About Rome Traveller

What this site is

Eighteen sights in Rome, one page each, and eleven sections on how the city works: arriving at two airports and two great stations, getting around by Metro, tram, bus and on foot, reading the twenty-two numbered rioni, the separate state of Vatican City, the seasons, what to eat, where to stay, what to book ahead, routes for one to five days, and the day trips beyond the ring road. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how to visit it, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a legend rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the monument or the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What Rome means here

This site keeps to the city of Rome: the twenty-two rioni of the historic center, most of them inside the Aurelian Walls, and the few great sights just beyond them, such as the Borghese Gallery and the Appian Way. Ostia Antica, Tivoli, the Castelli Romani, Orvieto and Cerveteri are close and much visited, but they lie outside the city, and they appear on the day trips page rather than as sights of Rome.

Vatican City is treated as what it is: a separate state beside Rome, not part of Rome and not part of Italy. St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museums carry Vatican City in place of a rione, and the Vatican's own rules for dress, bags and photography are set out on its page.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Practical rules, such as which sights sell named tickets and which turn away large bags, are checked against the monuments' own websites; where an official site could not be read, the page says so and sends you to check it yourself. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or leaves the number out.

Rome Traveller is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled Rome show another town of the same name, a Colosseum or a Pantheon elsewhere in the world, or a copy in a museum, so each one is checked before it is used.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a sight carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission.

This site does not sell anything, take bookings or reservations, handle payments or hold tickets or rooms. Any booking you make through a link on it is a contract between you and that travel company, under its terms; this site is not a party to it and has no responsibility for it.