You may find there’s quite enough of interest in Rome to keep you occupied during your stay. But Rome can be a hot, oppressive city, its surfeit of churches and museums intensely wearying, and if you’re around long enough you really shouldn’t feel any guilt about freeing yourself from its weighty history to see something of the countryside around. Two of the main attractions visitable on a day-trip are, it’s true, Roman sites, but just the process of getting to them can be energizing. 

Tivoli , about an hour by bus east of Rome, is a small provincial town famous for the travertine quarries nearby and its fine ancient Roman villa, complete with landscaped gardens and parks. Ostia , in the opposite direction from the city near the sea, and similarly easy to reach on public transport, is the city’s main seaside resort (though one worth avoiding), but was also the site of the port of Rome in classical times, the ruins of which - Ostia Antica - are well preserved and worth seeing.

Tivoli , about an hour by bus east of Rome, is a small provincial town famous for the travertine quarries nearby and its fine ancient Roman villa, complete with landscaped gardens and parks. Ostia , in the opposite direction from the city near the sea, and similarly easy to reach on public transport, is the city’s main seaside resort (though one worth avoiding), but was also the site of the port of Rome in classical times, the ruins of which - Ostia Antica - are well preserved and worth seeing.

The triangular area on the eastern side of Via del Corso , bound by Piazza del Popolo, the Corso, the edge of the Villa Borghese and Piazza di Spagna, is travellers’ Rome, historically the artistic quarter of the city, for which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Grand Tourists would make in search of the colourful, exotic city. Keats and Giorgio de Chirico are just two of those who used to live on Piazza di Spagna; Goethe had lodgings along Via del Corso; and institutions like Caffè Greco and Babington’s Tea Rooms were the 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; 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 InterRailers.

On the far side of the Forum, heading south , are some of Rome’s most ancient sights, remnants of the time when this area was mostly green, bucolic countryside. A lake lay where the Colosseum stands now, drained by a small stream that wove between the Palatine and Celian hills, curving to empty into the Tiber close by the Circo Massimo. The slopes of the Palatine and Celian hills were inhabited by people living in shanties and huts, until the great fire of 64 AD, when Nero incorporated the area into his grand design for the city, building a gigantic Nymphaeum to support his planned gardens on the Celian Hill, part of his Domus Aurea, and cleaning up the slopes of the two hills. Eventually a temple to the deified Claudius was built on the Celian Hill, and the Palatine became the residence of the emperors, fed by water brought by the arched span of the Aqua Claudia. 

Nowadays, this part of Rome has some of the city’s most atmospheric and compelling Christan and ancient sights, in the Colosseum , and, beyond, the churches of San Clemente and San Giovanni in Laterano , among others. It also has some of its most pleasant corners, in particular up on the still green and peaceful Celian Hill .

The real city centre of Rome is the centro storico , or historic centre, which makes up the greater part of the roughly triangular knob of land that bulges into a bend in the Tiber, above and below Corso Vittorio Emanuele, to the west of Via del Corso, Rome’s main street. This area, known in Roman times as the Campus Martius, 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 its most vivacious street- and nightlife. 

The main square and transport hub of Piazza Venezia is a good orientation point: to its north lies the main body of the old centre of Rome, with the graceful oval of Piazza Navona and the great dome of the Pantheon at the heart of its tangle of streets and churches; to its west is more of the same, focusing on the busy squares of Campo de’ Fiori and Largo Argentina , and fading as you move towards the river into Rome’s ancient Jewish Ghetto . To the south is the Capitoline Hill and its museums, on the edge of Rome’s ancient centre.

From Piazza Venezia Via dei Fori Imperiali, a soulless boulevard imposed on the area by Mussolini in 1932, cuts south through the heart of Rome’s ancient sites. Before then this was a warren of medieval streets that wound around the ruins of the ancient city centre, but as with the Via della Conciliazione up to St Peter’s the Duce preferred to build something to his own glory rather than preserve that of another era. There has been a long-standing plan to make the entire ancient part of the city into a huge archeological park which would stretch right down to the catacombs on the Via Appia Antica. Although excavations have been undertaken in recent years, they are continuing slowly. It’s a dilemma for the city-planners: Via dei Fori Imperiali is a major traffic artery with a function which must be preserved. One way around this is to dig a tunnel under the road - an expensive option but an option that is apparently being considered. For the moment, if you want tranquil sightseeing, you’ll have to settle for coming on Sunday, when a long stretch from Piazza Venezia to Via Appia Antica is closed to traffic and pedestrians take to the streets to stroll past the ruins of the ancient city.