Rome
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Historic Centre Of Rome, Inscribed 1980), Capital Of Italy And Of The Roman Empire, And Roughly Three Thousand Years Of Continuous Building On The Same Hills · Rome, Lazio
Seeded last, and it should have been first. Rome had four monument rows and no row of its own for sixteen batches, which is the same hole Naples was: the Colosseum, the Forum, the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain were all here, so the ring was full and the centre was missing. The city is not a set of sites with streets between them. It is roughly three thousand years of building on the same few hills without ever clearing the previous layer, so a bank has a temple in the basement, a church sits on a mithraeum, and the medieval lanes of the centro storico run through the footprint of a stadium. Walking is the whole method: the historic core is small enough to cross in half an hour and dense enough that nobody does. Add the Vatican, which is a separate country and a separate row, and the Appian Way out past the aqueducts. Three days is a first visit and it will still feel like a sample. A week is a short one, and the city will keep going after you leave whether you finished it or not.
Piazza Venezia, Rome, Lazio, 00186, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED, and the city itself has none: the streets, squares and fountains are public and always open. What has hours are the sites, and two structural facts matter. MANY CHURCHES CLOSE FOR A LONG MIDDAY BREAK, roughly one until four, which strands visitors planning a continuous day. The COLOSSEUM, the BORGHESE GALLERY and now the PANTHEON are all TIMED and should be booked ahead. AUGUST closes a large share of neighbourhood restaurants. Confirm the midday closures.