Rome's quiet hours
where to be at 7am and 7pm.
The same square can be unbearable at two and close to empty at half past seven. Almost all Rome advice is really timing advice.
Tripsupdated 5 min read
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Krzysztof Golik · CC BY-SA 4.0
There is a version of Rome that is forty people deep around a fountain, and a version that is you, a street sweeper, and a dome going pink. They are the same place about eleven hours apart, and the only thing standing between them is an alarm.
07:00 — the hour nobody uses
The centre genuinely empties out before eight. Walk the lanes west of Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere, which after dark is one of the busiest drinking districts in Italy and at seven in the morning is somebody sweeping a step.
Then the Pantheon on opening. A nineteen-hundred-year-old concrete dome with a hole in the top is a different building with thirty people in it than with three hundred, and the light coming down through the oculus is the entire point.
The oculus, nineteen centuries on. Wilfredor · CC0
19:00 — go uphill
The Janiculum is not one of the seven hills, which is why it is missing from most itineraries, and it has the best view in the city. Walk up through Trastevere in the hour before sunset, stay for the light, and come back down into Trastevere exactly as the restaurants are filling.
Most advice about Rome is advice about what time to arrive, wearing a disguise.
If you only have the middle of the day, spend it somewhere large enough to absorb a crowd. The Borghese gardens are eighty hectares of umbrella pines and will swallow any number of people.
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