You’d never consider trying to “do” Rome in a day, would you?
Well, that’s exactly what I did and it turns out that it is possible, although you can’t hang around and watch life go by from one of the cafes: lunch on the go is the only way.
We did it as a flight plus tour trip although to fit everything in we needed to abandon the formal tour about half-way through as the afternoon segment was basically taking you to the shops as quite a lot of these “in a day” type tours end up doing. If you are getting off the bus before the tour is over, one thing to be very careful about is that you know where to catch it later in the day or you’ll end up missing your trip home.
Detailed preparation for such a trip is essential as there really is no time to be messing around wondering where such and such a place is whilst you’re in the midst of the day itself (bring a compass or satnav to avoid guesswork). For that you can generally get a quick overview on WikiTravel but the way to get the most out of these daytrip events is to get the appropriate Dorling Kingsley guide which, in this case, is the one for Rome: not the “Top 10″ version as it’s too condensed and not the one for Italy as it’s not detailed enough.
So what did we manage in the day? Well, this might sound a bit unbelieveable but we packed in the Trevi Fountain and the Colloseum on the bus tour then St Peters, the Vatican Museum (the Sistine Chapel is fantastic), the Pantheon, the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Forum. We’d also have managed the Spanish Steps but I was over-ruled (”We’ll miss the bus!!!”). Even with moving along at a brisk pace, you always find unplanned things along the way like the Swiss Guard in the photo.
Although that list sounds like a “blink and you’ll miss it” type of trip, in fact it allowed us to have quite a reasonable amount of time at each of the stops on our trip. Where we saved time was in the little things like eating on the go, knowing ahead of time the route from A to B (that’s where the 3d maps in the DK guides are brilliant) and concentrating on what we wanted to see rather than the things in between.
In reality, most people do the above over the course of three or perhaps four days. That obviously allows for a much more leisurely approach to things with a lot less pre-planning required although you’ll get more out of your trip with a certain amount of planning ahead.
On the three-day jaunts, you’ll obviously need somewhere to stay. Booking systems have moved up a rung in sophistication lately and the top one at the moment seems to be Hotels Combined which scans all the other listings sites and brings you an enormous list of possible options. For Rome that amounts to nearly 1800 offers at the moment which is more than the total number of hotels in Rome as most hotels will be listed a number of times and, usually, at different prices so you can sometimes pick up a fantastic offer.
When should you go? Well, we went the week after Easter basically because that was when the daytrip offer was on rather than because of any grand plan. However, that’s quite a good time to go (or after any major religious festival) as the crowds have thinned out considerably and that was one reason we were able to pack so much into such a short time. Surprisingly, we didn’t even need to queue much to get into the Vatican Museum which is where we expecting to lose a lot of time.
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