Rome Isn't a Destination Anymore
3am, wide awake from jet lag, we walked to Trevi Fountain and had it completely to ourselves. Daytime there is miserable, this is the only way we'd go back.
We've been to Rome three separate times. Once in 2016, on our first Rome-to-Athens cruise with my niece Taylor. Once at Christmas in 2023, a land trip built around the idea that a Roman Christmas would be something special. And again in 2023, sailing Barcelona to Rome with our friends the Sieben family.
Three trips is enough to notice something neither of us expected. Rome stopped being a place we were going to see, and started being a place we simply stay.
This is one of the few things we agree on completely, which is worth saying plainly, since most of what we've captured for this site shows us landing on the same conclusion for different reasons, or landing on different conclusions entirely. Not this one. We both got here the same way.
For me, three visits was enough to work through what Rome actually has to offer beyond the museums. And even the museums have a limit. There's only so many artifacts you can look at behind glass before you need to understand the story behind them to keep getting anything out of it, and I'd rather go deep on the context of a few pieces than walk past a hundred more without it. Once that itch is scratched, sightseeing in Rome stops pulling at me the way it used to, and honestly, the summer heat there makes it easier to let go of.
What Rome does have going for it, even now, is that it's comfortable. It's safe. The food is good every time, no exceptions. And practically speaking, it's an easy place to restock for a longer trip, which matters more than it sounds like it should when you're stringing together a bigger, more expensive adventure. A four or five day stay in an Airbnb or a hotel, right in the middle of a longer tour, works better in Rome than almost anywhere else we've been.
Jeff's reasoning got him to the same place from a different angle. His interest in Italy hasn't gone away, it's just moved. He'd rather spend a return trip somewhere north or east that we haven't seen yet than walk the same streets in Rome a fourth time. For him, it's less about needing context and more about wanting new ground. Different reasoning, same landing spot: skip Rome as a sightseeing stop, keep it as a place to land.
The Christmas trip added one more layer to this. The lead-up to the holiday in Rome was genuinely lovely, the kind of atmosphere you hear about and it actually lives up to it. But being there on Christmas Day itself meant closures we hadn't planned around, and it confirmed the same thing a third time: worth experiencing once, not worth building a repeat trip around.
Rome's Christmas atmosphere leading up to the holiday really did live up to the reputation, even with the crowds.
Here's the actual takeaway, if you're doing this kind of planning yourself: a place doesn't have to earn a permanent "no" just because you're done touring it. It can graduate into something more useful, a comfortable, familiar stop you build a longer trip around, instead of a box you keep checking. That's not settling. That's knowing the difference between a place you've finished with and a place you've simply started using differently.
