Two days in Rome buys you the four sights everybody names and very little else, so the decision that matters comes before any booking: do you spend a whole day crossing the city for the Vatican, or do you keep the trip inside a ring you can walk? I do the second thing, with one half-day set aside for the museums, and every hour of that arrangement has held up in both winter and late spring.
Arriving, and the three things to fix in advance
I step onto the platform at Roma Termini at half seven in the morning, which is the useful hour to arrive. The baggage counters are still shut, the espresso bars are already open, and the first metro of the day is running, so there is nothing to do but drop the bag and start walking.
Three reservations are worth making before you leave home, and everything else can stay loose. I have never needed a fourth.
- Take a room inside the ring formed by Termini, Spagna, Navona and the Colosseum. A cheap pensione in that ring means most of the old city is on foot, which is the only reason a two-day plan works at all.
- Book the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine together as one timed entry. Walk-up queues in high season eat an hour you do not have.
- Book the Vatican Museums for the first slot of the morning, then leave the rest of the two days without a ticket in your pocket.
Day one: the ancient core, entirely on foot
Start at the Colosseum and walk uphill through the Roman Forum to the Capitoline Hill, which takes about three hours if you stop reading the reconstruction signs twice. From the top you can see how far the forum spread before the roads closed it in, and that view is worth the climb more than any statue inside the museum below it.
After lunch, cut north-west to the Pantheon. It is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is the only ancient interior in the city where the crowd actually goes quiet when someone points at the hole in the roof. From there it is eight minutes to Piazza Navona, fifteen more to the Trevi Fountain, and a flat walk up to the Spanish Steps.
I do the fountain twice: once in the middle of the afternoon when it is shoulder to shoulder, and once after nine in the evening when the tour groups have gone back to their hotels. The second visit is the one I remember, and it costs nothing but the walk back to the room.
If the feet are finished by seven, the Forum terrace above the Colosseum is the right place to stop. The light goes orange over the arches, the ticket holders have gone, and you get the whole length of the Via Sacra without somebody walking through the frame.
Day two: the Vatican, then the river
Cross the city early. The cheap metro line drops you a short walk from Saint Peter's Square, and the security queue at the basilica is a different animal before nine in the morning. The dome climb is 551 steps in a narrow spiral, and I would do it before the museums rather than after, when your legs still have something left.
The Sistine Chapel is the reason for the museum ticket, and the standard route delivers you into it after an hour and a half of rooms you can walk through faster than the audio guide suggests. Chapel first in your head, galleries on the way, is the wrong order; the galleries are what wear you down, so keep moving through them and save your neck for looking up at the end.
Leave through the side exit if it is open and walk south along the river. Trastevere across the water is where I eat on the second night, and the walk back over the bridge is the calmest ten minutes of the trip.
What I leave out, deliberately
The Capuchin Crypt is genuinely strange and worth an hour, but it sits west of the Vatican and it is the one stop that breaks the walking ring, so it goes only if the weather is bad and you need something indoors. The Spanish Steps I treat as a crossing point rather than a destination, because there is nothing to do there once you have sat down.
- Skip the hop-on bus. Inside the ring the distances are shorter than they look on a map.
- Skip the restaurant with a menu photo board outside any of the three main squares.
- Skip the second museum on day two. Two museums in two days is one too many.
Eating without a reservation
Lunch is a slice and a standing espresso, which in this part of the city costs less than the coffee does at home. Dinner is pasta somewhere off the main square, and my rule is that if the waiter is holding a menu in the street, I keep walking until somebody hands me a paper one at the table.
Getting around
The metro has two useful lines and a third that is rarely working, so I buy a 48-hour pass on the first morning and use it maybe four times. Buses fill the gaps, taxis are for the trip to the airport, and everything inside the ring is faster on foot than it looks.
The one thing to do before you go
Sit down with a map of the old city and draw the ring you intend to walk, then put the three reservations inside it. Everything else in these two days is negotiable, including which square you have dinner in, and that single drawing is what keeps the plan from turning into a commute.