Rome by motorhome is a problem of arithmetic more than of taste: you do not drive into it, and that is not a question of nerve but of limited traffic zones, of streets as wide as the vehicle and of places where you cannot leave it. So the three days work in one way only: you park once, on the first afternoon, and from then on Rome is a matter of trains, of buses and of legs. The choice that really weighs is not which monument to see, but which stopover: the mornings depend on it, because forty minutes out and forty minutes back for three days is four hours, that is half a day of sightseeing you never get. The rest is the city everyone knows, and on foot it turns out smaller than it looks: from the Colosseum to piazza Navona is twenty minutes.
Sleeping
Stops and overnight stays
Four candidates, and not one of them seen by us. The measure for choosing is not comfort but the journey: how long it takes in the morning to be in the centre, and with how many changes.
Area sosta camper Park Colombo
Via Cristoforo Colombo 170, 00147 Roma
fifty pitches on the Cristoforo Colombo, which is the closest to the centre of the four: four and a half kilometres. The price of that closeness is the road, a fast through route that does not go quiet at night. It has a waste drain and electricity but it has no toilets, which tells over three nights in a row. We did not sleep there: the rate is asked for when you book, and how noisy it really is we cannot say
fenced, east of the city, and the best equipped of the four: water, waste drain, toilets, shower, electricity and wifi, with a shuttle to the centre. Five kilometres, but with a shuttle it is its timetable that counts and not the kilometres. This is the area where we slept, forty euros a night
this is the one written into the route, and it is a campsite and not a service area: shaded by trees, inside the park of Veio, with full services and a laundry. The reason it comes first is not the greenery, though: the Due Ponti station is 449 metres from the entrance, on foot, and it is on the Rome to Viterbo line that ends at piazzale Flaminio, which is right up against piazza del Popolo. No changes, no shuttle to wait for. On top of that, coming down from Civita Castellana along the Flaminia, you drive straight past it. We slept at the Romae, though: the Flaminio is still the one we recommend, because of the station on foot, but we did not try it, and the rate is asked for when you book
guarded, outside the Grande Raccordo ring road at exit 24. It is the furthest of the four, almost eleven kilometres, and the centre is reached in two stages: the 702 bus to the Laurentina metro terminus, then line B. Two vehicles and two waits, which multiplied by six journeys over three days are the reason it is not the first choice. We did not sleep there, and the rate is asked for when you book
You cannot take the vehicle into the centre: the limited traffic zone covers the whole historic centre, and even outside the ZTL the streets are not made for a motorhome. You park once and you get out
A single Metrebus ticket (BIT) costs 1.50 euros and is valid for a hundred minutes, with one metro or train ride only; the timed tickets cost 8.50 euros for 24 hours, 15 for 48 and 22 for 72
Do the sums before you buy: with four rides a day the single ticket costs six euros, that is eighteen over three days against the twenty-two of the 72 hour one. The 72 hour ticket is worth it if you move around a lot or if you want to stop counting, not to save money
The train from Due Ponti and the city lines are all inside Metrebus, so the same ticket is good for the train, for the metro and for the bus
The historic centre is walked: from the Colosseum to piazza Navona is twenty minutes
What we did ourselves: tickets bought in advance, skip the line, for the Vatican Museums with the Sistine Chapel, for the Pantheon, for the Trevi Fountain (2 euros a head) and for the LEGO exhibition. For the rest you walk, and the transport ticket is only needed morning and evening, to get to the stopover and back
Seeing
Sights
Twenty-seven entries, which is far more than fit into three days: they are there to choose from, not to be worked through like a shopping list. The four that need booking are the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Vatican Museums and the Trevi Fountain, and they have to be fixed before you leave. Tap a marker on the map to open its entry below.
1
Colosseum
Monument · paid entry · 41.89094, 12.49190
the ticket is a single one with the Forum and the Palatine, it carries your name and requires a booked time slot: without one you do not get in. Sales open thirty days before the date. It is valid for 24 hours and gives one entry to the Colosseum and one to the Forum and Palatine area, so the two are done on the same day. In September the Colosseum opens at 8:30 and the last admission is at 18:15.
this is the original forum, the one that grew piece by piece in the valley between the Capitoline and the Palatine: not to be confused with the Imperial Forums, which are the five squares added alongside it centuries later and which are free to see from the street. Here you do go in, on the same ticket as the Colosseum, but it opens later, at 9:00, and the park closes at 19:15. It has no shade: in September the middle of the day is paid for.
it is inside the same enclosure as the Forum and on the same ticket, but almost nobody climbs it, and they are wrong: from up there you look down on the Forum on one side and the Circus Maximus on the other, and the shape of the city makes sense as it does from nowhere else. It is also the only place on the round where there are trees.
it is not a monument to visit but a hollow of grass six hundred metres long, open and free. Towards evening it becomes the place where you sit and watch the Palatine light up, and that is why in the route it comes at the end of the day.
off the beaten round, a kilometre south of the Circus Maximus, and for that reason you can visit them at leisure when everything else is full. What is left are walls as high as apartment blocks: it takes that to understand that the baths were not a bathroom but a district.
there has been a charge since 2023, and from the first of July 2026 the ticket has gone from 5 to 7 euros. You book in advance through the official channels, and entry is free on the first Sunday of the month. Inside there are no routes to follow: you go in, you look at the hole in the dome, and you leave when you want to.
it has the shape it has because it is built on top of a stadium, the stadium of Domitian, and the curve at the far end is the curve of the seating. It is two hundred metres from the Pantheon, so the two are done one after the other without thinking about it.
you pay, 2 euros a head, and the ticket is better taken beforehand. It is the most crowded place in the centre at any hour of the day. The only way to see it in peace is very early, before eight, or very late. We got there at three in the afternoon and the crowd was there: you see the basin all the same, the photograph without people you do not
they are two different places in the same square. In the morning it is a market of fruit, vegetables and stalls for tourists; in the evening the stalls clear away and it fills with people at tables. Anyone passing through once has to choose which of the two to see.
you are not allowed to sit on the steps, and there are people who will fine you: it is a rule from 2019 and it is enforced. From here via del Babuino runs towards piazza del Popolo, which is where the Due Ponti train comes in: anyone sleeping at the Village Flaminio enters the city from this side.
entry to the basilica is free, but you go through a security check and the queue crosses the square: early in the morning it is short, by the middle of the morning it is an hour long. Shoulders and knees have to be covered, and the rule is applied at the door.
you book on the official site, and anyone who turns up without a booking queues long enough to be worth the visit. They are half a full day and not an hour: the route is one way and ends in the Sistine Chapel, so you do not go in "just for the Sistine". If you do them, Trastevere slides to the next day.
it begins as Hadrian's mausoleum, becomes the fortress of the popes, and the passetto that links it to the Vatican is the escape route that actually worked, in 1527. From the terrace at the top you see St Peter's in front of you and the river below, and that is the view that pays for the climb.
you cross the river and the pace changes. Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere has the basilica with the gold mosaics on its front, lit up in the evening; around it are narrow lanes and inns. It is the place where you end the day, not where you begin it. We ate at Tonnarello, in via della Paglia, a few steps from the basilica
you climb it on foot from Trastevere, and it is a real climb. At the top is piazzale Garibaldi, from which you see the whole of Rome, and on the stroke of noon they fire a blank cannon shot: they have done it every day since 1904, and anyone who does not know jumps. At sunset it is the place from which you watch the city change colour.
it is the museum that holds the rest of this trip. Here are the gold tablets of Pyrgi, found at Santa Severa, with the same text in Etruscan and in Phoenician; here is much of what came out of the Banditaccia necropolis; and here is the Sarcophagus of the Spouses, which comes from Cerveteri. And since 1 July 2026 the paintings of the François tomb at Vulci are here too: detached from the walls in 1863 and shut away for a hundred and sixty years in a private collection, the State bought them in May 2026 and now they can be seen, with a video that reconstructs the whole tomb. Until the end of December 2026 they are accompanied by the exhibition "Il Ritorno degli Eroi", which puts the scattered grave goods back together with loans from the Louvre, the British Museum, Brussels and Lausanne. Anyone making this trip meets the sign "it is at Villa Giulia" four times, and this is the place where they stop meeting it. It stands north of piazza del Popolo, that is on the road home for anyone going back to the Village Flaminio.
the new covered market, off the monument round, with counters where you eat standing up. It is the place you go to have lunch and not to visit, and it is twenty minutes on foot from the Circus Maximus. It closes in the early afternoon, so it works at lunchtime and not in the evening.
you cross it on the way to Trastevere, on the ponte Fabricio, which dates from 62 BC and is the oldest bridge in Rome still in use: you walk over it without noticing. From the island you go down to the riverbank, which in summer is another city.
they are not the Roman Forum: they are the five forums the emperors added alongside it, cut in two by the road Mussolini drove over them in 1932. From the street you see them free and from above, which is how almost everyone sees them: the Forum of Trajan with its column, the Markets, the Forum of Nerva, the Forum of Augustus. Trajan's Column is thirty metres high and carries the chronicle of the Dacian war wound round it in a spiral, two hundred metres of relief that can only be half read from the ground. In the evening they are lit and the road is closed to cars.
Romans call it the typewriter and it is not a compliment, but in the evening, lit up all in white marble, the joke dies on its own. Inside is the Unknown Soldier with his two sentries, and entry is free; the lift up to the terrace of the quadrigas is paid for separately. The two fountains at the sides are the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, and the steps are the place from which you look at piazza Venezia.
you reach it up a hundred and twenty-four steps, brutally steep, built in 1348 as a vow for the end of the plague, and there is no handrail: it is the climb that puts off more people than any other in Rome, and that is why there is silence inside it a few steps from the Vittoriano. It stands on top of the Capitoline, beside Michelangelo's square, and from the top of the stairway you look out over the district on the other side.
Michelangelo designed it, and it is the first modern square in Europe: the oval star paving, the three palaces closing in a trapezium, and the cordonata, the ramp that climbs on shallow steps so that horses could go up it. At the centre stands the copy of the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius; the original is inside the Capitoline Museums. The square is open and free at any hour, the museums are not: they are another visit and another ticket.
four republican temples, the oldest in Rome, in a pit in the middle of the traffic. The thing people tell you is that Caesar was killed here, in the Curia of Pompey that stood along one side, on the ides of March in 44 BC. Until 2023 you could only look down on them from the parapet; since then a walkway goes down into the area and you walk among the temples. In the pit lives a cat colony that is an institution of the city.
it is the mother church of the Jesuits and the model the whole of the baroque copied: a single wide nave, with no columns to take the altar out of sight, because people came here to listen to the sermon. The vault is Baciccio's "Triumph of the Name of Jesus", and the painted bodies come out of the frame and cast shadows on the real ceiling. On the right is the chapel of St Ignatius, with the largest piece of lapis lazuli in the world on the globe at the top.
the only gothic church in Rome, and the surprise is all inside: blue vaults with gold stars that you see nowhere else in this city. There are Michelangelo's "Christ the Redeemer" beside the altar, the tomb of St Catherine of Siena below it, and that of Fra Angelico. Outside, in the square, stands Bernini's little elephant carrying an Egyptian obelisk on its back: Romans call it the chick of the Minerva, and it is as tall as a child.
the money for the dome ran out, and so they painted the dome: what you see at the end of the nave is a flat canvas seventeen metres across, the work of Andrea Pozzo, and from one exact point on the floor it looks real. From another point it falls apart, and that is the game. The vault of the nave is the "Glory of St Ignatius", by the same Pozzo, and so that you can look at it without breaking your neck there is a tilted mirror in the middle of the church. It is free, and it is worth as much as plenty of things you pay for.
small, in a square off the through route a few steps from the Minerva. On the lintel is written ARCHICONF. PIETATIS CARCERATORVM: it was the seat of the archconfraternity that looked after prisoners, and which had the privilege of freeing one man condemned to death on the feast of the Assumption. It is not a stop, it is one of those things you find on turning a corner.
Three fixtures that are not for tourists: one is the city's birthday, one is a quarter's own festival, and one is the whole summer.
Next: Natale di Roma · 21 Apr
21Apr
Natale di Roma
21 April
the city's birthday, which by tradition was founded on 21 April 753 BC. It is celebrated with processions in costume and with events in the civic museums: it is the one day of the year on which Rome looks at itself in the mirror. The celebrations, though, last a few days around the 21st, and the historical procession of the Gruppo Storico Romano usually falls on the nearest Sunday: in 2026 it was Sunday the 19th
17-25Jul
Festa de' Noantri
from the Saturday after 16 July
the festival of Trastevere, and the name says it all: "noi altri", we others, the people of the quarter. The tradition goes back to the sixteenth century and in the 1920s it became an official popular festival. The statue of the Madonna del Carmine goes in procession through the alleys as far as San Crisogono, where it stays on show for a week; the following Sunday it goes back on the river, on a boat, as far as ponte Garibaldi, because the statue was found at the mouth of the Tiber. Anyone in Rome on those days should see that, not one more monument
to be confirmed
This year's dates are not out yet
Estate Romana
from June to September
not an event but a programme: cinema, concerts and theatre scattered across the city, courtyards and parks included. It changes every year, and you look it up when you arrive
Remember
Useful tips
You choose the stopover on the journey, not on the services. Forty minutes out and forty minutes back, for three days, is four hours: half a day of Rome you never get. Of the four candidates the Village Flaminio is the only one with a station on foot, 449 metres, and with a train that reaches the centre without a change
Four bookings are made before you leave: the Colosseum, with its compulsory time slot and sales opening thirty days ahead; the Pantheon; the Vatican Museums; and the Trevi Fountain too, which costs 2 euros a head. Everything else is decided on the morning itself
The Colosseum ticket is valid for 24 hours and gives one entry to the Colosseum and one to the Forum with the Palatine: that is one single day, not two
Monday is the right day for the city. The Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine are open, while it is the day the necropolises and the museums round about close: anyone arriving on a Monday does Rome and keeps the Etruscans for the other days
Anyone making this trip meets the same pointer three times: the Pyrgi tablets, the grave goods from the Banditaccia and the Sarcophagus of the Spouses are all at Villa Giulia, and Villa Giulia is in Rome. If you want to close the circle, the place is here and the moment is this one
How we split the three days: the first afternoon Testaccio, with the Non-Catholic Cemetery and the Pyramid, and in the evening the Colosseum and the Imperial Forums floodlit as far as the Vittoriano; the second day entirely on foot in the historic centre, from Torre Argentina to the Pantheon to Trevi; the third one whole day at the Vatican Museums and St Peter's. We had been to Rome several times before, and the choice shows it: no Colosseum from the inside, no paying to enter the Forum, and the time spent looking up instead of queueing. Without children the LEGO show can be skipped; the walk with your nose in the air cannot, that is still the best thing Rome has to give
You can eat while you queue for the Pantheon: the takeaway counter of Appetito Pizza Gourmet, in piazza della Rotonda, is twenty metres from the queue, and the queue for the Pantheon is long at any hour
Where we ate: the carbonara at Vittorio a Portuense, in via Giuseppe Lunati, which is outside the centre and accordingly costs and is worth what a place where Romans eat costs and is worth. It is not within reach of a day in the historic centre: you go in the evening, on the way back to the stopover
Rome · part two
and then?
What to do, what to taste, and where to go tomorrow.
Experiences from here
What we did starting from here, ordered by driving time.
200 g of guanciale from Amatrice, in a single piece
4 egg yolks and 1 whole egg
100 g of pecorino romano, grated just before you start
black peppercorns, coarsely ground
coarse salt for the water
Method
cut the rind off the guanciale and cut it into strips half a centimetre thick, not into cubes: they have to stay crisp outside and soft inside
put them into a cold wide pan, with no oil and no butter, and turn the heat to medium low: the fat has to melt slowly and become the sauce itself
when the strips are golden and the fat has gone clear, turn the heat off and leave them aside in their own pan, away from the flame
bring the water to the boil and salt it lightly, because the pecorino and the guanciale bring salt of their own, and drop in the pasta
meanwhile beat the yolks in a bowl with the whole egg, the pecorino and a generous grinding of pepper, until you have a thick cream with no lumps
loosen the cream with two tablespoons of boiling cooking water, poured in a thin stream while you stir: this is the step that makes it glossy and that teaches it not to split later on
drain the pasta a minute early, keeping a ladle of the water, and tip it into the guanciale pan, still off the heat, stirring for a moment
take the pan off the hob, wait ten seconds or so until it stops sizzling, then pour in the cream and stir quickly: if the pan is still hot the egg sets and the carbonara is lost
adjust with the water you kept back until the cream veils the pasta, finish with more pecorino and more pepper, and take it to the table at once
the Colosseum lit up in the evening, seen from the road that runs past it, with the traffic light on red and people sitting on the pavementGabriele and Marcella in front of the lit Colosseum, in the middle of the crowd that at that hour is still all thereLetizia in the middle of via dei Fori Imperiali with the road closed to cars, and the Colosseum behind herthe excavations of the Roman Forum from the parapet of the road, with the sky still blue: a granite colonnade set back on its feet on new steps, and at the far left the church wedged into the Temple of Antoninus and Faustinathe Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, with the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda built inside the ancient porch, and in front of it the excavations of the Roman Forum in the eveningthe statue of Augustus with his arm raised on via dei Fori Imperiali, and Letizia standing beside the plinth to give the measure of itTrajan's Column and the dome of the Santissimo Nome di Maria, which at night look as though they were leaning on one anotherTrajan's Column from close up, with the reliefs of the Dacian war spiralling up for thirty metres and the lit church at its sidethe Forum of Trajan from up on the road: the columns left standing, the ancient paving and the two churches at the far endthe columns of the Basilica Ulpia shot from below, with their Corinthian capitals and the architrave suspended overheadthe Vittoriano in the evening from the side, with the bronze quadrigas on the cornice against the black skythe Vittoriano from the steps, with the flags at the sides and people going up and down against the lightthe Vittoriano head on, all white and lit up: this is the photograph that explains why in Rome they call it the typewriterLetizia sitting on the rim of one of the two fountains of the Vittoriano, the one with the marble group that stands for a seathe hundred and twenty-four steps of the Aracoeli seen from the bottom, and at the top the brick front of the basilica lit orangeMichelangelo's cordonata climbing to the Campidoglio, at night and empty, with the Palazzo Senatorio at the topthe Sacred Area of Torre Argentina from up on the parapet, with the new walkway going down inside it and the buildings standing round itthe four republican temples in the pit, with the umbrella pine stepping over them and the traffic going round without looking at themthe front of the Church of the Gesù against the sky, the one the whole of the baroque went on to copyLetizia in front of the life size wizard built out of bricks, inside the LEGO exhibition in via d'Aracoelithe Circus Maximus of the sixth century BC rebuilt in bricks, with the chariots on the red track, and Letizia watching it from the edgethe stegosaurus with purple and yellow plates, one of the big pieces in the exhibitionthe Trevi Fountain in bricks with its blue water and the square full of little figures: the same one we would see for real that afternoonthe brick built Trevi seen from the side, with the steps and the miniature crowd all round the basinSt Peter's Basilica in bricks, with the colonnade and the square filled with plastic faithfulLetizia face to face with the tyrannosaur with its mouth open, and the face she pulls is half the photographBernini's little elephant with the obelisk on its back in piazza della Minerva, and behind it the round flank of the Pantheonthe Egyptian obelisk the elephant carries on its back, from close up: Romans call it the chick of the Minervathe blue vaults with gold stars of the Minerva, the only gothic church in Rome, which inside does not look like Rome at allthe statue of the crowned Madonna with the Child, holding a rosary, in a chapel of the Minervathe porch of the Pantheon taken from below, with the granite columns converging towards the skythe columns of the portico from underneath, Egyptian monoliths twelve metres high that arrived here two thousand years agoone of the side chapels inside the Pantheon, framed between two fluted columnsthe dome of the Pantheon with the coffers shrinking towards the oculus, and the nine metre hole that is the only lightthe rotunda of the Pantheon seen from inside, with people circling under the niches and every phone pointed upwardshere we are, all four of us in a circle under the oculus, with the phone propped on the floor and the dome turning around usthe whole dome from the centre of the rotunda, with the queue of people coming in across the ancient marble floorthe aedicules and the coloured marble columns of the inner ring, the ones almost nobody looks at because everybody is looking upwardsthe tomb of Victor Emmanuel II inside the Pantheon, with its bronze crown and the words PADRE DELLA PATRIApiazza della Rotonda seen from inside the portico, framed between the columns as though from a windowthe fountain and the Macuteo obelisk in piazza della Rotonda, with the square full at middaythe vault of Sant'Ignazio with the Glory painted by Andrea Pozzo, where the false architecture carries on the real one without the join showinga side altar of Sant'Ignazio, with the altarpiece inside its frame of marbles and the twisted columnsthe vault taken down the length of the nave: the bodies come out of the frame and cast shadows on the real ceilingthe nave towards the high altar, with the false dome at the end that from here looks like a real onethe apse and its painted half dome, with gilded stucco and figures leaning out of the cornicesthe vault looked at in the tilted mirror the church puts in the middle of the nave, so that you do not break your neck: you can see the phone at the bottom, which is the way everyone looks at itpiazza di Sant'Ignazio with the curved fronts of the buildings opening out like a fan, designed as the wings of a theatrethe Trevi Fountain at an angle in the early afternoon, with green water and full light on the marbleTrevi head on, with Oceanus on his chariot between the two Tritons and the front of Palazzo Poli behindMarcella in front of the fountain, on the rim of the basin, at three in the afternoon on a day in Septemberthe church of Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio facing the fountain, with the crowd sitting on its steps looking the other wayan ice cream poster in the middle of the street, which on a September afternoon in Rome looks less like an advertisement and more like a directionthe front of San Giovanni della Pigna, with ARCHICONF. PIETATIS CARCERATORVM written on the lintel, the archconfraternity that looked after prisonersthe carbonara in its little pan, at Vittorio a Portuense, on the evening of 8 September: outside the centre, where the Romans eat
