Hotels in Rome

Introduction

This is a web page made up of my notes from researching hotels in Rome for a trip in the spring of 2007. The hotels below are 2 to 3 star hotels. I will be traveling alone, so my concentration is on camera singola (a single room). My preference is also for small hotels. Ideally I'd also like to find a hotel that has an in-room high speed (DSL) Internet connection. This allows me to down load my pictures to bearcave.com and avoid the security risks of an Internet cafe. I only consider booking hotels where I can book directly through the hotel. I'm nervous about booking through the booking services, since they add an extra layer where things might go wrong. Also they are taking a cut of the money, so the hotel may not give you the best room for the money you're spending. All of the hotels here have web pages and, even for promising hotels, I skipped them if they do not have Web pages and email contact information.

Rome is a remarkably expensive city. It is said that Venice is one of Italy's most expensive cities, but Rome seems to be more expensive. It is difficult to find a nice single room for much less than € 140.

The references I have used are:

I also check the reviews on TripAdvisor, which I have found to be an invaluable resource.

I have listed the areas of Rome in order of what I consider desirable (without having visited Rome yet). The most desirable areas are listed near the top of the web page, the least desirable toward the bottom of the page.

The Centro Storico (Piazza Navona and the Pantheon)

The Rough Guide to Rome, Second Edition, describes this area as (UK spelling is theirs):

The real heart of Rome is the centro storico or "historic centre", which makes up the grater part of the roughly triangular knob of land that bulges into a bend in the Tiber, above Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and to the west of Via del Corso, Rome's main street. This area, known in ancient Roman times as the Campus Martinus, was outside the ancient city centre, a low-lying area that was mostly given over to barracks and sporting arenas, together with several temples, including the Pantheon. Later it became the heart of the Renaissance city, and nowadays it's the part of the town that is densest in interest, an unruly knot of narrow streets and alleys that holds some of the best of Rome's classical and Baroque heritage and it's most vivacious street - and nightlife. It's here that most people find the Rome they have been looking for - the Rome of small crumbling piazzas, Renaissance churches and fountains, blind alleys and streets humming with scooters and foot-traffic. Whichever direction you wander in there's something to see; indeed it's part of the appeal of the centre of Rome that even the most aimless ambling leads you past some breathlessly beautiful and historic spots.

Ancient Rome (the Colosseum and the Forum)

The Rough Guide to Rome, Second Edition, describes the Ancient Rome area as:

Ancient Rome is the area that stretches south east from the Capitoline Hill. It's a reasonably traffic-free, and self-contained, part of the city. But it wasn't always like this: Mussolini ploughed Via dei Fori Imperiali through here in the 1930s with the idea of turning it into one massive archeological park...

Ancient Rome includes the Colosseum, the Imperial Forums, the Palantine Hill and the Celian Hill.

Campo de' Fiori

The Campo de' Fiori area is part of Rome's ancient city. The Campo de' Fiori area lies between the Corso Vittorio Emanuel II (the huge white marble monument to King Vittorio Emanuel II, who was the king during Italian unification in 1860) and the Tiber River. The Rough Guide to Rome, Second Edition, gives this description for the Campo de' Fiori area:

It's a very similar neighbourhood [to Rome's Centro Storico area], the same cramped, wanderable streets opening out onto small squares flanked by churches, although it's more of a working quarter = less monumental, with more functional buildings and shops, as evidenced by it's main focus, Campo de' Fiori, whose fruit and veg stalls and rough-and-ready bars form a marked contrast to the pavement artists and sleek cafes of Piazza Navona. Across the river to the west lies the Vatican and to the south Trastevere... To the east it merges into the gloomy streets and scrabbly Roman ruins of the Old Jewish Ghetto, a small but atmospheric neighbourhood that nuzzles up close to the city's giant central synagogue, while just north of here lies the major traffic intersection and ancient Roman site of Largo di Torre Argentina.
[emphasis in the original]

Vatican

Tridente: Piazza di Spagna (the Spanish Steps)

Again, quoting the Rough Guide to Rome, Second Edition's description of this area (note that this is a UK publication and follows British spelling):

The northern part of Rome's city centre is sometimes known as Tridente due to the trident shape of the roads leading down from the apex of Piazza del Popolo - Via del Corso in the centre, Via di Ripetta on the left and Via del Bubuino on the right. The area around Piazza di Spagna especially is traveler's Rome, historically the artistic quarter of the capital, for which eighteenth - and nineteenth - century Grand Tourists would make in search of the colourful, exotic city. This part of the city has also always had an artistic feel: Keats and Giorgio de Chirico are just two of those who used to live on the Piazza di Spagna; Goethe had lodgings along Via del Corso; and places such as Caffe' Greco and Babington's Tea Rooms were meeting-places of a local artistic and expat community for close on a couple of centuries. Today these institutions have given ground to more latter-day traps for the tourist dollar: American Express and McDonald's have settled into the area, while Via Condotti and around is these days strictly international designer territory, with some of Rome's fanciest stores; and the local residents are more likely to be investment bankers than artists or poets. But the air of a Rome being discovered, even colonized, by foreigners persists, even if most of them hanging out on the Spanish Steps are mostly flying-visit teenagers.

Some comments on TripAdvisor.com noted that the Tridente area has a lot of expensive and not terribly good resturants aimed at tourists. Ironically, some people from the UK commented that meals were just as expensive as they were back in the UK. Apparently they have not noticed that Italy in the era of the euro is at least as expensive as the UK (or the US). This is a district where you are likely to find lots of tourists, as the Rough Guide description suggests. I'm not actually sure why people choose to stay in this area. It sounds like the San Marco area in Venice.

My main web page on Italy

back to home page