Rome Travel Aids

I read through about 40 travel guides in preparation for my trip to Rome, and these are the ones I recommend bringing along. The Rick Steve's Rome is available in an ebook edition, which is at this point not a particularly easy medium to navigate in, but then you don't even have to bring the book. This is the book that has a no nonsense approach to the major sites--he has a free podcast for the Colloseum, the Roman Ruins, the Vatican, and the Palladeum, each about 30 minutes and worth listening to at some point, if not actually on the site. There are no restaurant pearls here, so you need to do something different related to eating, but this can be your only sites guide book. He does cover using the Metro and bus system, with enough information that you could do it without additional help, but for extensive bus travel, buying a bus map at a newspaper stand seemed like it would be wise. We couldn't fins an on-line source for this.

The Frommer's 24 Walks in Rome is icing on the cake. An addition to the Rick Steve's. We didn't do many of the actual walks, but I did pick out sites to see from this, and designed my own walks to them--the book has some good restaurant recommendations for the neighborhoods where it leaves you at walks end, and details how to get to and from the walk on public transport. Many of the churches included have famous paintings or sculptures, and as they don't charge admission is a fun budget approach to the treasures of Rome.

The absolute best map we had was the Streetwise Rome map. We have been reasonably happy with this series in other cities (Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Athens to name a few) but we have found that in some cities the scope of the map is too small. Not so here. The map has outstanding readability, which is critical because there are sections of the city where the street names change every block. and each block is marked in that case, which is not true of other maps. It is waterproof, and folds and unfolds easily. You can have it in your hands at all times, which is often where you find you need it.

In terms of food recommendations, the Fodor's guide books are reliable. They do have their rome recommendations on line, and we printed them off and carried them with us. So the actual book is not essential. The other thing I would highly recommend is reading through Frank Bruni's articles on dining in Rome. Before he was the restaurant critic for the New York Times, he was the Rome bureau chief, and he has some excellent choices for where to eat.