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Nothing makes you feel like a blip in time quite like a stay in the Eternal City of Rome. There’s a feeling of smallness when you wander Rome’s cobblestone streets and stumble upon the remains of its ancient, civilisation-building past. But it’s not just its history that has travellers returning to Rome, it’s the city’s next-gen trattorias boldly reimagining Italian flavours and the luxury hotels that continue to tell stories fit for cinema screens. So when it comes to things to do in Rome, there truly is something for everyone.
After all, the Romans have been eating, drinking, creating and hosting for centuries, creating a rich history and culture that makes it one of the best places to stay, indulge and observe. In fact, the city’s official tourism body, Turismo Roma, reported a record number of tourists in 2024, with 51.4 million presences and 22.2 million arrivals. And the Roman Catholic Great Jubilee is expected to attract 32 million visitors alone in 2025, according to Reuters.
But whatever your reasons are for visiting, it helps to plan ahead to make sure you get to see, do and taste everything you want. So, to help you soak up the atmosphere, here’s our guide to Rome for travel in 2025.
Rome starts every morning as it means to go on, with decadence. All the Italian cities have their own signature breakfast pastry, and in Rome we have the maritozzo, romantically named after marito (husband), an oval brioche bun oozing with fresh cream. You’ll find it at plenty of pasticceria in the city, as well as cafes and other eateries, with some highly-regarded venues including Il Maritozzo Rosso and Bar Pasticceria Romoli.
After breakfast, you can wander around the ivy-strewn piazzas of Regola, where double-Michelin-starred restaurants like Il Pagliaccio sit an arancini’s throw away from elevated street-food joints like Supplizio. Or explore the Nuovo Mercato di Testaccio, a glass-roofed food market, where you’ll also find hundreds of top-drawer food vendors, including Casa Manco, which many Romans swear is the best pizza-by-the-slice joint in Roma. This family-run pizzeria is famed for its 100-hours-leavened dough.
But for the main course, these restaurants showcase some of the best that Rome has to offer.
A contemporary take on a traditional Roman trattoria and with two Michelin chefs at the helm, Retrobottega is a communal eating project with a strong focus on locally sourced ingredients. Moody, minimal and open-plan (with an exposed kitchen and chef’s counter), the aesthetic of Retrobottega exudes a novel coolness.
“Food is the drug” declares the restaurant’s website, the tasting menu giving full flight to the intoxication of Giuseppe Lo Iudice and Alessandro Miocchi’s work. Think tortellini with broccoli, pecorino and marjoram or ‘nduja risotto with bay leaf, parmigiano and vinegar. Expect innovation, seasonality and produce from the restaurant’s own garden and from the chefs’ routine foraging expeditions.
This family-run delicatessen-cum-ristorante began with humble yet important origins: as a bakery established to sell bread at affordable prices via an edict from the Pope in the 1800s. Today, Salumeria Roscioli is still run by the Roscioli family and is a staple dining spot that serves up cured meats, cockerel in cacciatore and arguably the best carbonara you’ll ever eat.
Select your tipple from one of the almost 3000 bottles of wine that line the restaurant’s brick walls. Feast your eyes on the 300 cheeses whose individual smells waft from the delicatessen cabinet. Located in Rome’s historical district and just a few cobblestone streets away from one of the city’s best food markets, Campo di Fiori, the Roscioli family’s treasure trove of authentic Italian food is a place that fills both heart and belly.
In her orange-walled trattoria in a San Giovanni piazza, renowned chef Sarah Cicolini retrieves and updates traditional recipes with a pure and holistic approach to food. In San Palato’s warm and unpretentiously cool dining room, a small window allows diners to peer into Cicolini’s considered kitchen. With a chalkboard menu in conversation with the seasons, you may find dishes of veal coppa with Jerusalem artichoke, apples and mustard and a yellow yolky carbonara that has locals coming back.
This hole-in-the-wall fried fish joint sits on a mini piazza within the cobblestoned Regola neighbourhood, just off the River Tiber. Stepping into Dar Filettaro a Santa Barbara is like stepping back in time, and into a familial operation where orders are shouted between staff, down the length of the restaurant. Known for the flakiest, most buttery fried fish around, it also has delightful salads and the tastiest homemade anchovies.
Accompany your order with a beer pulled from one of the old-school, wall-mounted beer taps or a glass of house red. Otherwise, walk straight through the restaurant and into the kitchen where you’ll be handed cod in a paper cone for takeaway.
Trattoria da Danilo is as traditional as trattorias come, with spectacular pasta and surly service to match. The carbonara (made the Roman way, with egg yolks instead of cream) and cacio e pepe are the classic dishes on the menu.
An elevated Italian tasting menu is served with fanfare at Zia, a much-loved Trastevere restaurant run by a husband-and-wife team. Dishes include mutton tartare, hare served with beetroot and juniper and black cardamom rice pudding.
My Roman friends told me that eating well in Rome requires two things: 1. Don’t take rude waiters personally; they simply don’t see “pretending to like you” as part of the job, they’re too busy serving you exceptional food. 2. Do what you’re told. You will be issued strict instructions about where to eat, drink and sleep by Romans, and it’s best if you just obey these pleasure-seeking big-hitters.
– Anna Hart, Gourmet Traveller contributor and travel columnist
Looking for a place to lose track of time? Tucked away in a cobblestone street near Piazza Navona, with ample outdoor seating, is Bar Del Fico. Simple, approachable and with a youthful spirit, this is the place to sip a stiff Negroni while you watch the world go by.
Sipping wines in a small, dark enoteca is a Roman must. With only a handful of tables inside and mostly natural wines from small producers on offer, it’s likely you’ll have to put your name on a list to get into Enoteca il Piccolo but it’s well worth the wait.
Any Roman best bars list would be amiss without this well-known cocktail bar in Rome’s Monti neighbourhood, just a short distance from the Colosseum and city centre. Stepping into this bar feels like entering a retro-futuristic film set; decked out in neon lights and installation art with loud tunes and a trendy crowd. Drink Kong is helmed by mixologist and self-described “instinctive” bartender, Patrick Pistolesi, whose innovative cocktails don’t disappoint.
In a luxury hotel bar that overlooks the Spanish Steps, legend has it Princess Diana had the best Bellini she’d ever tasted. It’s unsurprising considering Hassler Bar’s long-standing reputation and attentive service. Sip on signature cocktails, such as the Summer in Palm Court (gin, limoncello, St. Germain, elderflower syrup, lime and soda), while you settle into the bar’s 1940s elegance of dark wood, chandeliers and red carpet.
Wandering the most famous food market in Rome is both an aesthetic and satiating feast. Campo de’ Fiori, which translates to “field of flowers”, boasts fresh flowers, vibrant fresh produce and some of the region’s finest cured meats and cheeses. This is a place where time is lost in the most satisfying of ways. Spend hours grazing then prop yourself up at one of the fringe bars for some excellent people watching.
Once a 17th-century estate to the aristocratic Borghese family, this 80-hectare, palatial block of land is all meadows, pristine gardens, grassy fields and romance. Stroll, picnic, hire a bike and take your time here. The Borghese gallery, which is housed in the Villa Borghese, a mansion located in an eastern corner of the park, holds seminal artworks from Raphael, Titian and Caravaggio. While simply watching the park may be a form of cinema, a little-known secret is that the park also holds one of the world’s smallest theatres, Cinema dei Piccoli. With just 63 seats in a green chalet-style structure, this mini cinema regularly screens films.
If you’re looking for things to do beyond the big-ticket landmarks, then this contemporary art museum is somewhere you could spend hours exploring. Designed by Iraqi-British artist Zaha Hadid, the maze-like structure is a feat of architecture itself, so much so that there’s no one way to view the museum, but many different routes. The museum features boundary-pushing works across art, fashion, film, design and architecture, such as the recent multimedia work by Riccardo Boccuzzi that sees Dante’s Inferno through the eyes of AI.
Rome is a famously walkable capital, and many of major attractions are within walking distance from one another, such as the Colosseum, Roman Forum, Pantheon, Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps. In fact, walking to these five places as directly as possible covers a distance of about 3.1km. How long it takes you, though, depends on what other wonders of the city catch your attention along the way.
So if you only have a day, there’s arguably a better way to get around: Vespa.
“In Rome, anyone on a Vespa is treated like an emperor in the traffic pecking order,” Scooteroma tour guide Michele Bartolini told Gourmet Traveller when we visited a few years ago. “We’re untouchable, superior to cars and bicycles and pedestrians.”
The result of 3000 years of emperors and architects and popes and engineers furiously trying to outdo each other, Rome’s cityscape is breathtaking to ride through. Immediately recognisable landmarks like the Colosseum, Roman Forum and Pantheon testify to the city’s golden age as “caput mundi” (capital of the world), with a population of more than a million inhabitants in the 1st century CE. No other city in Western Eurasia reached this population again before the 19th century.
Across the Tiber River, St Peter’s Basilica looms above the Vatican, a testament as much to the ambition and arrogance of Rome’s Renaissance popes as to the genius of Rome’s architects. Equally impressive is the terracotta maze of Testaccio, a working-class neighbourhood that is now home to the city’s most innovative restaurants and food vendors.
But Rome’s bigness was never really about size. Rome was, and is, about big ideas.
Paloma Worley is an occasional contributor to Gourmet Traveller, bringing her knowledge of Italy and beyond to the brand’s travel pages.
Born in Belfast to globe-trotting activist parents, Anna Hart’s journalism career began nearly two decades ago in London, as a junior reporter at FHM magazine, where she could be covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans one week, and interviewing Stevie Wonder at The Savoy Hotel the next. She rose through the ranks of features editor at Grazia and deputy editor at Condé Nast Brides before going freelance to focus fully on international food, culture and travel journalism, for titles including The New York Times, National Geographic, GQ, The Guardian and The Economist. She joined the Gourmet Traveller team as its roving travel columnist in late 2019 and still shivers with excitement to have a column previously held by one of her journalism idols, AA Gill. With an eye for a trend and a fiercely international outlook, she has lived and worked in Singapore, New Zealand, California and Spain, and continues to find other countries to call home. A multi-platform journalist, Anna has co-directed an award-winning short documentary, co-presented a Discovery Channel food and travel show, and written a best-selling travel memoir, Departures; she is currently working on her second travel book.
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