At the risk of shocking some of our readers, let me be honest. I’ve never found Rome a particularly spiritual place. Historic? Yes, in bucketloads. Laced with scandal and intrigue? Assolutamente. Stuffed with power-hungry prelates? Now don’t get me started …

But spiritual, hmm. The truth is – in my experience, anyway – Rome is way too frenetic and crisis-ridden for the sort of quiet thoughtfulness that goes with spirituality. So I was delighted to find myself, on a visit to the city last week, in a space that truly seemed to speak to my soul. And I was surprised – or then again, perhaps not so very much surprised – that it wasn’t in the Vatican, or even in a church.

To enter the space, you first walk through a pair of heavy red curtains with an illuminated sign above them. “Tutto”, it reads; this is the threshold across which all must pass. It’s heavy with metaphor: to be human we must pass through many doorways, enter many new worlds, from the moment of our birth to the moment of our death. And also, from the world of our daily lives to the world of our spirituality; that’s the threshold we cross when we go into church, and indeed it’s to provide a place of separation from our busy, temporal lives that churches exist.