24 Hours in Rome: Everything, Everywhere

 Newer phrases have permeated my feeds: “you can’t pour from an empty cup,” “perfection or joy,” “live, love, laugh” (kidding on that last one). Doing everything is no longer something I need to do. Going everywhere is mathematically and financially impossible. I now love where I live, love staying in, and I catch myself – more often than might be okay – just sitting on the sofa, staring at a wall, feeling totally fine about it.

But.

There are still times.

Times when the urge to squeeze every last drop out of every second, to get the most out of life in all its chaotic glory, drives me into an orbit of travel-plan delirium. It often emerges when I’m trying to transform a less-than-ideal situation into something with sparkle. The situation at hand: poorly connecting flights on my way back to Europe from Asia, which landed me in Rome far too late to catch the last flight to Lisbon. The sensible option – the 6 am departure, just get it done, get home and wallow in jet-lagged sleep deprivation on my own sofa with some lengthy wall-staring.

Or.

Option 2: Land. Collect my combined 55 kilos of luggage, head straight into Rome, check in somewhere beautiful, go out for dinner and drinks, see the city by night. Embrace the jet lag, wake early, walk the streets, drink the coffee, marvel at the magnificence of it all. Lunch, wine, shopping. Hotel time. Maybe a work call (camera off). Then back to the airport for the evening flight. In other words: go everywhere, do everything.

Option 2 it is.

CASACAU: A Door of Your Own

This is where I get to stay. I’ve been reading about this place, and it’s got me hooked. For just shy of 24 hours, I want everything on the doorstep. I want to feel part of the streets, the bricks, the buildings, the thousands of years of history surrounding me. And I want it to feel like mine, like I live here. Like every time I reach that door, for this short and sweet window of time, it’s truly mine, and I walk through it with that same sense of homecoming, familiarity, comfort.

CasaCau delivers. I’m given an apartment on the first floor. It’s vast and beautiful, with details and trinkets everywhere, velvet upholstery, a raised bed dressed in lush linen. There’s a balcony looking straight onto the piazza, where a small fruit and veg cart is open both last thing at night and first thing in the morning. I could live here. For this time, I do.

I could also just never leave, just sit in this window and watch the world go by; the tourists, the shoppers, vegetables being bought, light changing to dark as the surrounding trattorias twinkle on and diffuse an aura of hearty handmade pasta and carafes of Tuscan red.

The next morning brings pleasant surprises. As I spend more time observing the details dotted around the apartment – a Lego set of the Trevi Fountain (the real thing a stone’s throw away), books on Italian designers and architects Gio Ponti and Franco Albini, I open the door to discover a huge canvas bag filled with fresh eggs, butter, milk, bread, and possibly the best croissant I’ve ever had in my life. Not long after, I go to luxuriate in the beautifully tiled shower room and, after hitting a few buttons expecting the light to come on, realise the shower doubles as a full functioning steam room. With proper steam. Not the substandard tepid wispy things you get at chain hotels. Twenty-four hours suddenly feels like enough time to live an entire life.

MY HUSBAND RUNS: The City Wakes With You

“I should probably mention that I’m the kind of person who just wakes up at sunrise. Naturally. Every day. No alarms needed. It’s apparently incredibly frustrating to live with – I’ve been told this on multiple occasions – but here’s the thing about Rome in November at 6:30am: it justifies the existence of people like me. The Trevi Fountain without the crowds pressing in from all sides, the Pantheon’s portico catching that first golden light, the cobblestones still slick with morning dew and absolutely nobody trying to sell you a selfie stick. I’d downloaded a route on Strava the night before – someone else’s careful research condensed into a GPS track – and just followed the line. No planning, no agonising over which monuments to prioritise, just trainers on and out the door. Democratic tourism for the algorithmically inclined.

The route took me past everything that matters in the guidebooks: Piazza del Popolo with its twin churches standing sentinel, down to the Spanish Steps where I absolutely did run down them because what else are you going to do at that hour, through those impossibly narrow streets to the Trevi Fountain, then on to the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. And then – through what I can only describe as navigational incompetence – I somehow ended up circling Vatican City. Twice. Not on purpose. Rome’s street layout conspired against me, or maybe I just have terrible directional instincts, but there I was, passing St. Peter’s Basilica for the second time in one run, feeling like an idiot with good cardiovascular fitness. My calves hated the cobblestones, but by kilometer three I was warm and the light was doing that low-angled autumn thing that makes the whole enterprise feel less ridiculous. This is the kind of existential exhaustion that only comes from running through a city that’s been here for nearly three millennia, even if you do accidentally see the same bit twice.”

THE PANTHEON: Time Collapses and my mind caves in.

This is my first visit, and it’s something I’ve always wanted to stand inside of. The enormity of it. This is the first real moment in my lifetime where I grasp how old something truly is and how it just doesn’t make sense. The dome, 142 feet across, the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built, rises above me like a perfect hemisphere. An architectural miracle: it’s a perfect sphere, its height equal to its diameter, a staggering 43.3 meters. The ancient Romans somehow knew that balance and stability would keep this standing for two millennia.

And then there’s the oculus, the wide 27-foot opening at the dome’s centre, letting in a cylinder of light (and rain) that moves across the marble floor throughout the day. Legend says this site is where Romulus, Rome’s mythological founder, ascended to the heavens. Standing beneath that eye to the sky, you believe it.

The granite columns flanking the entrance were quarried in Egypt as single 60-ton pieces, then dragged overland, floated down the Nile, shipped across the Mediterranean, and hauled up the Tiber. The logistics alone seem utterly impossible.I can’t even begin to image what that Project Manager was going through. Emperor Hadrian then rebuilt this around 126 AD but inscribed it with the original builder Agrippa’s name – a Roman humility that feels almost mythical itself.

I got slightly swindled on tickets when I booked online via a genuine-looking site. When I messaged my Italian friend seeking sympathy, he thought this was hilarious and sent me this clip, which I’m not sure makes me feel better for not being the only one, or worse for falling into an age-old trap. The Pantheon has been in continuous use for 2,000 years, converted to a church in 609 AD, which is the only reason it survived when so many other Roman temples were plundered for building materials. Time doesn’t just collapse here. It persists.

COFFEE: La Casa del Caffè Tazza d’Oro

I’m not sure how this place manages to retain a local, authentic feel even though it’s right by the Pantheon and stuffed with tourists devouring maritozzi. But it does. This is my second time here and I still love it.

Founded in 1944 as an artisan roastery, now the last one remaining in Rome’s historic center, it opened as a café in 1946 so customers could taste the blends before buying beans to take home. The name means “Golden Cup,” and gold threads through everything here: the vintage signage wrapping around the building’s corner, the logo of a woman sowing coffee seeds (representing their farm-to-cup philosophy), even the porcelain cups if you’re lucky enough to snag one (I didn’t and could never as I have a guilty face). 

The espresso is rich without being aggressive, balanced in a way that appeals to locals ordering at the bar alongside tourists puzzling over the difference between caffè and cappuccino. Every variant of fresh pastry, cream, and coffee you could wish for. Their signature granita al caffè which is a coffee slushy layered with whipped cream that the octogenarians order with doppia panna at 7pm (cardiologists be damned) is a Roman institution in itself.