Romantic Things to Do in Rome, with the Hour That Makes Them Work

Rome is romantic by accident at any hour and on purpose at two of them. This is what to do at sunrise and at golden hour, and where to go afterwards.

The famous places are famous for a reason and you will go to them. But the Trevi Fountain at three in the afternoon, shoulder to shoulder with four hundred people, is not a romantic evening — it is a line. Everything below is the same city at a different hour.

At sunrise, when the city belongs to you

Rome before eight is a different place. The Colosseum with nobody in front of it. The Circus Maximus empty. Piazza Navona with one man sweeping and the fountains running for no one.

It costs you one early alarm out of a whole vacation, and it is the only way to have the famous places to yourselves. Nothing you book later in the trip will beat it.

The walk nobody else takes

The Clivo di Rocca Savella: a walled brick lane climbing the Aventine, ivy over the top, worn smooth, and almost always empty. It comes out at the Orange Garden, so the view is your reward at the top.

Fifty meters away is the keyhole of the Knights of Malta, where everybody lines. The lane is better and nobody is on it.

Golden hour, which in Rome means high up

The Pincio over Piazza del Popolo, forty minutes before sunset and not at it — the piazza turns gold while the sky still has blue in it.

The Janiculum for the twenty minutes after the sun goes: the whole city below, domes to the horizon, street lights coming on against a sky that has not gone black yet. It is the best thing to look at in Rome and it is free.

Dinner, and the rule that saves it

Walk three streets away from any monument before you sit down. In Rome the gap between the restaurant on the square and the trattoria round the corner is enormous in quality and in price. Trastevere away from the main drag, Monti, Testaccio, or Garbatella if you want an evening with no tourists in it at all.

For an anniversary, or a proposal

Two places, and they are not the obvious ones. The Orange Garden at the Aventine at sunset, which is quiet, framed, and photographs beautifully. And the Janiculum after dark with the city lit below.

If you want it alone, go early rather than late: both are empty at seven in the morning, and the light then is better than at any other hour.

You choose the stops, and they are already on the roadbook

Organized tours sell the coffee or the gelato as an included stop: one of them, at a fixed time, chosen by somebody else. We do the opposite, because you are driving.

The roadbook marks the places worth stopping for alongside the route: the right bakery for early morning, the gelato that is not the one on the square, the bar with the dome in view, the winery on the road out to the Castelli. You go if you feel like it, when you feel like it, and you stay as long as you want.

And if you have a place of your own — a restaurant you booked, a bakery somebody recommended, the spot where you met — tell us when you book and we put it on the route. It costs nothing and it changes the day: that is what you get for not having a guide at the wheel with a schedule to keep.

The two hours we run

An open electric car from the Seventies — rope seats, wooden wheel, cream top — and one of you drives. No guide sitting in the front, no fixed route, a printed roadbook with these stops and the right hour for each.

It leaves at 7:00 a.m. or 4:45 p.m., and those are not arbitrary times: they are the two windows this page is about. The car goes into the historic center, where a rental car needs a permit it cannot get.

And there is the part people do not think about until afterwards. From a tour seat you photograph the monument. From an open car with no pillars and no glass, the photograph has the two of you in it, in Rome, in a car people turn to look at.

190 € for the two of you, two hours, the whole car. On the road from 13 March 2027. Book a date or see how it works.