Visiting Rome: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

“If the whole world lived in their favorite vacation spots, then the whole world would live in Hawaii and Italy and Cleveland.”

Floyd to Liz, 30 Rock, Season 1, Episode 20 “Cleveland”

That is one of my favorite TV Show quotes ever. What Floyd from 30 Rock is really saying is that everyone loves Italy, right? Well, actually, we didn’t love Italy and we very nearly hated Rome. Rome was the next stop on our month-long tour of Europe, which started in the United Kingdom. (You can check out our UK itinerary and trip information here, here, and here.)

I was particularly looking forward to visiting Italy. After I’d gone to Rome in my 20’s, I thought of it as one of my favorite cities in the world. Now, perhaps because we went during tourist season or because I have different travel tastes, it’s basically a reeking cesspool of humanity with some amazing historic structures and art. Ok, ok, maybe I’m being too harsh here. There are some highly delightful things to do in Rome, but I’m going to take off my rose-colored Italy glasses right now and share with you all of the Roman highlights: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Our Italian Itinerary

This was our Italy itinerary. We didn’t actually bike around Italy like my map shows, we took the train, but this is where we went. We started with five full days in Rome and then got out into the countryside from there.

• Day 1: Colosseum & Roman Forum
• Day 2: The Vatican Museums & Saint Peter’s Basilica
• Day 3: Pompeii
• Day 4: Rome – Ancient Sites
• Day 5: Rome – Recovery
• Day 6: Travel to Cinqueterre (Vernazza)
• Day 7: Hiking in Cinqueterre
• Day 8: Cinqueterre by Train & Sea
• Day 9: Travel to Florence
• Day 10: Duomo & Museums
• Day 11: Florence – Recovery
• Day 12: Siena, San Gimignano, & Pisa
• Day 13: David
• Day 14: Back to Rome
• Day 15: Travel Home!

Let’s start by talking about the highlights, starting with the good stuff and moving down to the bad.

Pompeii

One of my favorite Italian adventures was Pompeii. Seeing Pompeii has been on my bucket list for a really long time and it did not disappoint. You can get down to Pompeii from Rome and back in a day. Typically, you’d drive or take a tour bus and it would take 15 hours or so to take the tour, but we found a tour that took us to Pompeii by high speed train. We got an amazing guided tour of Pompeii for around two hours and then went to a local winery with very good wine and very good food. We were home by 5pm instead of the normal 9 or 10pm for the typical Pompeii tour from Rome.

Pompeii itself was truly amazing! We saw the original streets, bars, residences with beautiful frescoes and mosaic floors, political graffiti, the famous brothel, the forum, an amphitheater, and plaster casts of Pompeiians just as they were discovered. There is a section of Pompeii that just opened up to visitors where you can see some of the most amazing frescoes in the whole town, a bakery complete with intact terracotta ovens, and large wine jars, also completely intact. The whole time you’re touring in the shadows of Mt. Vesuvius, just as the Pompeiians lived. I highly recommend taking a tour through Pompeii with a tour guide as ours added a lot to our visit.

The Food

Italian food is fresh and delicious. Yes, the pizza is the best pizza you’ll ever eat in your life. Yes, they do gelato better than any other ice cream in the world. And, yes, the pasta is also amazing and you can eat at a new restaurant every single night and never get the same dish twice. But, we did get sick of pizza and pasta by the end of our trip. We found an Indian restaurant on our first night in Florence and were relieved to have a little variety.

Our very favorite meals were the ones that we ate in tiny restaurants tucked into narrow streets, far from the throngs of tourists. There was a six table place down the street from our AirBNB with wine racks covering the walls. We had an amazing carbonara there. We also had a wonderful meal in a three-table restaurant in Vernazza (Cinqueterre), where we were scrunched in a corner and had to keep moving to let the waitress by. They had the best seafood linguini I’ll probably ever have in my life.

We got used to having wine with all of our meals and gelato on almost a daily basis. I won’t miss Rome, but I will miss the food.

Colosseum & The Roman Forum

First up on our list of “bad” Italian experiences is seeing the ancient Roman ruins. If you haven’t seen the famous ancient Roman sites yet, go. They themselves are amazing. I adore the Colosseum and Roman Forum. I love standing there and imagining life around 100 AD and I loved learning about ancient Rome.

But, these sites bring new meaning to the word “crowded”, at least during peak tourist season. There are so many tourists that you can’t freely move around. There are so many aggressive salesmen lying to you about their work and just trying to make a sale. Tourists pose everywhere, sometimes for 30-60 minutes trying to get the perfect selfie. No wonder the Italians are sick of us.

You must buy timed tickets ahead of time to most sites and none of the Italian websites are easy to navigate. I ended up just booking tours that came with tickets so I at least had a ticket and a guide. Just trying to see a few sites is hot (in June/July), uncomfortable, and annoying. It’s quite frankly not worth it. I don’t think I ever need to go back.

The Vatican

The Vatican Museums and Saint Peter’s Basilica are equally as crowded. They are beautiful and filled with famous works of art. At times, I loved it, but mostly I felt a bit like I did in the British Museum, where most items have been stolen from other cultures. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much money the Catholic leaders accepted from ordinary Catholics, telling them they could pay to get into heaven, then turning around and building the most ornate buildings in the world. We learned during our Colosseum tour that the Colosseum was once covered in marble. Then, the Vatican (as well as others) gutted the place so they could build St. Peter’s and other structures. I didn’t grow up Catholic and I have no tolerance for the Catholic church’s patriarchal views and other ongoing bullshit. So, visiting the Vatican was both mesmerizing and deeply appalling. No need to visit the Vatican again.

Getting Around

OK, now we’re getting into the “ugly” territory. After traveling around the UK for a couple of weeks, we got used to trains that were clean and ran on time. There seems to be no such thing in Italy. Trains are gross, packed, late, and graffitied. Buses don’t run on time and sometimes skip whole portions of their routes. Not to worry, you can just take a taxi, right?

Wrong. Italy doesn’t not have enough taxi drivers so the drivers they do have will only pick you up if they want to go exactly where you need to go. Especially at the airport. Finding a taxi at 11pm when we arrived was a nightmare. Everyone made up excuses until we found a great driver who needed to get home to our neighborhood. We also had a horrific experience trying to get from the airport to our final night’s hotel on the seaside in a town 25 minutes away. No one would take us. Not taxi drivers, not Uber drivers. No one. So, we spent two hours trying to figure out the bus system and I nearly lost it. If you go to Rome, find a place to stay that you can walk to from the Roma Termini train station. The train between the airport and Termini is great.

Luckily, we stayed in a place in Rome near the Campo d’Fiori, a famous outdoor market within walking distance (30-45 minutes) of the Roman Forum, Termini, and the Vatican. So, most of the time we were in Rome, we didn’t have to fight their public transit system.

Final Thoughts on Rome

And there you have it. My take on Rome: the good, the bad, and the ugly. I highly recommend visiting Italy during the off-season. The heat and the crowds were a major contributing factor to our impression of the country. But I sincerely also suggest you visit another country. So many people rave about Italy and I honestly don’t think it’s worth the hype. If you’re debating between Italy and somewhere else, do yourself a favor and pick somewhere else. Italy will be there for you to see later if you really need to go.