ROME is a city that spreads out, not only across geographical space, but across time. Add in to the mix the city's role in the literary and musical imagination and here is a place where you can follow a heroine's trail, or turn yourself into an opera star.

My own Rome exists partly in that past - real and fictional - and partly in the present, because a half-Italian friend will persuade me over with promises of visits to her family's butcher's shop in the Trastevere, or to the little park where the stray cats get fed in the early morning.

She once took a tiny flat near the Campo dei Fiori, booked me a hotel room across a street so narrow that we could virtually touch, and would lean out the window at 11 in the morning shouting, “Time for Angela's Christmas cocktail!”

Winter and early spring is a wonderful time in Rome. At the beginning of January the special market in Piazza Navona sells witch dolls called “La Befana” that shoot demon sparks from their eyes and promise to ward off ill luck in the coming year.

Fine dining up the Eiffel Tower

Paris has a new landmark - an Alain Ducasse restaurant 125 metres up the Eiffel Tower

BACKGROUND

• Chef Michael Caines in Istanbul

• Hip and happening Tel Aviv

• Welcome to Rome, open city...

• New York's new cultural quarter

• Amsterdam comes of age

52 great weekends for 2008

From festivals to feasting, and sales to surfing, Chris Haslam has every weekend figured out

• 20 style destinations for 2008

Related Internet Links

• More than 350 articles in our City Breaks section

You may even be lucky enough to catch the magical sight of snow falling through the skylight (the oculus) in the dome of the Pantheon - a pagan temple to all the Gods dating from 118-125 AD and transformed in 609 into the most bizarre of churches.

But it doesn't matter when you go - take a book with you and make Rome come alive. If you're into the life of the ancient city then any one of Lindsey Davis's Falco novels will do as a guide around the Forum or through the narrow streets of the Aventine, as they offer helpful little maps that work pretty well whether for 76 or 2008AD.

When I first went to Rome in my early twenties I carried a copy of Madame de Staël's 1807 novel Corinne, about a celebrated improvisatrice and the Englishman she loves. There is a scene where Corinne is brought in procession to perform and be crowned by her audience at the Capitol, and that certainly makes sense of the long flight of steps up to the Capitoline Museum.

Later on, it was George Eliot's Middlemarch, so I headed for the Sculpture Galleries in the Vatican Museum - the place where Will first sees Dorothea. These galleries were the tourist attraction in the 19th century, but today you will almost always have the place to yourself as the hordes queue for the Sistine Chapel.

If you have children in your party, enjoy a (discreet) run around the square in front of St Peter's before a brisk walk up the Borgo Santo Spirito to the 12th-century Hospital. In the street wall is a frame with an iron grill and a revolving barrel contraption. This is the “rota”, where women - girls hiding a pregnancy or matrons with too many mouths to feed - came to give up their babies.

A summary of Eliot's Adam Bede will help to explain, then back to Middlemarch and Santa Maria della Concezione in the Via Veneto, where Dorothea's vision of Rome as a “funeral procession” could have been influenced by the crypt decorated with some 4,000 skeletons of Capuchin monks.

One of the best story trails in Rome is offered by Victorien Sardou's play La Tosca - and this one has a soundtrack in Puccini's famous opera which premiered in Rome. Set in June 1800, the first act takes place in the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle (though you won't find Cavaradossi's blonde Magdalen or the Attavanti chapel). Scarpia's second act office is in the Palazzo Farnese (the French embassy, so not open to the public, but the magnificent façade will do), and the third act is at the Castel Sant'Angelo where Floria Tosca throws herself from the battlements.

Having done the fiction, you can check out the history behind it - Napoleon's campaigns in Italy - at the Museo Napoleonico in the Piazza di Ponte Umberto. Among the relics is a plaster cast of his sister Pauline's right breast - said to be the inspiration for the shape of the old-fashioned saucer-shaped champagne glass.

My favourite shop has its story too. The Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella, founded in Florence in 1612, has a branch in Corso del Rinascimento. Its phials and potions, coloured jars and old gold lettering make this an enticing place. I stock up on iris toothpaste, bean face scrub and the most velvety pale face powder. And after that it's definitely time for another cocktail, and never mind the glass it comes in.

Times recommends

• Oasis of the Seas: the Times review
• The 20 best new year party places to stay
• Green Spaces 2009: are you the winning writer?