Ten things worth building your days around — and the order to do them in.
Rome rewards the visitor who walks. The distances are short, the taxis are slow, and the best things are the things you find between the things on the list. Book the museums that require booking, get to them at opening, and leave the afternoons unstructured. The evening belongs to Trastevere.
The greatest small museum in the world. Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and Caravaggio's David in the same building. Entry is timed and capped — book at galleriaborghese.beniculturali.it weeks ahead. Two hours, no longer. Go at the last slot.
Almost two thousand years old, still in continuous use. The oculus open to the sky, the proportions exact. Go at 9am before the crowds. Sit on the benches across the piazza after and have a coffee at Tazza d'Oro.
Book the first slot of the day at museivaticani.va, or pay for the after-hours Friday opening, which is the right move. The Raphael Rooms before the Sistine — the order matters. Skip the official guide and bring headphones.
Open only on Saturday mornings. The Great Hall is the room from Roman Holiday, the ceiling is extraordinary, and most days you will share it with thirty people instead of three thousand. Buy tickets at galleriacolonna.it.
Buy the combined ticket with the Colosseum, but go to the Forum first and at opening. Climb the Palatine for the view down over the Forum that everyone photographs from the wrong angle. Bring water. Wear real shoes.
Zaha Hadid's contemporary art museum on the northern edge of the city. The building is the point — fluid concrete ramps that are themselves the exhibition. The shows are uneven; the architecture never is.
An orange grove on the Aventine with the best free view in Rome. Walk up from Circo Massimo, sit on the wall, and look at the city the way it was meant to be looked at. The keyhole at Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta is a hundred metres away.
Classical Roman sculpture displayed inside a decommissioned power station. The juxtaposition of marble emperors against turbines is one of the best museum experiences in Italy and you will mostly have it to yourself.
Start at Piazza Trilussa, walk to Santa Maria in Trastevere for the mosaics, then up the Gianicolo for sunset. No itinerary. Get lost in the back lanes. Eat at Da Enzo or Trattoria Da Cesare al Casaletto. This is the evening.
Rent a bike at the visitor centre at 8am on a Sunday when the road is closed to cars. Stone pines, original Roman paving, tombs in the fields. Forty minutes out and back. The closest thing left in Italy to walking through an antiquity.