Unique Things to Do in Rome, Depending on Who You Came With

You already have the Colosseum and the Vatican on the list. This is the other half of the trip — the part people actually talk about afterwards — sorted by whether you are two, a family, or four of you.

Rome rewards the second list. The first one — the monuments — writes itself and you will get through it. The second is what separates a trip you enjoyed from a trip you remember, and it changes completely depending on who is standing next to you.

If there are two of you

The Aventine keyhole, early. Through the door of the Knights of Malta, St Peter’s dome framed inside a keyhole, with a hedge avenue leading to it. By ten there is a line. At seven there is nobody.

The Protestant Cemetery. Keats and Shelley are buried here under umbrella pines, behind the Pyramid. It is the quietest place inside the walls and almost nobody goes.

The Orange Garden at sunset, then down into Trastevere on foot for dinner. Not a secret, but the timing is: get there forty minutes before sunset, not at it.

Drive the city at dawn. Two hours in an open car with the center empty — the Colosseum with nobody in front of it, the Circus Maximus deserted. You drive, there is no guide, and the pictures are of the two of you rather than of a monument. Rome at dawn.

If you came with the children

Centrale Montemartini. Roman statues displayed among the turbines of a 1912 power station. Children who are bored of marble find this one genuinely strange, and it is never crowded.

The Appian Way on a Sunday, when the old road is closed to traffic. Original paving, tombs, open country inside the city, and space to run.

The Aqueduct Park. Vast arches across a field, with no ropes and no ticket. Go in the morning.

The Capuchin Crypt, if your children are the right age for it — chapels decorated with the bones of four thousand friars. They will talk about nothing else for a week.

A practical note: Rome with children is less about what you see and more about not walking them into the ground. Our half-day drives exist largely because of that — the car is yours, and you stop when somebody needs to stop.

If you are four friends, or two couples

This is the group Rome serves worst and best. Worst, because everything priced per person adds up fast. Best, because the good things here are shared things.

Testaccio market at lunchtime, then the Protestant Cemetery and Monte Testaccio, which is a hill made of broken Roman amphorae.

Quartiere Coppedè — four streets of deliberately eccentric 1920s architecture that look like nowhere else in Italy, and that most Romans have never visited.

Garbatella for an evening, which is where you eat well without a single tourist menu.

Take a car between you. This is where the arithmetic turns: our vehicles are priced whole, not per seat, so four of you pay 72.50 € each for two hours instead of 95 € each as a pair. One drives, one navigates, and the other two take the photographs. How it works.

Three things worth skipping

Said plainly, because a list of recommendations with nothing left out is useless.

The Trevi Fountain in the middle of the day. Go at seven in the morning or at midnight; at three in the afternoon you will see the backs of other people’s heads.

Restaurants with photographs of the food outside. Three blocks from any monument the quality doubles and the price halves.

Trying to do the Vatican and the Colosseum on the same day. They are three miles apart with the river in between. You will see two ticket offices.

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 one we run

Four open electric cars with a Seventies line — rope seats, wooden steering wheel — and you drive. No guide on board, no fixed route, a printed roadbook with the stops and the right hour of light for each. The car is yours for the whole drive, up to four people, from 190 € for two hours.

They are quadricycles, which is why they go into the historic center where a rental car needs an annual permit. On the road from 13 March 2027, and dates can be booked now. Book a date.