trastevere, San Pietro, and Valle Aurelia. The Tiburtina and Valle Aurelia stations also happen to connect to the metro.

Unaccountably, Alaina and I have both had wonderful visits to historic cities of about 70,000 inhabitants. We discovered this predilection during a trip in the early 1990s to Catalonia, where we were both quite smitten by the tidy little city of Vic, an hour north of Barcelona in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Viterbo had the same feeling: not perfectly provincial, not as brisk as a metropolis, and extremely friendly around the edges.

Slow Food’s guide led us to a family trattoria named after the Porta Romana, the gate at the southeast corner of the city wall. The owner in her 60s runs the place, her mom runs the kitchen, and the simple food delighted: a roast chicken, good pasta and sauce, simple potatoes.