| March 2023 | An unexpected work trip lands me in Rome for a week. I chose to travel over the weekend and use our “official” travel days to explore the city as this is my first visit to Rome. No stranger to clocking a ton of miles while sightseeing, I mapped out a path through the city to see “all the things”. Well, not everything of course, but a decent selection of recommendations from well-travelled friends and local colleagues.

I’m staying in the Piazza del Popolio area (picture above) which puts me at the northern end of my list of sites. The first stop on my self-guided ‘tour di Roma’: Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti (the Spanish Steps). The enormous staircase of 135 steps was completed in 1725. 

One of our team-building activities was a food walking tour of the Campo di Fiori area. This is the cheese and charcuterie sampler at La Bottega Di Campo. I stopped by here on my last day to pick up a local pecorino romano to make cacio e pepe at home. 

Other stops on the tour featured pasta, tiramisu, and of course, gelato.

Fancy team dinner at Felicia. Apparently you need reservations multiple weeks in advance and they only do two seatings each night. The food was excellent and we were pretty well-behaved. 😀

Pantheon – No line to get into this famous site when I arrived at 9:30. Entrance is free and I expected to hit a wall of tourists, but instead the interior was busy but not packed.

My hotel is located near the Vatican – I’ve successfully ventured onto holy sites before, right? St. Peter’s Square, which we always see packed to bursting on the news, was basically empty on a Friday morning.

Jeff had pre-scouted a record store specializing in electronica. At the half way point of my walk there I stopped into T&C Burger Lab. Excellent!

Another 40min of walking had me paralleling an old stone wall for many blocks before arriving at Ultrasuoni – an unassuming little storefront on a street generally absent of store fronts. After a talking to the woman working for a few minutes, she sent me to the listening station with some samples of Italian techno and house artists. Four records were winners and I set off in the direction of my hotel which was, at this point, well over an hour away.

The Colosseum needs no introduction. Even this site wasn’t particularly crowded – mostly school children and a few tour groups. 

Ponte Fabrico is the oldest Roman bridge in Rome still existing in its original state. Completed in 62BC, it spans half the Tiber River from Campus Martius to Tiber Island. 

Bucca Della Serratura Dell’Ordine Di Malta (Knights of Malta) in the Ripa neighborhood. There’s a green door in a parking lot where you can actually take a picture of St. Peter’s Bascillica perfectly framed through a keyhole and a private garden walkway.

Nearby is Giardino degli Aranci, a quiet park space with orange trees, medieval walls and a beautiful view of Rome.

I enjoyed several morning strolls along Via Margutta, notable for its appearance in the 1953 film Roman Holiday.