Venice and its lagoons form a singular, water-bound world in north-east Italy, where Gothic grandeur, Byzantine art, Renaissance architecture, and a living lagoon ecosystem combine to create one of the most astonishing and layered destinations on earth.
Italy: The Historic Centre of Rome
🏛️ 1. The Roman Forum
We’ve been to Rome twice now, and both times we ended up at the Roman Forum. It’s one of those places you simply can’t ignore — not least because it’s right next to the Colosseum and Palatine Hill, and you’ve practically tripped over it before you’ve had your first espresso of the morning.
The Forum sits in the historic heart of Rome, a sprawling, sun-baked tangle of broken columns, crumbling arches and ruined temples that, when you stop to think about it, was once the beating centre of the most powerful empire the Western world had ever seen. Hard to believe, frankly, when you’re standing there in the July heat, squinting at a pile of old stones while someone from a tour group plants a selfie stick uncomfortably close to your elbow.
At its peak, roughly between the 7th century BC and the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, the Forum — or Forum Romanum, if you want to sound like you know what you’re talking about at dinner — was where everything happened. Elections, public trials, religious ceremonies, political speeches, gladiatorial contests in the early days, and, presumably, quite a lot of standing about complaining, which is a tradition we British have clearly inherited. Julius Caesar himself was cremated here in 44 BC, after being stabbed to death in what must have been one of the more dramatic days in Roman history.
What we saw on our visit was the result of centuries of astonishing history layered on top of itself, like a very expensive, very complicated lasagne. The site covers a long rectangular valley between the Capitoline and Palatine Hills, and it’s genuinely enormous. You wander through it along a road called the Via Sacra — the Sacred Way — which was the main processional route through the Forum, and along which victorious Roman generals once paraded after their conquests, preceded by their prisoners and followed by their troops. These days it’s preceded by children eating gelato and followed by people frantically checking the Modula app to make sure their timed entry ticket is still valid.
Among the ruins, a handful of structures still manage to make a proper impression. The Temple of Saturn, for example, dates back to around 497 BC, making it one of the oldest buildings on the site. Eight of its original columns still stand, which is frankly more than you’d expect given everything the place has been through — earthquakes, floods, medieval builders cheerfully dismantling bits of it to use elsewhere, and roughly fifteen hundred years of general neglect. Saturn was the Roman god of agriculture and wealth, and his temple doubled as the state treasury, which tells you quite a lot about Roman priorities.
Then there’s the Arch of Titus, built around 82 AD to commemorate Emperor Titus’s sacking of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It’s one of the oldest surviving Roman triumphal arches, and the carved reliefs inside show Roman soldiers carting off the treasures from the Temple of Jerusalem, including the famous menorah. It’s a sobering sight, and a reminder that the Romans were not, when it came down to it, especially gentle neighbours.
We also made our way through what remains of the House of the Vestals — the large, colonnaded courtyard that was home to the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses who tended the sacred flame of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Their role was considered so important that they were among the most privileged women in all of Rome. They served for thirty years from childhood, had reserved seats at the games, and could free condemned prisoners simply by encountering them in the street. On the downside, if the sacred flame went out on their watch, they were flogged. And if they broke their vow of chastity, they were buried alive. So, swings and roundabouts, really.
Today the Forum attracts more than 4.5 million visitors every year, which means you’ll want to book ahead. This is where Modula comes in very handy indeed — it keeps everything organised and means you’re not standing in a queue that stretches halfway back to the airport. Entry is typically combined with the Colosseum and Palatine Hill on a single ticket, and the site is open most of the year, though hours vary by season.
Go early, wear comfortable shoes, bring water, and try to ignore the audio tour groups. The Forum rewards a slow, unhurried wander, and if you stand quietly for a moment among the old stones, away from the crowds, it does hit you — this was once the centre of the world. Genuinely. Not in a brochure-speak way, but in an actual, remarkable, slightly hard-to-process way.
We’re not ones for gushing, but even we had to admit it was rather magnificent.
From the Roman Forum, we climbed to the top of Palatine Hill, which is the centremost of the Seven Hills of Rome and is one of the most ancient parts of the city. It rises to around 40 m (about 120 feet) above the Roman Forum and offers amazing views across the ruins.
🏟️ 2. The Colosseum
From the Roman Forum, it’s a short skip, hop and jump to the Colosseum — and by the time we arrived, the crowds had well and truly swelled. It was, to put it mildly, absolutely mental around the entrance. People everywhere, tour groups waving coloured umbrellas, selfie sticks at every angle, and the kind of organised chaos that makes a busy Saturday at IKEA look positively serene. It was at precisely this point that we fully appreciated the real value of having booked a “skip-the-lines” tour. We still had to wait for our allotted time slot, of course, because nothing in Italy is entirely straightforward, but at least we weren’t queuing in the blazing heat with what appeared to be the entire population of Western Europe.
The Roman Colosseum — or Coliseum, if you prefer — was originally known as the Flavian Amphitheatre, and was commissioned in AD 72 by Emperor Vespasian. Now, Vespasian was an interesting character. He’d come to power after the catastrophic Year of the Four Emperors in AD 69, when Rome had essentially been an imperial lucky dip, and he was determined to stamp his mark on the city. His answer was to build something so monumentally large that people would still be taking photographs of it two thousand years later. Fair play to him — it worked.
He didn’t live to see it finished, mind you. That fell to his son Titus, who completed the amphitheatre in AD 80 and inaugurated it with a rather spectacular 100-day festival of games. By all accounts, several thousand animals and a not inconsiderable number of gladiators met their ends during the celebrations. Romans knew how to throw a party. Further modifications were later carried out by Emperor Domitian, Titus’s younger brother, who added a fourth storey and made various structural improvements — the sort of thing you do when you inherit someone else’s project and want to make it your own.
The sheer scale of the place is genuinely staggering. The Colosseum is elliptical in shape, measuring 188 metres long and 156 metres wide, making it the largest amphitheatre ever built — a record it still holds today, which is either impressive or a damning indictment of modern ambition, depending on how you look at it. It was constructed from travertine limestone, tuff (a volcanic rock the Romans were rather fond of), and brick-faced concrete — a combination that has, give or take the odd bit of earthquake damage and medieval pilfering, managed to hold together remarkably well.
The building featured 80 arched entrances, which allowed up to 55,000 spectators to enter and take their seats with surprising efficiency — far better, I’d wager, than the average Premier League stadium on a wet Tuesday night in February. Seating was allocated strictly according to social rank. Senators and VIPs got the best spots at the front, closest to the action, while ordinary citizens were herded further up, and women and slaves were consigned to the very top tier. The Romans were many things, but subtle about class distinctions they were not.
One detail that particularly caught our attention was the roof arrangement. Around the fourth level, 240 masts were attached to stone corbels, from which a vast canvas awning — known as the velarium — was stretched across the open top to provide shade for the spectators below. Operating this contraption was the job of a specially trained detachment of sailors from the Roman navy, which is a wonderfully peculiar fact. There they were, men whose skills had been honed on the Mediterranean, now pressed into service hauling ropes over a stadium in the middle of Rome. One imagines they had mixed feelings about the career change.
Standing inside, looking up at those ancient walls, it’s hard not to feel the weight of the place — all that history, all those lives, all those emperors and gladiators and roaring crowds. It’s one of those rare spots where the past doesn’t feel distant at all.
🏛️ 3. Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele
A short stroll from the Roman Forum brought us face to face with what can only be described as one of the most aggressively attention-seeking buildings on the planet. The Monumento Nazionale a Vittorio Emanuele — known to locals as the Vittoriano, and to generations of unimpressed Romans as the “wedding cake” or, rather less charitably, the “typewriter” — is not a building that does subtle.
It was inaugurated in 1911, the result of a competition launched back in 1878 following the death of Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a newly unified Italy. Italy had only formally become a single nation in 1861, after centuries of fragmented city-states, foreign dominations, and the revolutionary upheaval of the Risorgimento — the great 19th-century movement that eventually stitched the peninsula together into one country. Victor Emmanuel, king of Sardinia before unification, became the monarch of this bold new Italy, and the powers-that-were decided he deserved a monument of frankly staggering proportions to mark the fact.
The architect Giuseppe Sacconi won the design competition and work began in 1885, though the whole thing took so long to complete that Sacconi himself died in 1905 before seeing it finished. One suspects he may have been quietly relieved. The building sits at the foot of the Capitoline Hill and houses, among other things, the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento and the Central Museum of the Risorgimento — both of which are, we’re told, genuinely worth a visit if you’re keen on 19th-century political history and have somehow not yet had enough of marble floors.
Since 1921, the monument has also been home to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — the Milite Ignoto — installed after the carnage of the First World War to honour the Italian fallen. An eternal flame burns there permanently, and the tomb is always guarded by two soldiers standing in silent vigil. It’s one of those moments, if you pause long enough, that cuts through all the architectural excess and actually means something.
The monument itself is colossal by any measure — 135 metres wide and 70 metres high, clad entirely in white Brescian marble, bristling with scores of majestic Corinthian columns and enough steps to make your knees weep just looking at them. At the very top sit two bronze chariots, each driven by the winged goddess Victoria, and between them a rather magnificent equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel II himself, cast in bronze and looking extremely pleased with the whole arrangement. The statue, completed in 1910, is so large that a dinner for fourteen was allegedly held inside the horse during construction. Whether that story is entirely true is anyone’s guess, but it rather tells you everything you need to know about the scale of the thing.
The monument was, and in many quarters still is, deeply controversial. To build it, whole swathes of the ancient Capitoline Hill neighbourhood were demolished, including a 16th-century convent and a significant chunk of medieval Rome. Roman citizens were not especially pleased about any of this, and it’s fair to say the building has never fully made its peace with its surroundings. Plonking an enormous gleaming-white neo-classical extravaganza next to two thousand years of weathered, ochre-toned Roman history requires a certain brass neck, and the architects had that in abundance.
One of the monument’s genuine draws is the panoramic terrace up near the bronze chariots, accessible by lift — the panoramic elevators being, usefully, the only practical way to reach the upper levels without sacrificing your will to live on the stairs. The views over Rome from up there are, by all accounts, spectacular: the Forum, the Colosseum, the Palatine Hill, the whole magnificent, chaotic, deeply impractical city laid out below you.
We, however, did not make it up there. By the time we arrived at the Vittoriano we were ravenously hungry and the heat was the kind that makes you question every decision you’ve ever made, including the one to visit Rome in summer. Climbing several hundred marble steps in 34-degree heat, on an empty stomach, with the prospect of a queue for a lift at the top, was not, we concluded, a proposition any reasonable person could defend. We admired it from the bottom, took a photograph or two, and went to find lunch instead. Next time, we told ourselves. We always say next time.
🏛️ 4. Trevi Fountain — Fontana di Trevi
No trip to Rome was ever really complete without a visit to the Fontana di Trevi — or the Trevi Fountain as we English-speakers insist on calling it, because apparently two thousand years of Italian history still wasn’t quite enough to make us learn the language. Tucked away in the Quirinale district of Rome, this was, without question, one of the most jaw-dropping fountains we’d ever clapped eyes on.
Like the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain was built largely from travertine stone. The name itself comes from the Latin lapis tiburtinus, meaning “stone from Tibur” — Tibur being the ancient name for Tivoli, a town sitting about 22 miles east of Rome in the hills of Lazio. The Romans had been quarrying travertine from around Tivoli since the 2nd century BC, and it turned out to be extraordinarily useful stuff — strong, relatively light, and pleasingly creamy in colour. The Colosseum alone consumed around 100,000 cubic metres of it, which gives you some idea of the scale of Roman ambition (and Roman slave labour, but let’s not dwell on that).
The Trevi Fountain itself stands a genuinely impressive 85 feet tall and stretches nearly 65 feet wide, making it the largest Baroque fountain in Rome and, indeed, the world. And the water? The fountain pushed out roughly 2,824,800 cubic feet of water every single day through multiple jets and cascades into the large basin in front. Before you get ideas about cupping your hands for a refreshing drink on a hot Roman afternoon, don’t bother — the water was all recycled. Sensible, really. Romans have always had a flair for engineering if nothing else.
The centrepiece of the whole glorious spectacle was Neptune himself, the Roman god of the sea, standing imperiously on a shell-shaped chariot and looking very much like someone who wasn’t planning to apologise for anything. His chariot was hauled along by two powerful horses, each one guided by a Triton — a half-man, half-fish figure from Roman mythology. One horse was calm and compliant, the other skittish and difficult. This, apparently, was a deliberate artistic choice to represent the two contrasting moods of the sea — tranquil one moment, furious the next. Frankly, it reminded us of the M25 on a Bank Holiday.
The sculpture was the work of Nicola Salvi, who won a competition in 1730 launched by Pope Clement XII to redesign what had, up until that point, been a rather unimpressive little wall fountain. Salvi spent the rest of his life on the project, dying in 1751 before it was finished. It was finally completed in 1762 by Giuseppe Pannini. So the whole thing took about 32 years to build. Admittedly, it looks it — in the best possible way.
The story of the Trevi Fountain, however, went back a great deal further than the 18th century. The fountain marked the terminal point of the Aqua Virgo aqueduct, one of ancient Rome’s eleven major aqueducts, built in 19 BC under the orders of the Emperor Augustus’s right-hand man, Marcus Agrippa. The Aqua Virgo ran for about 14 miles from springs near the Via Collatina to the east of the city, supplying water to the great Roman baths of Agrippa in the Campus Martius — the very first of Rome’s famous public baths — and to various fountains throughout central Rome.
The aqueduct’s rather charming name — Aqua Virgo, meaning “Virgin Waters” — came, according to legend, from a young Roman girl who led a group of thirsty Roman soldiers to the spring’s source during the construction. Whether that actually happened or whether some Roman PR man simply made it up is anyone’s guess. Either way, the name stuck for over two thousand years, which is more than can be said for most things.
The fountain was built at the precise point where three ancient Roman roads converged. Tre vie in Italian means “three roads,” and it was from this simple geographical fact that the entire structure took its name — the Three Roads Fountain, or Trevi. We found it quietly satisfying that one of the most famous landmarks in the world was essentially named after a road junction.
Today, the Trevi Fountain was absolutely rammed. We’d read the travel guides, we knew it was popular, but nothing quite prepares you for the sheer wall of humanity wedged around that basin. Tourists jostled for selfie spots, coin-throwing couples elbowed each other out of the way, and tour groups arrived in formations that could only be described as military. The ancient tradition of tossing a coin over your left shoulder into the fountain — said to guarantee your return to Rome — was apparently taken extremely seriously, as an estimated €1.5 million was collected from the basin every year and donated to a local charity.
If we wanted any photos that didn’t look like the opening scene of a disaster film, getting there before 7am was essentially non-negotiable. Even then, the early-morning crowd was already gathering. In Rome, it turned out, you were never as alone as you’d hoped to be.
🏛️ 5. The Pantheon
From the Trevi Fountain, we took a five-minute stroll through a tangle of narrow side streets — the sort of cobbled Roman backstreets that smell faintly of coffee and ancient drains — to reach our next stop: the Pantheon.
Even now, nearly two thousand years after it was first built, the Pantheon is a genuinely remarkable thing to stand in front of. Not remarkable in the way that people say things are remarkable when they mean “quite nice.” Remarkable in the proper sense — as in, it makes you stop, look up, and feel slightly inadequate about everything you have ever built or achieved in your life. It is a powerful reminder of just how seriously the Romans took their architecture, and how the rest of us have spent the last two millennia trying and largely failing to match them.
The word Pantheon comes from the Greek adjective meaning “honour all Gods,” which sounds like the sort of hedge-your-bets approach to religion that a sensible person might adopt. The first Pantheon was believed to have been constructed around 27 BC during the reign of Emperor Augustus. That original structure suffered various calamities over the following century and went through several revisions before the building we see today was commissioned by Emperor Hadrian around 120 AD. So what we were standing in front of was a building that has been quietly getting on with things since the second century. Put that next to your average 1970s office block and weep.
The Pantheon started life as a temple to all the gods of ancient Rome before becoming, in 609 AD, the first pagan temple to be converted into a Christian church — a decision that is almost certainly the reason it survived at all. While barbarian raiders and the general chaos of the Middle Ages were busy dismantling every other ancient monument in the city, the Pantheon carried on being a church and nobody touched it. Sometimes the best survival strategy is simply to make yourself useful.
The exact composition of the building material remains unknown to this day, but it behaves structurally rather like modern concrete. Whatever they used, the Pantheon remains the only structure of its age and scale to have survived entirely intact — not a ruin, not a reconstruction, but the actual building, still standing with all its splendour exactly as Hadrian intended.
The centrepiece of the whole thing, and the feature that makes grown adults go quiet and stare upwards like dogs hearing a strange noise, is the dome — specifically the famous oculus, or Eye of the Pantheon, the hole at its very top. The dome was the largest in the world for an astonishing 1,300 years and remains, to this day, the largest unsupported dome on earth. It spans 43.30 metres — 142 feet, compared to a rather modest 96 feet for the United States Capitol dome. In a geometrically pleasing touch, the distance from the floor to the top of the dome is exactly equal to its diameter. A perfect sphere of space.
Entry is free, which in Rome feels almost suspicious. Ladies need to cover their shoulders, and gentlemen must remove their hats — entirely reasonable given the building has been a place of worship for fourteen centuries. Visitors are asked to observe silence, a request reinforced periodically by an announcement over the loudspeakers. Yes, a loudspeaker announcement asking for silence. We are aware of the irony. Predictably, most people ignored the signs with cheerful abandon. The interior itself is less ornate than most churches we had visited — less gold, fewer frescoes — and the relative simplicity actually added to the grandeur rather than taking away from it.
What made it genuinely breathtaking was the timing of our visit. Sunlight was coming through the oculus at just the right angle to form a single intense beam that cut down through the interior like something from a film, illuminating the ancient marble floor below with a sharp circle of light. Two thousand years of history, all of it pointing at one hole in a ceiling.
Worth every penny of the free admission.
🏛️ Piazza Navona
We wandered over from the Pantheon to the Piazza Navona, one of those places that makes you stop dead in your tracks and think, yes, this is exactly why people fly to Rome and spend a fortune on hotels the size of a cupboard.
The piazza is enormous — one of the largest in Rome — and sits on the footprint of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, built around 86 AD. Today it packs in tourists clutching gelato rather than 30,000 spectators, which is arguably more civilised.
🌊 La Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi
The showstopper at the centre was the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi — the Fountain of the Four Rivers — designed by Bernini and completed in 1651 for Pope Innocent X. The centrepiece is a tall Roman obelisk, originally erected by Emperor Domitian and hauled over from the Appian Way — a thoroughly miserable job without a forklift. Around its base, four enormous figures recline dramatically, each representing a great river: the Ganges, the Nile, the Danube, and the Río de la Plata.
🐬 La Fontana del Moro
At the southern end stood the Fontana del Moro, depicting a Moor wrestling a dolphin. Originally built in 1575 by Giacomo della Porta, Bernini added the central figure in the 17th century, giving the whole thing considerably more drama.
🔱 La Fontana di Nettuno
At the northern end sat the Fontana di Nettuno, also originally by della Porta, dating from 1576. The dramatic sculpture of Neptune surrounded by sea nymphs wasn’t added until 1878 — waiting 300 years does seem a bit leisurely, even by Italian standards.
Both fountains predate the grand Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, yet spent centuries being altered and fussed over. Rome, it seems, is never really finished.
⛪ Sant’Agnese in Agone — Beauty, Baroque, and a Blessed Bit of Shade
The most dramatic feature of the piazza was the baroque church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, looming magnificently across the western side of the square like a very grand aunt who knows exactly how impressive she looks.
A place of worship was thought to have stood here as far back as around AD 300 — roughly 1,200 years before anyone thought about building the fountain we’d just been staring at. The young St Agnes, a Roman girl of around twelve or thirteen, was said to have been martyred on this very spot during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, whose enthusiasm for persecuting Christians was, to put it diplomatically, quite something.
The church we were admiring was not, needless to say, the original. The present building was largely the work of baroque architects Francesco Borromini and Carlo Rainaldi, with the façade completed in the 1660s — a gloriously theatrical confection of curved stonework, flanking bell towers and an enormous dome.
We went inside, which turned out to be a splendid decision — not just for the beautifully ornate interior with its gilded everything and dramatic ceiling frescoes, but because by this point the Roman sun was doing its level best to finish us off entirely. The gloriously cool air was, if we’re being honest, at least half the appeal.
Best time to visit Rome
🌸 Spring (March–May)
Spring is widely regarded as the finest season to visit Rome. Temperatures are pleasantly mild, ranging from around 12°C in March to a comfortable 22°C by May, making it ideal for exploring the city on foot. The days are long and bright, the city’s piazzas burst into bloom, and the famous wisteria cascades over ancient walls and villa gardens. Crowds are building but have not yet reached the overwhelming levels of summer. Easter, which falls in spring, draws large numbers of pilgrims and tourists to the Vatican, so accommodation should be booked well in advance if your visit coincides with Holy Week. The Roman countryside is lush and green, and al fresco dining becomes an evening pleasure rather than an ordeal.
🧳 What to Pack: Lightweight layers, a waterproof jacket, comfortable walking shoes, a light scarf, sunglasses, SPF 30 sunscreen, a compact umbrella, smart-casual evening wear, and a crossbody bag for sightseeing.
☀️ Summer (June–August)
Summer in Rome is hot, often intensely so, with temperatures regularly reaching 32°C to 36°C and humidity making it feel even warmer. July and August are the peak tourist months, meaning long queues at major attractions, packed public transport, and inflated prices for flights and hotels. That said, summer has its charms. The city hosts outdoor film screenings, concerts at ancient venues, and vibrant evening street life that extends well past midnight. Many Romans leave the city in August, so certain neighbourhoods take on a quieter, more local character. Early morning visits to the Colosseum or the Roman Forum can be magical before the heat builds. Hydration and sun protection are non-negotiable.
🧳 What to Pack: Breathable linen or cotton clothing, a wide-brimmed hat, high-factor sunscreen (SPF 50+), a refillable water bottle, sandals and light trainers, a portable fan, a light cardigan for air-conditioned museums and churches, a modest cover-up for basilica visits, and insect repellent for evenings.
🍂 Autumn (September–November)
Autumn rivals spring as the best season to visit Rome and, for many seasoned travellers, surpasses it. September retains the warmth of summer — often 26°C or above — without the relentless crowds. October brings golden light, cooling temperatures, and the grape harvest in the surrounding Lazio countryside. Rome’s markets overflow with mushrooms, chestnuts, and seasonal produce, and the city’s restaurants are at their most enticing. By November, temperatures drop to around 12°C to 15°C and rainfall increases, but visitor numbers thin considerably and the great monuments can be enjoyed with far more space and serenity. Autumn light lends a particular beauty to Rome’s ochre and terracotta facades.
🧳 What to Pack: A versatile mid-layer (light wool or fleece), a waterproof coat, ankle boots or sturdy walking shoes, trousers and smart jeans, a warm scarf for evenings in November, an umbrella, SPF 30 sunscreen for September, and a tote bag for market shopping.
❄️ Winter (December–February)
Winter is Rome’s quietest and most affordable season for visitors. Temperatures hover between 4°C and 12°C, and while snow is rare, cold wind and persistent rain are common, particularly in January and February. Christmas, however, transforms the city. Piazza Navona hosts its traditional Christmas market, and the Vatican is especially atmospheric for Midnight Mass at St Peter’s Basilica. The major museums are less crowded, and queue times at the Colosseum and the Pantheon drop dramatically. Hotel rates fall sharply outside of the Christmas and New Year period. Those willing to brave the chill will find a more intimate, unhurried Rome — one closer to how the city actually lives and breathes.
🧳 What to Pack: A warm coat (wool or down), thermal base layers, a hat and gloves, a warm scarf, waterproof boots, thick socks, a compact umbrella, smart layers for Christmas concerts or dinners, and a small rucksack for day trips.
📊 Season Summary Table
🏆 The Overall Best Time to Visit
For most visitors, late April to early June and mid-September to October represent the sweet spot. The weather is reliably pleasant, daylight hours are generous, and the city’s most celebrated sights — the Colosseum, the Vatican Museums, the Trevi Fountain, and the Spanish Steps — can be enjoyed without the suffocating heat or exhausting queues of peak summer. Prices for flights and accommodation are more reasonable, and Rome itself feels more alive and less like a theme park. If budget is the primary concern, a late January or February visit offers extraordinary value and a genuinely authentic experience of the Eternal City. Whatever the season, Rome rewards those who arrive with comfortable shoes, an unhurried spirit, and a willingness to wander beyond the obvious.
Where to stay?
1. Rocco Forte Hotel De La Ville
Sitting directly above the Spanish Steps on Via Sistina, Hotel De La Ville is one of Rocco Forte’s flagship properties in Rome. The building is a restored early 19th-century palazzo with 104 rooms, many featuring traditional wooden floors, marble bathrooms with handmade terracotta tiles, and views over the city’s rooftops. Dining is a genuine strength: there are three restaurants overseen by chef Fulvio Pierangelini, ranging from fine dining to a classic Roman trattoria, plus a rooftop terrace with panoramic views. The two-floor spa covers around 167 square metres and includes a hydromassage pool, steam room, salt room and sauna. The Trevi Fountain is a seven-minute walk away, and the hotel holds two Michelin Keys.
2. Hotel Scalinata Di Spagna
Perched at the top of the Spanish Steps in Piazza Trinità dei Monti, Hotel Scalinata di Spagna is a three-star, owner-managed boutique hotel occupying a 19th-century building in one of Rome’s most central locations. The hotel spreads across five floors and two staircases, with rooms decorated in either classic or contemporary style, several offering rooftop views across the city’s domes and terracotta skyline. A covered rooftop terrace serves the breakfast buffet, which gets consistently good marks from guests. Rooms come with air conditioning, free Wi-Fi, and a complimentary minibar. The Spagna metro station lift is just 50 metres away, making wider exploration straightforward. It’s a compact, well-run property that does what it promises — a reliable, well-located base for visiting Rome.
3. YellowSquare Rome
YellowSquare Rome sits in a large art deco building on Via Palestro, a ten-minute walk from Roma Termini station and within easy reach of the city’s main sights. It operates firmly in the hostel bracket, offering both dorm beds (for guests aged 18–45) and private en suite rooms, all air-conditioned and colourful. The social side is a big part of the appeal: there’s a bar with DJ nights, live music, a gourmet restaurant serving Mediterranean food, cooking classes, a hair salon, and coworking spaces for those who need to get some work done. A shared kitchen, outdoor patio, and bike hire round things out. It’s a well-organised, sociable base that suits independent travellers who want more than just a place to sleep.
More to Explore
