Known for
Ancient Roman ruins, Renaissance and the seat of the Catholic Church
Must-see landmarks
The Colosseum, the Pantheon and St. Peter's Basilica
Free to visit
St. Peter's Basilica and the piazzas around Pantheon and Trevi Fountain
Days needed
Four to five full days
The monumental staircase of 135 steps climbs from Piazza di Spagna to the Trinita dei Monti church, built in the 1720s and framed by Bernini's Barcaccia fountain at its base. Sitting on the steps is no longer allowed. The Trevi Fountain is about 10 minutes away on foot.
Nicola Salvi's Baroque fountain, completed in 1762, fills a small piazza with the mythological figures of Oceanus and his sea horses carved from travertine. Tradition holds that tossing a coin over the shoulder guarantees a return to Rome. The Pantheon lies about 10 minutes away.
The best preserved building of ancient Rome keeps its original bronze doors and coffered concrete dome, open to the sky through the oculus at its centre, nearly 1,900 years after Hadrian rebuilt it as a temple. It now serves as a church and holds Raphael's tomb, with a timed ticket required. Piazza Navona is a 7 minute walk.
The elongated Baroque piazza follows the shape of Domitian's ancient stadium, with Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers at its centre facing Borromini's church of Sant'Agnese in Agone. Street artists and cafe terraces line the square through the day. Campo de' Fiori is 6 minutes away.
Rome's oldest market square trades fruit, flowers and produce from stalls each morning until early afternoon, overlooked by the statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, before the same piazza fills with bars in the evening. The Roman Forum is about 22 minutes away on foot, past the ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina.
The valley of temples, basilicas and triumphal arches once served as the political and commercial heart of ancient Rome, with the Arch of Titus and the House of the Vestal Virgins among its ruins. The site opens at 9:00 and shares a combined ticket with Palatine Hill. The Colosseum stands 12 minutes away.
The largest amphitheatre ever built opened in 80 AD with gladiator contests and staged hunts for up to 50,000 spectators, its arena floor now partly exposed above the underground chambers that once held performers and animals. It opens at 8:30 and requires a timed-entry ticket booked in advance.
The Colosseum is the largest amphitheatre ever built, a four-tiered ellipse of travertine, tufa and brick-faced concrete that once seated tens of thousands. Emperors staged gladiator duels, wild-animal hunts and public spectacles on its wooden arena floor, while a warren of tunnels, cages and lifts known as the hypogeum waited below. Earthquakes and centuries of stone-robbing stripped away much of the outer ring, yet the surviving tiers, arches and underground passages still map out how Roman crowds were funnelled to their seats.
Style: ancient Roman architecture · Opened: around AD 80
Location: Piazza del Colosseo, Rome
Access: Ticketed, timed entry · Tickets and tours
For centuries the Roman Forum was the beating heart of the ancient city, a valley of temples, basilicas, arches and law courts wedged between the Capitoline and Palatine hills. Senators debated, generals paraded in triumph and citizens traded and worshipped among monuments raised over a thousand years. Today it is a field of columns, paved roads and ruined foundations, from the Temple of Saturn to the Arch of Septimius Severus, best read as an open-air record of how Rome governed itself.
Location: Via della Salara Vecchia, Rome
Access: Ticketed; one ticket covers the Roman Forum and the adjoining Palatine Hill.
The Vatican Museums hold one of the world's largest art collections, a chain of papal galleries, corridors and courtyards assembled by popes over five centuries. The set route runs past classical sculpture, the map-lined Gallery of Maps and Raphael's frescoed Rooms before ending at the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo painted the ceiling and, decades later, the Last Judgment behind the altar for two different popes. Crowds are heavy and the walk is long, so a timed slot booked ahead makes the visit far calmer.
Location: Viale Vaticano, Vatican City
Access: Ticketed, timed entry · Tickets and tours
St. Peter's Basilica is the largest church in the world, raised over the traditional tomb of the apostle Peter and rebuilt across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by a roster of Renaissance and Baroque masters. Its nave leads to Bernini's towering bronze baldachin above the papal altar, and Michelangelo's Pieta stands near the entrance. Michelangelo also designed the great dome, whose lantern crowns the Vatican skyline and can be climbed for a view over St. Peter's Square.
Style: Renaissance and Baroque · Architects: Bramante, Michelangelo, Maderno, Bernini
Location: Piazza San Pietro, Vatican City
Access: Free to enter with a security check; the dome climb and treasury are ticketed · Tickets and tours
The Pantheon is the best-preserved monument of ancient Rome, a temple of all the gods rebuilt under Hadrian and later consecrated as a church, which spared it from ruin. Its portico of granite columns opens onto a vast domed rotunda whose coffered concrete ceiling is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built. At its centre the open oculus lets in a shifting disc of daylight, and rain, above the tombs of kings and the painter Raphael.
Style: ancient Roman architecture
Location: Piazza della Rotonda, Rome
Access: Ticketed, timed entry · Tickets and tours
The Trevi Fountain is the grandest of Rome's Baroque fountains, a theatrical wall of travertine where the sea god Oceanus rides a shell chariot drawn by tritons and sea horses across a rocky reef. Designed by Nicola Salvi and finished by Giuseppe Pannini, it marks the end point of the restored Acqua Vergine aqueduct, which still feeds its basin. By tradition visitors toss a coin over the left shoulder to ensure a return to Rome, and the collected coins are given to charity.
Style: Baroque · Completed: 1762
Location: Piazza di Trevi, Rome
Access: Free to view from the surrounding square; a timed entry pass is now required to reach the fountain basin.
Piazza Navona traces the long oval of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, where Romans once watched athletic games, and its arena outline still shapes the square. Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers anchors the centre, its four giant figures standing for the Nile, Ganges, Danube and Rio de la Plata beneath an Egyptian obelisk, while Borromini's church of Sant'Agnese in Agone rises alongside. Ringed by cafes, street artists and Baroque palaces, it is one of the liveliest gathering places in the old city.
Style: Baroque · Architects: Bernini, Borromini
Location: Piazza Navona, Rome
Access: Free, open square.
The Spanish Steps sweep in a wide Baroque cascade of one hundred and thirty-five steps linking Piazza di Spagna to the twin-towered church of Trinita dei Monti above. Designed by Francesco de Sanctis and paid for with French money in the 1720s, the curving flights fan out around terraces that fill with people, and with azaleas each spring. At the foot the boat-shaped Barcaccia fountain by the Bernini family plays, and the house where the poet Keats died looks onto the square.
Style: Baroque · Completed: 1725
Location: Piazza di Spagna, Rome
Access: Free to visit; sitting on the steps is not allowed.
Castel Sant'Angelo began as the round mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian before it was turned into a papal fortress, prison and refuge over the centuries. A spiral ramp climbs through its drum to frescoed Renaissance apartments, papal treasure rooms and a rooftop terrace with a sweeping view over the Tiber and the Vatican. The raised Passetto corridor still links it to St. Peter's, an escape route popes used in times of danger, and the bronze angel on top recalls the vision that gave the castle its name.
Location: Lungotevere Castello, Rome
Access: Ticketed · Tickets and tours
Campo de' Fiori is one of Rome's most characterful squares, a market ground by day and a busy meeting place by night. Stalls of produce, flowers and spices fill it most mornings, giving way after dark to crowded bars and restaurants. At its centre stands a brooding statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned here for heresy in 1600 and now a symbol of free thought, marking the spot where the square once staged public executions rather than trade.
Location: Campo de' Fiori, Rome
Access: Free, open square; a produce market fills it most mornings.
The Via Appia, or Appian Way, was the first and most famous of the great Roman roads, begun in 312 BC to carry armies and trade south toward Brindisi. Romans called it the queen of roads, and its long basalt-paved stretch survives on the edge of the city, lined with tombs, catacombs, ruined villas and umbrella pines. Now protected within a regional park, it makes a broad open-air walk where cypress-shaded ruins replace traffic and the ancient paving is still visible underfoot.
Style: ancient Roman road · Begun: 312 BC
Location: Via Appia Antica, Rome
Access: The ancient road is a public route open to walk; individual sites along it, such as the catacombs, are ticketed.
The Basilica di San Clemente is a layered cross-section of Roman history hidden behind an ordinary facade near the Colosseum. The bright twelfth-century church at street level, rich in gold mosaics, sits above a fourth-century basilica with faded frescoes, and below that a first-century Roman house and a temple to the god Mithras, with an underground spring still running through the lowest level. Descending through the three levels is like walking back through nearly two thousand years of the city in a single building.
Style: Romanesque · Consecrated: 1123
Location: Via Labicana, Rome
Access: The upper church is free; the excavated lower levels are ticketed.
Photo: "Basilica di San Clemente in Laterano 02" by Nicholas Gemini (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Wilco plays Auditorium Parco della Musica for Roma Summer Fest on 31 August at 21:00, the American alt-country band's stop on its European tour.
Hermanos Gutierrez performs at Auditorium Parco della Musica on 2 September at 21:00, the Swiss-Ecuadorian instrumental duo known for its desert blues guitar sound.
KRS-One takes the stage at Hacienda on 4 September at 21:00, the pioneering hip-hop MC and founder of the Stop the Violence Movement.
Conway the Machine headlines a live showcase at Casilino Sky Park on 18 September at 21:30, the Buffalo rapper and Griselda Records co-founder.
Matteo Lane brings his stand-up show to Teatro Orione on 3 October at 20:30, the American comedian and Emmy-nominated performer.
RAF brings his Infinito Palasport tour to Palazzo dello Sport on 17 October at 21:00, the veteran Italian pop singer known for writing Self Control.
Piazza del Popolo costs nothing to visit, day or night, as one of Rome's largest public squares. A free staircase on its eastern side climbs to the Pincio terrace in Villa Borghese, one of the city's best free sunset viewpoints. Weekday mornings are quietest.
Piazza Venezia and the ground level of the Vittoriano monument cost nothing to visit, including the Shrine of the Unknown Soldier beneath the marble columns. A separate ticket covers the panoramic lift and the Palazzo Venezia galleries. The square is busiest at midday.
Trastevere itself charges nothing to explore at any hour, and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere at its centre, with Cavallini's 13th century mosaics, opens daily from 07:30 to 20:30 with no ticket needed. Evenings after the shops close are quietest.
The city's grand landscaped park spreads across the northern hills with a lake, neoclassical temples and shaded avenues, purchased by the Italian state in 1903 and open to the public at no charge. The Galleria Borghese museum and the Bioparco zoo inside charge their own admission.
A public park on the Aventine Hill planted with bitter orange trees frames one of the city's best free viewpoints, looking across the rooftops and the Tiber toward the dome of St. Peter's. It opens daily with no entrance charge.
The French national church near Piazza Navona holds Caravaggio's cycle of Saint Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel, free to view during opening hours, typically 09:30 to 12:45 and 14:30 to 18:30 on weekdays.
The church built to house the chains of Saint Peter is free to enter and holds Michelangelo's Moses at the centre of Pope Julius II's tomb, open daily except for a midday closure between 12:30 and 15:30.
Four sunken Republican-era temples where Julius Caesar was assassinated, now shared with a colony of stray cats cared for by volunteers.
Location: Largo di Torre Argentina, Rome
A green swathe of Roman countryside where the arches of several ancient aqueducts still stride across the fields toward the city.
Location: Via Lemonia, Rome
An excavated Roman house and water cistern hidden in the streets just behind the Trevi Fountain, fed by the same ancient aqueduct.
Location: Vicolo del Puttarello, Rome
Photo: "Trevi - città dell'acqua - serbatoio aqua virgo" by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0).
A section of Rome's oldest defensive wall, built from volcanic tufa in the fourth century BC, displayed inside a fast-food restaurant by Termini station.
Location: Piazza dei Cinquecento, Rome
Photo: "New passenger building - Interior - 1" by Szilas (Public domain).
The vast circular tomb the first emperor built for himself and his family, long overgrown and recently restored and reopened to visitors.
Location: Piazza Augusto Imperatore, Rome
Photo: "Photographs of the Mausoleum of Augustus 14 (cropped)" by MumblerJamie (CC BY-SA 2.0).
A curved, multi-storey complex of brick halls and shops built into the hillside beside Trajan's Forum, often called the world's oldest shopping centre.
Location: Via IV Novembre, Rome
A plain third-century travertine gate set into an older Republican wall, tucked down a side street beside a small church.
Location: Via di San Vito, Rome
Photo: "Arc of Galliennus - panoramio" by trolvag (CC BY-SA 3.0).
Underground chapels decorated entirely with the bones of thousands of Capuchin friars, arranged into patterns as a meditation on mortality.
Location: Via Vittorio Veneto, Rome
A sharp white marble pyramid, tomb of a Roman magistrate, raised during the city's craze for Egyptian style after the conquest of Egypt.
Location: Piazzale Ostiense, Rome
A church of a confraternity that once buried the anonymous dead, its facade carved with winged skulls and a crypt below.
Location: Via Giulia, Rome
Photo: "Santa Maria dell'Orazione e Morte - Rome, Italy - DSC01683" by Daderot (Public domain).
A quiet cypress-shaded burial ground for non-Catholics beside the Pyramid of Cestius, resting place of the poets Keats and Shelley.
Location: Via Caio Cestio, Rome
Photo: "Roma Cimitero Acattolico di Testaccio" by Gidipa (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Miles of early Christian burial galleries carved into soft rock beneath the Appian Way, among the first sites to be called catacombs.
Location: Via Appia Antica, Rome
Photo: "Roma, Catacombe di San Sebastiano (4)" by Palickap (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The reclining, wax-covered remains of an early Roman martyr displayed beneath an altar in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
Location: Via XX Settembre, Rome
Photo: "Chiesa di Santa Maria della Vittoria (Roma) 11" by Nicholas Gemini (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A church that claims to hold the skull of John the Baptist, one of several sites around the world making the same relic claim.
Location: Piazza di San Silvestro, Rome
Photo: "Roma - Chiesa di San Silvestro" by Luca Aless (CC BY-SA 3.0).
A brass sundial line set into the floor of a Michelangelo-designed basilica, once used to check the calendar and mark solar noon.
Location: Piazza della Repubblica, Rome
Photo: "Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri 30" by Nicholas Gemini (CC BY-SA 4.0).
An ancient marble mask in a church portico said to bite the hand of any liar who dares place it inside its open mouth.
Location: Piazza della Bocca della Verita, Rome
A humble green door on the Aventine Hill whose keyhole frames a perfect distant view of St. Peter's dome down a hedged garden path.
Location: Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta, Rome
A small, dreamlike district of fanciful mansions mixing Art Nouveau, medieval and Baroque motifs around a fairy-tale fountain and arch.
Location: Piazza Mincio, Rome
Photo: "Coppede Rom 002" by Edelmauswaldgeist (CC0).
A lone seventeenth-century doorway carved with alchemical symbols and formulas, all that survives of a nobleman's villa in a public park.
Location: Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome
Photo: "Rione XV Esquilino, Roma, Italy - panoramio (32)" by Mikhail Malykh (CC BY 3.0).
A flower-crowned skull labelled as the patron saint of lovers, kept in a glass reliquary inside the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin.
Location: Piazza della Bocca della Verita, Rome
Photo: "Roma - Iglesia de Santa Maria in Cosmedin - 001" by Xosema (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A large underground temple to the mystery god Mithras, hidden beneath a former warehouse next to the Circus Maximus chariot track.
Location: Piazza Bocca della Verita, Rome
Photo: "Circus Maximus - panorama view" by Peter Clarke (CC BY-SA 3.0).
A Mannerist artist's house near the Spanish Steps whose door and windows are framed as the gaping mouths of grotesque stone monsters.
Location: Via Gregoriana, Rome
Photo: "Roma - Bibliotheca Hertziana Palazzetto Zuccari (41995843175)" by Fred Romero (CC BY 2.0).
A tiny, sign-less Jewish bakery in the old Ghetto famous for its burnt-looking ricotta and cherry tart, often sold out by afternoon.
Location: Via del Portico d'Ottavia, Rome
Photo: "Boccione Bakery" by JSFarman (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The buried remains of Nero's sprawling golden palace, explored on guided visits with projections that rebuild its frescoed halls.
Location: Via della Domus Aurea, Rome
A whimsical House of the Owls in the Villa Torlonia park, rich in stained glass, owl motifs and storybook turrets.
Location: Via Nomentana, Rome
Photo: "Casina delle Civette" by Hugo DK (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The balcony of Palazzo Venezia from which the dictator harangued crowds packed into the square below during the Fascist years.
Location: Piazza Venezia, Rome
Photo: "Celebre balcone - panoramio" by pietro scerrato (CC BY 3.0).
A raised fortified corridor along the top of a wall linking the Vatican to Castel Sant'Angelo, once an emergency escape route for popes.
Location: Borgo, Rome
A single glass case in a riverside church holding scorched books and cloth said to bear the handprints of souls in purgatory.
Location: Lungotevere Prati, Rome
Photo: "5594RomaSCuoreSuffragio" by Geobia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A former anatomical theatre near the Vatican crammed with antique surgical tools, wax models and specimens tracing centuries of medicine.
Location: Lungotevere in Sassia, Rome
Photo: "Roma - Museo di storia della medicina - 20 - 2024-09-25 18-42-30 001" by Albarubescens (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Rome layers three thousand years of history into a single walkable centre, where ancient temples share a street with Renaissance palaces and Baroque fountains. The city ruled an empire that spanned the Mediterranean, then became the seat of the Catholic Church, and both identities still shape its skyline side by side, from the Colosseum to the dome of St. Peter's. It is also where most longer routes through the country begin; see things to do in Italy for what lies beyond the capital.
The centro storico around the Pantheon and Piazza Navona holds the densest concentration of sights and stays lively into the evening. Trastevere, across the Tiber, keeps a medieval street plan, ivy-covered facades and a strong restaurant scene. Monti, behind the Roman Forum, mixes vintage shops with quiet piazzas, while the Vatican side of the river forms its own self-contained district around St. Peter's Square.
April to June and September to October bring mild weather and shorter queues than the peak of summer, when temperatures regularly pass 35 degrees. Four to five full days allow time for the historic centre, ancient Rome and a half day at the Vatican Museums; three days cover only the essentials at a rushed pace.
The historic centre rewards walking, with most major sights within a couple of kilometres of each other. Three metro lines, A, B and C, run out from the centre but cross it only at a few points, since further tunnelling regularly turns up archaeological finds. Buses and trams fill the gaps, and taxis or rideshares cover the distance to the Vatican or Trastevere quickly outside rush hour.
