One Day in Rome

Most people who write to us with one day in Rome have already made a list of eight places. The list is usually the problem. Rome is small for a capital city, but it is built on hills, paved with basalt cobbles that punish thin shoes, and busiest exactly where the list says to go. A day here is enough to see the city properly. It is not enough to see all of it, and the sooner you accept that, the better the day gets.

This is the route we would walk ourselves, in the order we would walk it.

Start east, and start early

Be at the Colosseum when it opens. Not an hour after, when the coaches arrive. If you are through the gate by half past eight you will have the upper tier almost to yourself, and the light comes in low through the arches on the east side, which is the hour photographers wait for.

The Roman Forum is next door and your ticket usually covers both, so walk straight down into it rather than back out to the street. Give it an hour. Leave by the Arch of Titus and climb the Palatine if your legs are willing; the view over the Forum from the top explains the layout better than any sign down at ground level.

Midday is for short distances

From the Forum it is about twenty minutes on foot to the Trevi Fountain, uphill for the last stretch. The Trevi is worth seeing and it is not worth an hour. Look at it, take the photograph from the right side, where the crowd thins out, and keep walking.

The Pantheon is seven minutes further. It is the one building in Rome that has been standing and in use for nearly two thousand years, and the oculus is still open to the sky, so if it rains while you are inside, stay and watch. Piazza Navona is four minutes past it.

That is four of the sights everyone comes to Rome for, inside forty minutes on foot. This is why we tell people not to plan a day around transport.

Where to eat, and where not to

Walk away from the monument before you eat. Anywhere with photographs of the food outside, a menu laminated in six languages, and someone at the door inviting you in is charging you for the address rather than the cooking. Two streets back from any piazza the prices fall and the food improves.

We keep a longer list of the places we actually send guests to, including where to go for gelato that is made on site rather than piped in.

The afternoon is where the plan usually breaks

You have to choose here, and most people choose badly by trying to do both.

The Vatican is across the river. St Peter's and the Vatican Museums will take four hours if they take one, and the walk from the Pantheon is roughly half an hour each way. If the Sistine Chapel is the reason you came to Rome, give the afternoon to it, book a timed entry in advance, and accept that you will not see Trastevere today.

If it is not the reason you came, stay on this side of the river. Trastevere in the late afternoon, when the light goes orange on the ochre walls and the restaurants start setting tables outside, is the part of the day most of our guests end up talking about afterwards.

Stay out after dark

Rome empties of day visitors around six and refills with people who live here. The Colosseum lit from below, the Pantheon portico with almost nobody under it, the fountains in Piazza Navona running in the dark: none of it costs anything and all of it is better than the same places at noon.

If you only have one evening, spend it walking rather than sitting.

Three things we would skip

• The sightseeing bus. The centre is closed to most traffic and the bus goes around it, not through it. You will spend the day looking at Rome from a window, stuck behind the same taxi.
• The queue at the Mouth of Truth. Forty minutes for a photograph of your hand in a drain cover. The church behind it, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, is free and empty and far more worth the time.
• Booking a restaurant for eight o'clock on your only night. You will be watching the clock from four in the afternoon. Eat late, the way the city does.

How we do it

Everything above assumes you are walking, and walking Rome in one day is honest work: around twelve kilometres, most of it on cobbles, much of it in the sun. It is entirely doable and plenty of people do it.

The reason our own day tours exist is that a Vespa, a Fiat 500 or a golf cart covers the same ground in a fraction of the time and without the hills. You sit, someone who knows the city drives, and the walk from the Forum to the Trevi, twenty minutes on foot, becomes four minutes with a stop for photographs on the way. What you buy is not speed for its own sake. It is the second half of the day, with your legs still working.