Holiday in Rome - Logistics

View of St. Peter's Basilica from the Tiber River

Scott and I just returned from one of the best vacations we've ever had.  We spent 13 days in Italy (includes travel days), and it was nearly perfect. I've pulled together some of my notes and details in hopes that the information will help someone else plan a vacation to my favorite city on the planet, Rome.

That's me in the center at The Pantheon

Rome is not for everyone. When we told people we were going to Rome there were two responses - I love Rome! or I hate Rome! Rome is old, gritty, tough, and blue collar in many ways. Florence, on the other hand, is pretty, delicate, graceful and many would say more sophisticated. There are many things I love about Rome, but one of the top reasons is that you can have a blast in Rome and see a ton of things for next to nothing -- The Pantheon? Free. Trevi Fountain? Free. Spanish Steps? Free. Piazza Navona? Free. St. Peter's? Free. The whole city is a museum! But, of course, you'll want to see more than that, and I'm happy to tell you how we did it.

Ready to go!

FLIGHTS
We flew direct, round trip from ATL to FCO (Leonardo da Vinci / Fumiciano) via Delta. It's a long flight - 9 hours there and 11 hours back. We departed around 6pm and arrived in Rome the next day around 9:30 a.m. Our hotel offered a car service for about the same cost as a taxi, so when we arrived, we met our driver, jumped in the car and we were off. The airport is about 20 minutes from Rome's Centro Storico.

PACKING
We each squeezed everything into one rollerboard and one backpack. We brought a few extras, which made the trip a little nicer - Bose headphones, Mac Pro and a Canon DSLR camera with a 50mm and 10-22 mm lens. Packing cubes are a game changer! You can repack during the trip and sort things by clean/dirty. Packing cubes also condense space so you can pack more. We also brought along our Marpac Rohm white noise sound machine, which I cannot live without.

HOTELS
We chose to stay at the Albergo del Senato in Rome, which is right next door to The Pantheon.

If you zoom in on this photo, you'll see a balcony on the 3rd level with people on it. Not our room. Our room was on the 6th floor, center window with balcony. There is a rooftop terrace that serves drinks when the weather is warmer. The weather was perfect when we were there so the terrace was open but without service.

View of the Pantheon from our room

When we go back to Rome, I would not consider staying anywhere else. Why?

1. Location, location, location. You are within walking distance to everything. We walked everywhere with a few exceptions. Most of the top sites are within a 15 minute walk.

2. Great restaurants, shops and bars are right outside your front door. I wouldn't advise eating at the spots around the edge of the piazza because it's pretty basic and touristy, but there is one exception and that's Antica Salumeria, which I'll talk about later.

3. If you get lost or need to give directions to your hotel, all you have to do is follow the signs all over the city to The Pantheon. How easy is that?

4. The rooms are beautifully appointed and you'll feel like you're in Rome.

5. Complimentary breakfast every morning. It's not the best breakfast in Rome, but here's the deal - breakfast is not a big deal/not very good in Rome. Lunch and dinner are big, breakfast is not.

6. If you want a great cup of coffee, Tazza d'Oro is right next door and they claim to make the best coffee in the world, or at least in Rome. Romans will tell you it's a Mexican cup of coffee, not Italian. Nevertheless, it's an excellent cup of joe. I'll have another post about food and drinks coming soon.

7. The Front Desk staff at Senato is amazing. They are friendly, helpful, pleasant and gracious. They are completely at your service. At Senato they ask all guests to leave their room key with the staff before you leave for the day. They say it's for security reasons, and as you might expect, with such close proximity to a major free public tourist attraction, they have to be careful about who goes in and out of their hotel. And they take it very seriously. But, the upside is that now staff and guests have daily interaction. How was your day? What did you do? Do you need help? Do you need dinner reservations? Etc. We learned so much from them! They even taught us key Italian phrases and words. It was awesome.

8. Michele (pronounced Michael), the bartender, is a doll. The bar only serves hotel guests, and it's a fairly small hotel, so you have personal bar service beginning each night at 5:30 PM. Michele makes a mean Negroni and serves complimentary snacks. He's been at the hotel for 13+ years. He's an institution in his own right. He brought us lemons from his own garden! And since Scott and I are cocktail enthusiasts, we looked forward to going downstairs every night around 6:30 for our Negronis and chats with Michael. It was one of the highlights of our trip.

Michele and Scott behind the bar of Albergo del Senato

9. There were live performances outside every day. Musicians/Performers crank up around 10 a.m. and wrap up around 8 or 9 p.m. I think the hotel would prefer they not perform at all, but from what we understand, this is a mafia run thing. (Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but we heard it repeatedly.) Some of the songs we loved, and some we began to loathe. If I heard "House of the Rising Sun" one more time I thought I might scream, but ..... when they play the theme from The Godfather on trumpet, you'll melt. See videos on my Instagram account. Our daily routine was to get up, grab a croissant and coffee downstairs, run around for the day, come back around 3, open the balcony doors, listen to whatever performance was happening, nap/relax, freshen up, go downstair for Negronis with Michele, then out for dinner. Rinse and repeat. I could do it every day for the rest of my life :) Oh, and bells ring on the hour! Bliss!

If you're not sold on Senato and want to look elsewhere I recommend researching on TripAdvisor, then go to Instagram and do a location search on the hotel you're researching. Look at the posts from that location so you can see the most recent pics and read what guests have to say. That's your back up/insurance.

We spent 5 nights at Senato, then took a train from Rome to Florence for 2 nights. In Florence we stayed at Hotel Brunelleschi. This is also a beautiful hotel and gets consistently high reviews.

We *thought* we'd reserved a room with a view of Il Duomo, but when we arrived and pulled back the curtains we saw nothing but a wall. You have to be REALLY careful when selecting your room because if you read the fine print under "Deluxe Rooms" it says they *may* have views of Il Duomo. If you have any doubts about the room you've reserved, I encourage you to email the hotel and confirm everything.

We discussed the problem with the front desk staff, and they told us there was nothing they could do because the hotel was completely booked that night. They offered to upgrade us the next night to a 1 bedroom suite, which was nice, but again, no view.

Il Duomo in Firenze

We spent 3 days and 2 nights in Florence, and because Scott and I have both been to Florence before, we felt like that was the right amount of time. The crowds in Florence were almost unbearable, and the lines to get in Il Duomo went for blocks. I would imagine people waited more than an hour to go inside. Thankfully, we've seen it before and did not feel the need to go back. Plus, there are a LOT of other things you can do in Florence where there are no lines and no crowds and the art is just as magnificent. Spoiler alert ----> There's more than one David in Florence :) (more on that later)

Rome Termini Train Station

Trains are the preferred method of travel in Europe. They're inexpensive, plentiful and easy to navigate. Most of the signs and announcements are now in Italian and English, and most of the train staff speaks enough English to help tourists. We had one small snafu -- we were on our way to visit friends for New Year's Eve and planned for them to pick us up at the Castiglione del Lago train station in Umbria. We were the only people in our train car, and when the train stopped we waited for the doors to open, but they never did. We completely freaked out. There are red handles on the train doors, and you know, we've been trained in the United States to NOT pull on red handles, but you are most definitely supposed to pull on those red handles if you want to open the doors!! Luckily, we were only one short stop away, and our friends were able to pick us up at the next station in Chiusi. We apologized profusely, and thankfully, they were understanding - apparently this happens a lot!

We took the train from Florence back to Rome (approximately 90 minutes) and this time we stayed at Relais Trevi 95. There are a lot of hotels in Rome with the name Trevi in it, and they all look similar, so this can make things a little confusing. The staff at Relais Trevi 95 is very nice and they definitely offered the best breakfast we had in Rome / Florence - cooked to order eggs any way you like, excellent cappucini (the plural of cappucino), all set on a really pretty outdoor terrace. The rooms, however, are not the greatest. You definitely do not feel like you're in Italy, as the furnishings are more contemporary and sparse. While the guest rooms are spacious, the bathrooms are TEENSY tiny. No counter space at all. This led to our second snafu -- I accidentally put in Scott's contact lenses!!! I kept thinking something was wrong, so I dumped them out and opened up new lenses. When Scott walked into the bathroom to put in his lenses he realized his were missing. We've been together 10 years and this is the first time this has happened. Thankfully, he had a spare pair, too, so crisis averted!

Pope Francis on Christmas Day

MONEY
You'll use the Euro in Italy, and you can withdraw Euros from almost any ATM (Bancomat) in Rome and Florence. Most places accept Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. Don't be surprised if the server at a restaurant brings a mini credit card machine to your table once you've asked for "il conto" (the bill). That's very common. It seems they prefer to have the bill paid by credit card and tips in Euros, so you'll always want to have some cash on hand.

CELLPHONES
Talk to your cellphone service provider about a plan while you are in Italy. Scott and I chose different options. He opted for the $10 day plan. I paid $60 for 10 days and only used data when I was in a free WIFI spot. Scott was able to pull up Google Maps wherever we were so we always knew where we were. I'm old school and like a walking map :). These days cellphones take really nice photographs, so you don't need a fancy camera. I took mine because I enjoy photography.

ITINERARY
Here's a day by day itinerary of our trip. We like to alternate heavy/busy days with easy days, and we try not to schedule anything on our last day so that we a) feel rested and b) have one last chance to see or do something we may have missed. If you're only going to Rome, I think 7 days would be sufficient.

December 21: ATL to FCO
December 22: Arrive in Rome, hotel check-in, get oriented. Since I'd been to Rome before, I was able to guide Scott around and show him the major sites.
December 23: Vatican Museum Tour in the morning with Private Tours of Rome, open afternoon
December 24: open morning, San Giovanni en Laterano and The Colosseum in the afternoon, Midnight Mass at the Pantheon for Christmas Eve
December 25: St. Peter's at noon for the Pope's Christmas Message "Urbi et Orbi", free afternoon
December 26: Musei Capitolini (allow 3-4 hours, we also had lunch here)
December 27: Rome to Florence by train (90 minutes), Accademia Gallery to see David at 3PM (1-2 hours)
December 28: Uffizi Museum (2-3 hours) at 10 AM, free afternoon
December 29: Bargello Museum (2 hours), Florence to Rome by train
December 30: Borghese Gallery and Gardens at 11 AM, free afternoon
December 31: Train from Rome to Chiusi / Gioiella for New Year's Eve with friends
January 1: Train from Chiusi to Rome for one last day in Rome
January 2: FCO to ATL via Delta, 11:30 AM, arrived 5:15 PM in Atlanta

We did our best to stay awake once we got to Rome and follow the time zone, but most afternoons we were exhausted and took ~ 30 minute naps. We walked a LOT and stood in line, unfortunately, a LOT. We took an Uber several times in Rome because it rained a little and because we were tired. Uber is not in Florence, so you'll have to taxi from the train station to the city center. You can walk, but ugggh, with luggage and cobblestones and really tiny sidewalks, it would not be fun. Rome also has a Metro which is easy to navigate.

My next post will be about what to see and do while you're in Rome and Florence and how to schedule it. If you have questions about anything, don't hesitate to ask!

View of Rome from the Terrazza Cafe at Musei Capitolini