Rome Tour in an Electric Méhari: You Drive

An open Seventies car, the keys in your hands, and a roadbook with the right hours for the light. No guide on board, no convoy, no route you have to follow.

Most tours of Rome carry you. This one you do yourself. The difference is not the vehicle: it is that the day is yours, and you stop where you like for as long as you like.

It is not a golf cart, and it is not a tour bus

Rome has plenty of both, and it should: they carry you, they tell you the story, they cost little. But they are shuttles with a driver, and at the end of the day the photographs have the monument in them, not you.

This is something else. It is an open car with the 1968 shape, hand-woven rope seats and a wooden steering wheel, and you drive it. People who get in are not on an organized tour: they are driving through Rome in a car that turns heads.

You take the car, not a seat

You are not buying a ticket each: you take the whole car, up to four people. For the length of the drive it is your car. If a piazza gets to you, you stay twenty minutes; if you change your mind halfway, you change your route.

It is also why the bill falls instead of rising: four of you costs less per head than two.

The two hours that matter

Our two-hour drives leave at 7:00 a.m. and 4:45 p.m., and those times are not arbitrary. They are the two windows when Rome has the right light and the squares are empty: at sunrise the monumental center is deserted, at golden hour the hills are the finest thing in the city. In the middle of the day, May through September, you sit in the heat along with everyone else.

The drives

Rome at dawn — two hours with the city still empty: Colosseum, Forums, Circus Maximus, the Aventine. 190 € for two, 290 € for four.

La Dolce Vita at sunset — two hours in the golden hour: Via Veneto, Trevi, the Janiculum. 190 € for two, 290 € for four.

The seven hills — all seven in one afternoon. 250 € for two, 370 € for four.

Appian Way and Aqueducts — half a day on the oldest road in Europe. From 250 €.

Castelli Romani — a full day among volcanic lakes and wine towns. From 390 €.

All prices are for the whole car. Dates are booked here.

Where it goes, and where the others cannot

Ours is an electric quadricycle, type approval L7e, and under the City of Rome’s own regulations quadricycles are among the vehicles admitted into the historic center restricted traffic zone, where a car needs an annual permit. Our plates are also registered for the A1 Tridente zone.

And being electric, it parks free in the blue-line bays. On a drive made of stops — and in Rome they all are — that is the difference between stopping where you want and circling for a space.

One thing it cannot do, and we would rather say so first: it is not allowed on motorways or expressways. Our routes never use them.

How it is built

Hand-woven natural rope seats, a wooden steering wheel, pale slatted decking in the marine style, a cream canvas top. Four real seats including the driver. There are four cars, mechanically identical: Gina white, Sophia orange, Claudia green, Anita yellow. You can ask for yours when you book. Photographs and a short video of the interior are here.

How it works

You meet us at via Labicana 123/A, five minutes on foot from the Colosseum. Fifteen minutes together for the controls and the roadbook, then the car is yours. You need a category B license held for at least a year; visitors from outside the European Union also need an International Driving Permit. Free cancellation up to 24 hours before.