ROME -- At Jonathan's Angels bar in Rome, you can be whoever you want to be, for better or worse. Having painted himself as Bacchus, Alexander the Great, and the pope, all on display here, owner Nino Medros is just fine with that. As he says of one self-portrait, ''Sometimes I feel like a saint, sometimes like a devil." Tonight, a woman well into her 60s, who gives her name only as Delores and says she was an early Fellini star, is feeling devilish. Under the porcelain angels, she wriggles out of most of her black lace get-up to perform a rowdy swing-dance-turned-striptease with a man half her age. Medros, himself about 65 by his employees' estimates, shrugs. ''She does that every night." Maudy Tuseth, 30, an animator who once tended bar here, recalls the police routinely showing up to stop Delores's exhibitionism. They seem to have given up.
It's not that Medros, a self-proclaimed former trapeze artist with a biblical-looking shock of white hair and beard and a taste for leather and tattoos, is running anything other than a respectable establishment near Piazza Navona. It's just that in his corner of Rome, the angels and the devil aren't at odds. Here they can meet for a drink.
Not even Michelangelo, whose ''Last Judgment" in the Sistine Chapel juxtaposes the mouth of hell with the rise to heaven, could have imagined so apt a meeting place as Jonathan's Angels. The decor is somewhere between an antique shop and a Gothic shrine, with rickety chandeliers and Roman Catholic bric-a-brac. The bar's famous restroom is decked out with plaster busts, dribbling fountains, mosaics of Medros's face beside the Virgin Mary, and a ''Beware of Crocodiles" sign. Meanwhile, with the ice broken by Delores's performance, Italians of all ages fill the dance floor, swinging, moshing, and jitterbugging to live piano music.
American visitors to Jonathan's tend to revel in the campiness of it all, though not everyone sees it that way.
''When it comes to this stuff, Italians know no irony," insists Tuseth, who is American-born. ''This piano bar, the kitsch -- it's the real thing to them, mullets and all."
Medros solemnly hands a visitor a business card with a photo of him and a grinning nun.
Rome can be both heaven and hell. Pillars of Western civilization were formed on a great and bloody scale here, and treasures of antiquity are a few blocks from the trickle-down fascist architecture. After millennia of battling the opposing forces of bacchanalia and asceticism, the city has settled into a cautious companionship with the two.
For the student traveler, it's a happy balance. With the possible exceptions of Delores and Medros, the young are less trained than our elders in the art of denying the devil on our shoulders. We have no trouble stepping chastely into a historic church the morning after debauchery --provided we wake up in time.
In search of other citadels of the sinful and the sacred in the Eternal City, I came across Taverna Lucifero, a restaurant on a hidden block off Campo dei Fiori. Locals, brandishing cigarettes and attitudes that could be described only as devil-may-care, pack this unpretentious place, and are welcomed with a kiss by owner Francisco Perlini. It took some persuading to get a table in winter; would-be customers in high season are advised to call two weeks in advance. Who knew Lucifer's den would be so hard to get into? Some clues as to why: fresh pasta, swathed in cream and topped with freshly-brushed truffles, homemade limoncello, and 400 varieties of wine.
Repenting these transgressions required an extra trip to the Vatican -- on foot -- and lunch at Mediterranean pizzeria Angeli a Borgo, a short walk from St. Peter's. It's light, classy, and uncomplicated, and a massive plate of gourmet pizza, including one named after Lucifer, costs 7 euros (about $9).
South of Vatican City, the neighborhood of Trastevere offers plenty of contrasts for saints and sinners alike. It was here that in the third century, tavern owners and early Christians faced off in a property dispute. Their descendants no longer spar over the charming little bars that dot the piazzas around Santa Maria in Trastevere, the first church ever to be named after the Virgin Mary.
A symbol of this new pax romana is the Casa di Santa Francesca Romana, a former convent where the pope said Mass half a century ago. It remains Vatican property, but is now a lovely hotel, and despite a 2 a.m. curfew, there's no evidence that the unholy are turned away.
Across the street, what was once a popular gay bar has been replaced by an Amsterdam-style smart shop. Ecosmartshop sells cannabis paraphernalia and herbal hallucinogens, coolly suggesting that everyone reach heaven in his or her own way. Then there's the tiny Museum of the Souls in Purgatory in the Chiesa del Sacro Cuore del Suffragio, which contains objects purported to contain traces from souls in purgatory. It's perfect for those of us who prefer to hover between heaven and hell.
Irin Carmon, a student at Harvard University, is a researcher-writer for Let's Go Travel Guides. Taking Off, her column on student travel, appears the third Sunday of the month. She can be reached through www.irincarmon.com.
