🇮🇹 Italy · Central Italy (Lazio and Tuscany)
Few cities in the world pack in as much history, art and everyday life as Rome. The 'Città Eterna' is an open-air museum where, round any corner, you can run into a two-thousand-year-old Roman temple, a Baroque church with a Caravaggio inside or a monumental fountain ringed by people eating ice cream. One of the greatest empires in history was born here, the heart of Christianity was built here, and the Renaissance and the Baroque flourished here. Walking Rome means travelling through twenty-five centuries in a few blocks.
But Rome is not just ruins and museums: it is an intensely living city. It is the ritual of coffee at a bar counter, cacio e pepe or carbonara in a Trastevere trattoria, the walk at dusk along cobbled lanes, the golden light falling on ochre walls and the din of the piazzas. Romans live in the street, with a wry humour and enormous pride in their city, and they pass on that relaxed, pleasure-loving way of being in the world, the famous dolce far niente.
This guide covers the essentials of Rome with a practical, warm eye: how to organise visits to the Colosseum and the Vatican, what to see in the historic centre, where to eat well without falling into tourist traps, how to get around and how to make the most of every day. Rome is big, chaotic and overwhelming at first, but with a little planning it gives you some of the most memorable days of any trip in Europe.
According to legend, Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BC by Romulus, who together with his brother Remus had been suckled by a she-wolf. From a shepherds' village on the seven hills beside the Tiber, Rome went through a period of kings, then the Republic (from 509 BC) and finally the Empire, which under Augustus and his successors came to rule the whole Mediterranean and much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. At its height, in the 2nd century AD, the imperial capital had close to a million inhabitants. With the crisis of the Western Roman Empire and its fall in AD 476, the city emptied out, but it gained a new role: as the seat of the bishop of Rome — the Pope — it became the centre of western Christianity. In the Middle Ages it was the capital of the Papal States. The Renaissance and the Baroque (15th to 17th centuries) turned it into a monumental stage set at the hands of patron popes and geniuses such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante and Bernini, who left St Peter's, the Sistine Chapel and dozens of churches, palaces and fountains. In 1870, after Italian unification, Rome was taken from the Pope and proclaimed capital of the new Kingdom of Italy; the Vatican became an independent state only in 1929. The full story, with its myths and its emperors, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Italy: Rome and Lazio, cradle of the Empire and seat of the papacy; the Tuscany of the Etruscans, the communal republics of Siena and Pisa, and Florence, the city that gave the world the Renaissance.
Read the history of Central Italy (Lazio and Tuscany) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities carry a founding myth as powerful as Rome's. According to legend, the city was founded on 21 April 753 BC by Romulus, one of the twin sons of the god Mars and the princess Rhea Silvia, herself descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas. Abandoned in a basket on the waters of the river Tiber, Romulus and Remus are said to have been suckled by a she-wolf (the famous Lupa Capitolina) and then raised by a shepherd. As grown men they decided to found a city on the hills where they had been saved; after an argument about which hill to choose and who would rule, Romulus killed Remus and gave the city his name: Roma.
Beyond the myth, archaeology confirms that on the hills beside the Tiber — the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Quirinal and the rest of the famous 'seven hills' — there were villages of Latin and Sabine shepherds from at least the 8th century BC. The location was privileged: a ford across the Tiber, defensible hills and a strategic position between Etruria to the north and Magna Graecia to the south. Out of the merging of those villages the city was born over time.
Tradition says that after Romulus seven kings ruled, Latin, Sabine and Etruscan, until in 509 BC the last of them, Tarquin the Proud, was expelled and the Republic proclaimed. The first institutions, the first temples and the original layout of the city are credited to that monarchical period. The she-wolf suckling the twins is still, to this day, the emblem of Rome.
After the fall of the monarchy in 509 BC, Rome established itself as a Republic, a system in which power was shared between elected magistrates (above all the two annual consuls), the Senate — an assembly of aristocrats that concentrated moral and political authority — and the popular assemblies. For centuries, Roman political life was marked by tension between the patricians (the old aristocracy) and the plebeians (everyone else), who gradually won rights until they obtained magistrates of their own, the tribunes of the plebs.
The Republic was, above all, a formidable machine of expansion. It first subdued its Latin and Etruscan neighbours, then the Samnites and the Greek cities of southern Italy. The great leap came with the Punic Wars against Carthage (264-146 BC), the great power of the western Mediterranean: after three wars, and despite the challenge of the Carthaginian general Hannibal — who crossed the Alps with elephants and came close to defeating Rome — the Romans destroyed Carthage and became the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Then came Greece, Hispania, Gaul (conquered by Julius Caesar) and much of the East.
But expansion brought crisis. The enormous influx of wealth and slaves, the concentration of land and the struggles between generals with armies loyal to them personally tore the Republic apart in the 1st century BC. The civil wars between Marius and Sulla, between Caesar and Pompey, and finally between Octavian and Mark Antony marked the end of the republican system. The murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC was one of the decisive episodes of that collapse.
In 27 BC, Octavian — nephew and heir of Julius Caesar — received the title of Augustus from the Senate and became the first Roman emperor. Without formally abolishing the republican institutions, he concentrated real power in his own hands and opened the Empire. With Augustus began the Pax Romana, two centuries of relative stability and prosperity in which Rome reached its greatest extent, running from Britain to Egypt and from Hispania to Mesopotamia, with the Mediterranean turned into a 'Roman lake' (the Mare Nostrum).
It was the age of the great monuments that still define Rome today: the Colosseum, opened in AD 80 under the Flavian dynasty; the imperial forums; the Pantheon rebuilt by Hadrian; the baths, the aqueducts and the great roads that connected the empire. The city of Rome came to hold close to a million inhabitants, a figure no European city would reach again until the 19th century. Latin, Roman law and Roman administrative organisation left a mark that endures today across much of the western world.
From the 3rd century, however, the Empire went into crisis: pressure from peoples on the frontiers, political instability, economic problems and epidemics. The emperor Constantine legalised Christianity in 313 and moved the capital to Constantinople in 330. In 395 the Empire was split into two halves. The western part, weakened and pressed by the Germanic invasions (Rome was sacked in 410 and 455), crumbled until in 476 the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed: a date that traditionally marks the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
After the fall of the Western Empire, Rome lost population and political power, but gained a new kind of greatness: the religious one. The city, where tradition held that the apostles Peter and Paul had been martyred, became the centre of western Christianity and the seat of the bishop of Rome, the Pope. Over St Peter's tomb, in the Vatican, the greatest church in Christendom would in time be raised. Through the Middle Ages, the papacy asserted itself not only as a spiritual authority but also as a temporal power: the Papal States, a territory governed by the popes that covered much of central Italy.
For centuries, Rome was a relatively modest city compared with its imperial past, marked by disputes between noble families, conflicts with the Holy Roman Empire and traumatic episodes such as the move of the papacy to Avignon in the 14th century. But from the Renaissance on, the popes decided to turn the city into a showcase for the Church's splendour. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, Rome saw an extraordinary artistic renewal: popes such as Julius II and Leo X called in geniuses like Michelangelo, Raphael and Bramante, who painted the Sistine Chapel, designed the new St Peter's Basilica and filled the city with palaces, squares and fountains.
The Baroque, in the 17th and 18th centuries, gave Rome much of its present appearance, through artists such as Bernini — author of the colonnade of St Peter's and of fountains like the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona — and Borromini. The Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps and so many other Baroque marvels made Rome an obligatory stop for travellers on the European Grand Tour.
Through the long process of Italian unification in the 19th century (the Risorgimento), Rome held a central symbolic place: a united Italy without Rome as its capital was unthinkable. But the city was still the heart of the Papal States, defended by the pope's troops and, for years, by a French garrison. The outcome came on 20 September 1870: taking advantage of the withdrawal of French troops because of the Franco-Prussian War, the Italian army breached the wall at Porta Pia and entered Rome. The Papal States disappeared and Pope Pius IX shut himself away in the Vatican, declaring himself a 'prisoner'.
In 1871, Rome was proclaimed capital of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy, a role it holds to this day. The city, which for centuries had been a papal town of modest size, was transformed into a modern capital: great avenues were opened, ministries and the imposing monument to Victor Emmanuel II (the Altare della Patria) were built, and the population grew fast. The 'Roman question' — the conflict between the Italian state and the papacy — would only be settled in 1929 with the Lateran Pacts, which created the State of Vatican City as an independent sovereign entity.
The 20th century brought Mussolini's fascist regime, which used the grandeur of ancient Rome as propaganda and opened avenues such as the Via dei Fori Imperiali; the Second World War, during which Rome was occupied and then liberated in 1944; and, after the war, a period of cultural rebirth — the Dolce Vita of Fellini's cinema — and of growth. Today Rome is the capital of Italy, seat of government, a city of almost three million people and one of the biggest tourist destinations on the planet, with its historic centre listed as Unesco World Heritage.
Rome has been called the 'Eternal City' (Urbs Aeterna) since Antiquity, an expression already used by Roman poets such as Tibullus, expressing the conviction that Rome would last for ever. The passing of the centuries has only confirmed the strength of that nickname: few cities in the world pack into one space almost three thousand years of continuous history, from the ruins of ancient Rome to Renaissance and Baroque art, by way of medieval churches and modern palaces.
In 1980, the historic centre of Rome was inscribed by Unesco on the World Heritage list, a listing later extended to include the properties of the Holy See in the city and the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls. The recognition covers the extraordinary set of monuments — the Colosseum, the forums, the Pantheon, the Baroque squares, the fountains, the basilicas — that make Rome an open-air museum unique in the world.
Roman culture has radiated across the whole world: Roman law is the basis of the legal systems of much of the planet; Latin gave rise to the Romance languages (Spanish among them); and Roman architecture, engineering and art still inspire today. To that ancient inheritance are added the Catholic tradition, the food (Roman cooking with cacio e pepe, carbonara, amatriciana and pizza al taglio), the cinema and a way of life that mixes monumental grandeur with the closeness of the neighbourhoods. Rome is still, as the old saying goes, a city to which all roads lead.