How Not to Plan Your Visit To Rome

I arrived yesterday from ten days in Italy. And in six years, a lot has changed. If only I knew what those changes were, perhaps my trip would have been complete.

Finally, after six years of not entering an airplane, my husband and I went for ten days to Italy. And as I write these words, English sounds like a bizarre language to me, so read this while picturing an Italian person speaking English with an Italian accent because that’s me right now.

We made a hell of a trip because we tried to see a lot of the country in ten days, which left us exhausted even if it was awesome.

We visited Lake Como, Milan, Le Cinque Terre, La Spezia, Pisa, Florence and Rome.

I will be writing a series of articles about each place in the following days. The dos and don’ts of this trip; how to plan your trip, where to eat and where not to eat, how to book trains and some extra information.

But this introductory article starts with one minor detail about Rome — and in short, about the whole trip — and how much my husband and I have been living perhaps too far away from society.

This trip also made us realize how much the world has changed in Rome and in a post-(still in)-pandemic world.

Booking the Colosseum and Museu Vaticani

This was our last day, and I could have been leaving this to the end. However, this information I find handy to share.

Before we went, I planned the whole trip. We book the flights and the hotels through booking.com, and I also booked the train tickets in trenitallia . They also have an app, and the tickets can be shown on this app.

Because I’m still a bit of an “old school” kind of gal, I printed everything while it was honestly not needed. But I’m always afraid that plan A fails, and I like to have other options, so just to be sure, if I were you, I would print it all over again, just in case your phone runs out of battery.

But the only thing I did not book were the tickets to the Colosseum and to the Vatican, and this is honestly because the last time I was there, the line was not that huge ( it was August), and I had bought a private tour, and I no longer felt the need to do that anymore.

So I decided that once we arrived there, I could simply buy the tickets, wait in line, and go in.

But to our surprise:

THERE ARE NO PHYSICAL TICKETS ANYMORE, NEITHER A TICKET OFFICE WHERE YOU CAN BUY THE TICKETS!

So, this was a shocking surprise.

When we got to the Vatican, a man was informing us that because of the pandemic, everything changed to online, and the ticket offices had been closed everywhere. What once cost 17 euros to enter the Vatican now cost 35 Euros per person, and we had to stand in line for at least two hours.

We gave up.

I had been to the Vatican before, my husband not really, but we would not be one of those people who waste precious time in lines. Sometimes it’s better to give up on things when we were only in Rome for two days.

So the first day, we wandered around Rome. I mean, it’s not bad at all. Along the way I revisited those Roman clichés, Fontana de Trevi, Piazza Navona, Piazza di Spagna…. until we reached the Roman Forum and the Colloseum.

And there, there we went searching for the unexistent ticket offices.

When we arrived there, there was only one wall where you could take a picture of a QR code that would take you to the official website to buy the tickets.

SSo, apparently, these QR codes are everywhere, and I have been living in Middle Ages for the last 2 years.

We went to the hotel after a tiring day. There I went on my mobile trying to buy the damn tickets. The website didn’t work well, and the tickets were only available at a certain time. The website kept crashing and crashing, and I fell asleep with the bitterness of not taking Tiago, my husband, to see the Colosseum — which was his main attraction to visit.

The next day, I tried again, and for some miracle, I could buy the tickets for 2.40 pm.

You get a notice saying you need to be there 15 minutes before your time. These tickets, which cost us 18 euros per person, included the Colosseum and the entrance to the Roman Forum.

Luckily, the ticket allowed us to enter the forum in the morning, which we visited in peace.

We headed towards the exit to “Circo Massimo,” and we had lunch in a restaurant called “Circo Osteria”.

We spent 55,65 euros on a decent meal. We ate focaccia, half a liter of red wine, pasta all amatriciana for me, Tiago ate a steak with french fries, and I drank water. The price was excellent given the food quality, location, and service.

So, at 2 pm, we were in the line to enter the Colosseum. We did it, but it was a miracle.

If you’re going to Rome and want to visit the Vatican and the Colosseum buy the tickets before. Either print them or leave them on your phone.

You can buy the tickets on the following website, the same as the codes above.

If I had booked the Vatican before, I could have skipped that line, and perhaps it would have been cheaper.

So here is my advice regarding the first in this series of articles: book everything in advance before you leave.

Hello, I’m Araci, a female writer from Portugal navigating her thirties. If you have enjoyed this article, maybe you would like to buy me a coffee here https://ko-fi.com/joanaaraci

I write on Medium about politics, culture, pop culture, society, feminism, and womanhood. I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and that it helped you out!

You can also find more about me here:

Are you considering joining Medium for only 5$ a month? If so, consider doing it through my referral link:

Your membership fee directly supports me, Araci Almeida, and other writers you read. This way, you are helping me out while you’ll also get full access to every story on Medium.

Thank you for reading me.