Rome - any handy hints or tips welcomed!

bylromarha

We got our Colosseum tickets elsewhere, at a queueless booth at Forum and walked past the long queue at colosseum.

You HAVE to eat Nutella Ice cream!

We were there for 3 full days and found the open top bus ticket a wonderful thing. You can navigate the city quite easily, but open bus tour gave us a great overview.

Climbing the Dome at St Peters is a great experience!

And as wierd as it sounds, Angels and Demons book may be worth a read to get a loose geography of the city!

Have a great time.

sickparrot

Don't buy drinks, snacks etc at the tourist traps, they are ludicrously overpriced. Usually up the side streets there are ordinary shops which sell the same much cheaper.

Clip-joint recruiters in the evenings pretending to be your friend and trying to get you to go to their bar. You'll get fleeced, ignore them.

Fun game: try and spot a car with no dents in it.

Churches, churches, churches, there are hundreds of them and many are much more ornate than anything we have here.

And yes, the water fountains on every corner are perfectly safe to drink, if it's hot, keep topped up.

matchfacts

Wanted to reiterate the taxi problem.

From my memory some cabs start the meter running from a call to book them, so you pay for their journey to you and then your journey to wherever. We needed two taxis from a restaurant to our hotel. There was a rank outside the restaurant and one taxi waiting and another passing which we flagged down. The taxi rank cab cost €8, the flagged down one cost €24 because "we had telephoned him"! The hotel receptionist argued our case for us and after I said I was willing to wait for the police to arrive he agreed to accept €10.