Rome in 3 days

How to do Rome in 3 days:

Day 1 - Arrive in Rome, jump on a bus to the main station, find your Hotel down one of the many many side streets in 30 degree heat and get exploring! 

We started off with a wander into the centre of the town for dinner with some sights on the way: 

- the Piazza della Republica 

- San Carlo Quattro Fonanta

- Quirinale

- Fontane Trevi

and Tempio Adriano

Piazza della Republica

Once in the centre of the city, in among all the tiny alleyways, we decided to try and find some dinner. In Rome, as with many other European cities, as soon as you look mildly interested in eating in a restaurant, you will get absolutely bombarded with menus and people trying to sit you down. As I was looking for somewhere offering gluten free food, (in Italy - Ha!) it worked as a pretty good deterrent to get rid of all the restaurant people! It went something like this:
Them: "Ahhh table for two?!" (Imagine the Italian accent and menus being shoved in your face)
Us: "Gluten free?"
Them: "Err no sorry!"
And then they'd move on. Sweet!

The only problem was, as soon as someone said "Yes we do have GF" I got so excited that we just had to eat there! Luckily it was a nice restaurant and I had some lush GF carbonara :D

Fontana di Trevi

Day 2 - Grab yourself a cheap cappuccino and croissant (or just a cappuccino if you're me!), head to the station to attempt to buy your next train ticket and fail, and then head out to see some more sights!
- Santa Maria Maggiore
- St. Pietro in Vincoli
- Colosseum
- Arco di Constantino
- Palatino/Roman Forum

Tiny piece of advice if you are thinking of visiting the Colosseum, Palatino and Roman Forum - book a ticket for all of them in advance! We joined a short queue, which lasted about 10-20 minutes and watched all the poor innocent people queueing for hours and hours who hadn't booked a ticket.

Visiting the ruins was definitely worth it. All the things you learned about in primary school about the Romans suddenly comes to life and you can picture exactly how they would have spent their lives.
Two slightly embarrassing tourist errors we made whilst visiting the Palatino and Roman Forum. Whilst we were walking around the old Palatino on the top of the hill, with a view of most of Rome, I saw a "big ruined building" through some trees and made the mistake of asking what it was... turns out it was the Colosseum. Akward.
Another mistake was searching for ages for the Roman Forum, following signs which were taking us back on ourselves and places we'd been before. After a good half and hour (possibly an hour...) we realised that all that time we had been standing in the Roman Forum. Oops.

In amongst our extreme touristing we managed to fit in some real Italian gelato (very overpriced but YUM!) to keep us refreshed and to stave off hungry. On the way back to the hotel we went via:
- the courtyard of Campideglio
- Ara Coeli steps
- Monumento a Victoria Emanuele

I'd highly recommend trekking up the millions of steps of the Ara Coeli because the view you get of Rome at the top can't really be beaten!

Hiking the steps of the Ara Coeli

Roma

Day 3 - Book your Vatican tickets in advance, queue for 10 minutes instead of 4 hours, and some culture!

One of the hottest days so far! We headed over to the Vatican City for some pretty intense culture. Although it was really cool to have a look round, it was mostly a massive art museum... so it didn't take all that long for Sam and I to get a bit bored of looking at vases and paintings by people we had never heard of! The Sistine Chapel was very cool though, with the guards violently shushing every 20 minutes or so!
Now I wont lie to you, we definitely thought that St Peter's Square and Basilica were part of the Vatican City, as in included in your ticket. How wrong we were! At the end of the walk through the Museums we were a bit disappointed - the square is what we came to see really, aside from the Sistine Chapel. In case anyone else ends up confused like we did, you actually have to walk around the City walls in order to get to the square, but it's so cool!

St Peter's Square and Basilica

After the Vatican we decided to walk back to our hotel across Rome, catching some more sights on the way. We grabbed some (very expensive) lunch and followed the river towards the Palace, stopping to look at a little riverside market and pick up some pretty paintings of Rome to take with us. After another sneaky gelato stop to keep us going (coconut ice cream = best thing ever) we visited the Pantheon, which mysteriously has a huge circular hole in the roof.

By this point I was exhausted and had a headache so we visited our last sight of the day, the Spanish Steps (which we just sat on because we were too tired to climb them!). We decided to take the lazy option and get the metro back to our hostel for the last night of our Rome experience. 

Spanish steps