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City guide · Italy
Rome's comune covers 1,287.36 km² and held 2,746,984 people in 2025, with 4,223,885 across the metropolitan city, but the Rome a first-time visitor walks is a fraction of that. The historic centre in the central-western Italian peninsula has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980, and Vatican City — the smallest country in the world — lies inside Rome's own boundaries, so a single morning crosses an international border without anyone stopping to notice. Plan around that dense core rather than around the map of the comune, and the city stops being the exhausting thing it is reputed to be.
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The Colosseum is the Flavian Amphitheatre, the largest amphitheatre in the world, standing at the eastern end of the Roman Forum on Piazza del Colosseo.
The Pantheon stands on Piazza della Rotonda in the middle of old Rome, and it is two things at once: a Roman temple and a working Catholic church.
The Roman Forum is the excavated floor of the valley between the Capitoline and Palatine hills, and it was the centre of Roman public life for more than a thousand years.
The Palatine is the hill in the middle of the seven, rising between the Roman Forum on its north side and the Circus Maximus on its south, and it is the place Rome kept returning to.
The Trevi Fountain is the terminal display, the mostra, of the Acqua Vergine — the aqueduct brought into Rome in 19 BC and the only one of the ancient aqueducts that has run without interruption to the present day.
Castel Sant'Angelo is a single drum of brick and travertine on the right bank of the Tiber, and it has been four different buildings without ever being rebuilt.
Piazza Navona is a long oval-ended square in the historic centre of Rome, and its shape is not a design decision of the Baroque period but the footprint of a Roman building.
The Galleria Borghese is a state museum of the Italian Ministry of Culture, housed in the villa that Cardinal Scipione Borghese built for himself in the park now called Villa Borghese.
The Capitoline Museums occupy the two palaces that face each other across Michelangelo's piazza on the Capitoline Hill, at Piazza del Campidoglio 1.
The Spanish Steps are the staircase that carries Piazza di Spagna up the slope of the Pincio hill to the church of Santissima Trinità dei Monti standing above it.
Source: OpenStreetMap contributors, Wikidata ·
Set your days, your pace and the hours you actually want to be out. The planner works around closing days and travel time, and leaves room to eat.
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