City guide
Three thousand years stacked on top of each other, four pasta dishes worth arguing about, and more tourists than any of it was built for.
Italy6 min readUpdated August 15, 2026
Rome is not a museum city, which is the thing most guides get wrong. People live above the ruins, park badly beside them, and eat extremely well two streets away from all of it. The ancient parts are worth the queue, but the reason to come back is dinner.
The centre is small and the crowds concentrate in maybe six places. Walk twenty minutes into Testaccio, Monti or across the river past the second bridge and the city empties out considerably.
Roman cooking is four sauces and a lot of offal, done with an almost religious refusal to change anything. Cacio e pepe, carbonara, amatriciana, gricia. If a menu offers you chicken with pasta, leave.
Trastevere
The trattoria everyone recommends, and for once the crowd is right. Carbonara made properly, house wine in a jug, and a room the size of a living room.
Local tip: They take lunch bookings and early dinner only. Otherwise arrive at 6.45pm and wait outside like everyone else.
Ask the concierge to book thisTwelve tables, no reservations after 7pm, and a queue that never shortens.
Testaccio
A triangular pizza pocket filled with the Roman stews nobody has time to cook at home. Five euros, eaten standing, and a genuinely good idea.
Testaccio
A modern covered market in the old slaughterhouse district, where the food stalls sit among people buying their weekly vegetables. Go before 2pm or it is shut.
Campo de' Fiori
A deli counter with a restaurant attached, packed with cured meat and cheese hanging over your table. Their carbonara starts arguments, which in Rome is a compliment.
Ask the concierge to book thisMonti for walkable and characterful, Trastevere for evenings, Prati for quiet and near the Vatican. Anywhere touching Termini station is cheap for a reason.
Piazza del Popolo
The grand option, with a stepped garden running up the hill behind it and a bar that Roman society actually uses. Expensive and worth understanding why.
Ask the concierge to book thisA terraced garden in the middle of the city that you would never guess was there.
Serviced apartments in a Renaissance palace, designed by Jean Nouvel, a minute from Piazza Navona. Better value than a hotel room of the same size and location.
Ask the concierge to book thisPiazza Navona
A villa on the quietest hill in Rome, with a garden for breakfast and a walk down into Testaccio for dinner. You trade ten minutes of walking for actual silence.
Ask the concierge to book thisAventine
Two big ticketed sites and two free ones. Doing the Colosseum and the Vatican on the same day is a mistake people make once.
Celio
The amphitheatre is the photograph, but the Forum next door is the better visit: an entire civic centre lying in pieces where it fell.
Local tip: One ticket covers both plus the Palatine. Book a timed entry; the same-day queue is punishing in summer.
Centro Storico
Nearly two thousand years old, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome on earth, and open to the sky. It rains inside, which is the best thing about it.
Vatican City
Four kilometres of corridor before you reach the ceiling everyone came for. Extraordinary and exhausting in roughly equal measure.
Local tip: The first entry slot of the day is the only civilised way to do this. Book weeks ahead.
Trastevere
The hill above Trastevere, with the whole city laid out below and a cannon fired at noon every day since 1847. Free, and much quieter than the Spanish Steps.
Two of these are easy on the regional train. The third needs a car or a driver and is the best of them.
An Umbrian town on a plug of volcanic rock, with a striped cathedral and a well you can walk down inside. Eighty minutes by train, and lunch there is better than lunch in Rome.
hilltown · food · full day
Ask the concierge to book thisTwo villas on one hill: Hadrian's enormous ruined estate, and the Villa d'Este, whose garden is essentially a machine for moving water downhill beautifully.
gardens · full day
Ask the concierge to book thisRome's abandoned port city, nearly as complete as Pompeii and with a fraction of the visitors. Forty minutes on the train and you walk down real streets with real shopfronts.
ancient · half day · quiet
Everything above, on one map. Colours mark what kind of place it is; tap a dot and its details open beside the map, and you keep your place. Day trips are left off, they sit well outside the city.
Pin positions are approximate: neighbourhood level, not street addresses.
Colosseum, Vatican, Borghese Gallery. The Borghese in particular sells out weeks ahead and has strict two-hour slots.
Enforced at St Peter's and most churches, including in August. A scarf in the bag saves a wasted walk.
Nor is anyone standing outside inviting you in. Both are reliable signals within two hundred metres of any major sight.
Rome is the city where not booking costs you the most: the Borghese, the Vatican and the Colosseum all sell timed slots, and the trattorie worth eating in have twelve tables. Send the Simly concierge your dates and a person will book the sights in a sensible order and hold the tables around them.
Message the conciergeEverything in this guide assumes a working phone: maps between neighbourhoods that follow no grid, ride-hailing instead of flagging taxis, a menu handwritten in Arabic. A Simly eSIM activates before you land, so you step off the plane already connected.
Get a Simly eSIMRome, Italy
