A curated introduction to the city. The Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona, the Spanish Steps — all the must-see sights, but done the right way. We move through the historic center at an unhurried pace, slipping into silent churches hiding forgotten masterpieces, pausing for the right espresso, and following stories most visitors never hear.

What the light in the Pantheon was actually designed to do. What Bernini and Borromini were really fighting about in Piazza Navona. Why the Spanish Steps have nothing Spanish about them , and what the Trevi Fountain actually means, beyond the coins.

Small details begin to connect. And the city starts to make sense in a way it didn't before. (Priority entrance to the Pantheon included)

For five centuries, this was the center of the known world. Walk into the Colosseum and forget what the movies taught you — gladiators were professional athletes, celebrities of their age, performing in a precisely calculated machine of political theatre. Cross into the Forum, where every monument and inscription was propaganda carved in marble. Climb to the Palatine Hill, where emporor Domitian built the largest palace in the ancient world and demanded to be called dominus et deus, lord and god. The view from the top hasn't changed. The ambition behind it is still staggering.

(Priority entrance to all sites included).

The most ambitious art project in history — commissioned by popes who believed beauty was the most powerful theologic argument of all.

We move through the Vatican Museums not as a sequence of galleries, but as a single narrative: from ancient sculpture collected as symbols of authority, to Renaissance masterpieces that express faith through beauty. Then comes the Sistine Chapel — painted by a sculptor who never wanted the commission, on a ceiling he had to invent a new technique to reach, in four years that nearly broke him. The same room where, to this day, cardinals lock themselves in to elect the next pope.. We end in St. Peter's Basilica, where Michelangelo, Bernini, and Raphael converge in the same space, were power, spectacle and faith became one. Priority entry to all sites included.

Locals call Rome a lasagna — a city built in layers. Inside San Clemente, we descend through all of them: from a 12th-century basilica to an early Christian church, and deeper still into a 1st-century Roman house, where an underground stream still runs in the dark and pagan cult rituals were once performed.

We resurface near the Colosseum, walk through the park on the Oppian Hill, and end with Michelangelo's Moses — not in a museum, but in a quiet church almost always to ourselves. A single block of marble that seems to breathe. By the time we're done, Rome feels different: not a city that replaced what came before — but one that never quite let it go.

The Doria Pamphilj Gallery isn't a museum. It's been a noble family's private home for 400 years — and the family still lives here. You'll know because their Teslas are parked in the lobby.

The rooms, hung floor to ceiling with Caravaggios and a magnificent Velázquez, unchanged for centuries, feel exactly like what they are: a home where masterpieces are part of everyday life — where a 17th-century cardinal's portrait hangs opposite a doorway someone walked through this morning. That collision of the ancient and the utterly alive is what makes this place unlike anywhere else in Rome.

We love it so much we wrote about it for Lonely Planet, and we keep coming back.

Two of Rome's oldest neighborhoods, two thousand years of stories — and some of the best street food in the city. In the Jewish Ghetto, small brass plaques set into the cobblestones mark the homes of Roman Jews deported during WWII — one of Europe's most quietly devastating memorials, side by side to ancient roman ruins bearing the memory of the oldest jewish community of Europe. Cross the river into Trastevere — once Rome's neighborhood of outsiders, traders, and migrants — and the city shifts: medieval churches with golden mosaics glowing after a thousand years, cobblestoned streets, a alower rhythm. Along the way, stop for a Roman grattachecca — shaved ice piled with fresh fruit syrup — or supplì, fried rice ball still hot from the paper

The most beautiful art collection in Rome.

Tucked inside an elegant villa surrounded by acres of parkland just outside the city walls, the Borghese Gallery holds the greatest concentration of Caravaggio in existence, alongside Bernini's most breathtaking sculptures and the giants of the Renaissance, all perfectly preserved in the very rooms they were made for.

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Popes, cardinals, and princes commissioned these masterpieces with a single ambition: to seduce, impress, and dominate. Beauty as propaganda. Art as politics. And the stories behind the works, of rivalry, vanity, genius, and ruthless ambition, are every bit as dramatic as the paintings themselves.

The world's oldest public museums — set in a square Michelangelo himself designed.

Rome has grander museums and more famous ones. But none quite like this: a hilltop collection that was already centuries old when the Louvre opened its doors, holding emperors in marble so lifelike they seem mid-sentence, ancient gods, and mosaics that have outlasted every civilization that tried to replace them. 

We end on a terrace above the Roman Forum — one of the great views in Rome, never crowded, and entirely unforgettable. The emperors once looked down on this same panorama to remind themselves of their own power. The story hasn't lost any of its force.

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(This tour pairs beautifully with Ancient Rome: Colosseum & Forum for a full-day journey through the ancient city.)

Pompeii gets all the attention. Ostia deserves it just as much — and you'll almost have it to yourself.

Just thirty minutes from the city center, Rome's ancient port lies remarkably intact: streets, temples, bathhouses, apartment blocks, and taverns recalling the 2nd century AD, when this was one of the busiest cities in the Mediterranean.  The extraordinary sensation of walking through a Roman city that actually feels like one.

And that's exactly what makes Ostia different: you walk the same streets the merchants walked, step into the same bathhouses where they gossiped, and read the same slogans still carved on the walls. Ancient Rome stops being a history lesson and becomes something you can touch and feel.

A full-day feast for the sense in Tivoli, a hill town just a short drive away from the city.

An emperor who dreamed of the whole empire — and built it in his backyard: Hadrian's Villa is one of the most ambitious building projects in the ancient world: a sprawling complex of temples, libraries, theaters and baths inspired by the emperor's travels across his empire. A short drive away, the Renaissance fountains of Villa d'Este turn water into pure theatre. The lunch at a local restaurant with views over the countryside the kind of table you don't want to leave. 

Where popes come to breathe — and the views are worth the trip alone.

Perched on the rim of an ancient volcanic crater above Lake Albano, Castel Gandolfo has been the papal summer retreat for four centuries. The gardens are immaculate, the medieval town is unhurried, and the lake below shimmers in a way that makes Rome's traffic feel like another world entirely. Lunch here, with that view, is the kind of afternoon you talk about for years.

Rome is infinitely deep, and the best itineraries are the ones built around you.

We've cycled the Appian Way past ancient tombs and crumbling aqueducts, traced Caravaggio's life street by street, explored Renaissance villas hidden in the hills outside Rome, discovered Rome's thriving street art scene and its world-class contemporary art museums. 

Whatever draws you — a specific artist, a period, a landscape, a passion, or a beloved TV show — we'll build something around it.

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Get in touch and tell us what you're looking for. We'll take it from there.