Amazing place. Review on Rome

We went to Rome over the New year long weekend of 2009-2010. We were lucky that the weather was just right! Rome is full of attractions and you can easily spend even 7 days and still not be finished with it. Hence the most difficult task is to plan your visit - short list the places to see, reaching the places and calulating the time each place takes. This review is more to help in that perspective for a 2 to 3 days traveller than describe the greatness of Rome. There is plenty of information on the internet about the attractions and so I'm not duplicating it here. We had 2.5 days in Rome and I can say we managed to cover most of the popular attractions. You will need a minimum of 2 days or you would not have covered even primary attractions of Rome!

During this time of the year, the Sun rises at 8:00 AM and sets by 4:45 PM. Hence the key for a successful coverage is to be in the first sightseeing place by sunrise. One more key point is to stay close to some metro station. The metro train covers most of the well known visitor spots of Rome. However, it still will mean a lot of walking. Points it does not cover are the Pantheon and the Venezia. Note that buying tickets for the metro first time is also a challenge. Please check on the internet how/where to buy them. Else you will lose upto 1 hour just trying to figure out or may even end-up paying fine for wrong usage.

The most visited attractions are: Collesium, Vatican city (Pope's residence), Vatican museum+Sistine chappel, Roman forum,  Maggoire basilica, Pantheon, spanish steps, Trevi fountain, Venezia, San Giovanni. It is better to visit the fountain at night. It looks amazing with the lighting.

The Collesium and the Roman forum are located next to each other and will need about 5 hours for a decent coverage. The Vatican city, museum and sistine chappel will take 6 to 8 hours depending on the rush. The rest will take about 2 hours each including travel time. Be sure of the OPEN DAYS and TIMINGS to avoid disappointment. It is a bit funny that these world famous attractions are closed 1 day a week...but that is how most of Europe is! Check the internet for the open timings.

Some of the metro stops I remember are:

City center - Termini (this station is huge, being the single point for metro trains, suburb trains, international trains, airport transfer trains and city bus station. One end to other end is easily 1 Km and has 3 levels)

Collesium+Roman Forum - Colosseo - has entry fee (i think 20euro, not sure)

Vatican city - Ottaviano - no entry fee

Vaticam museum+sistine chappel - musei vaticani - has entry fee (i think 16 euro)

Spanish steps - Spagna - no entry fee

Trevi fountain - Barberini - no fee

San Giovanni - San Giovanni - no fee

Maggoire - Cavour or Termini - no fee

Venezia - no metro access (but within 2km walk from collesium) - no fee

Pantheon - no metro access - no fee

The good thing about Rome is that city maps are available free in a lot of places. Locate Termini on the map and navigate yourself from there.

The city is just amazing and cannot be descibed in words. Every part of the city has some ruins and speaks volumes of the history. It offers such diversity that there is no 1 single selling point of the city. The decoration in the churches, the architecture/grandeour/painting/sculptures/ruins all beat one another.  It is a MUST VISIT city of Europe.

For brief info, https://rome.info is a good website

For accommodation, booking.com, hotelclub.com, laterooms.com are good. The rates could be different for the same hotel, same room in different websites. So check for the cheapest.

There are many hop-on-hop-off tour operators (euro 20 for 24 hrs, 30 for 48 hrs) running buses from 9 AM to 6 PM in winter. This could reduce the walking by about 50%. But AVOID Greenline tours. You will spend lot of time just waiting for the bus since they have very low frequency.