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Home > Cities: Rome

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Sample itinerary for Rome

Colosseum Penthouse
with Terrace (and Cat) - Rome

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Accommodates 2 — 1-plus Bedroom, 1 Bath, Terrace, Air-Conditioning

We ourselves are now spending 3 to 4 months per year in England and France, and we’d like occasionally to sublet our own flat in Rome for up to a month or 6 weeks at a time (but also for shorter weekly periods as well) at a very good price to people who (a) already know Rome well; (b) have preferably rented in Italy from us or an agency we know; (c) can be independent – e.g., capable of purchasing and changing a light bulb, hooking up the computer, operating the satellite TV, etc.,  without outside assistance for every little thing; and (d) lack pretenses regarding furniture and furnishings.  If you want designer furniture, or to see your reflection in the shine of the kitchen floor, forget it. 

In return for the reduced price, you must assume several RESPONSIBILITIES:

First and most important: You have to keep and take care of Julian, our cat.  This means feeding him, emptying and changing his litter box, and seeing he doesn’t get lost.  It also means you can’t be allergic to cats, as he goes everywhere in the house.  So if you’re allergic to cats, stop here.

Second, you must, when necessary, water the plants on the terrace.

Neighborhood?  It’s the Celio, or the Celian Hill, one of Rome’s original seven.  The Colosseum is the most obvious landmark, just 4 blocks away.  It’s a little “pocket” neighborhood, formerly populated by the Roman working class, now somewhat trendy.  The old Romans still live here, but in the evening there’s a very engaging Greenwich-Villagey atmosphere of restaurants, with lots of outdoor tables in season, pizzerias, pubs, and wine bars, obviously frequented by a much younger crowd.  Summer opera and chamber music recitals are held in the nearby courtyard of San Clemente.  For jazz aficionados, open-air concerts with world-renowned artists take place in the park of Villa Celimontana, just up the street.

For years, we had dreamed of living in the Piazza Navona/Pantheon neighborhood.  But after living in that neighborhood for a year running, we changed out minds.  Too crowded and touristy. We moved to the Celio neighborhood because we wanted to be around Italians and didn’t particularly want to hear English.  It’s a neighborhood which any Roman considers the dead center of Rome, immensely accessible to everything in town, yet just enough away from the hordes for a certain authenticity.

There are little neighborhood shops, a couple of banks, a sometimes uncrowded post office, bakery, butcher, two recently opened supermarkets plus various longer-standing grocers, three coffee bars within steps, others within a few more steps, an ice-cream parlor right downstairs – in other words, everything one needs.

Features/Pluses:

• A 1000 square-foot flat 4 blocks from the Colosseum, Forum, Palatine, and Nero’s Golden House.  Building dates from about 1925.  Fifth floor, with elevator that works 95% of the time.  I would not propose the flat to people who simply cannot tolerate stairs if the elevator were to go out for a few hours, as happens, though very rarely.  Excellent public transport.
• Wonderful light and quiet.
• Independently contolled heating and almost full air-conditioning.  (The story here is that one of the four units has recently broken – it’s the one in the den/TV room — and I’ve decided not to have it fixed.)
• Delightful plant-filled 600-square-foot terrace, accessed by two sets of French doors, furnished with table and chairs for alfresco dining, reading, and lounging
• Living/dining room with powerful stereo/CD player; dual-line telephone with voicemail; FAX; high-speed ADSL connection; printer
• Charming (at least to me) glassed-in verandah with table and chairs, giving out onto the terrace.  We use the verandah for all our winter meals and evening meals on cooler evenings in spring and fall.
• Bedroom with excellent-quality California king-size bed
• Bathroom with shower over tub
• Kitchen with fridge, washing machine, and gas stovetop and oven.
• Second bedroom which we do not consider part of the offer, as we will use it to store all of our voluminous stuff when we rent the flat.  Thus, there might be some boxes and suitcases lining this room; we do the best we can to put things out of the way.  The room does, however, contain an excellent leather armchair and a new futon on which you can perch yourselves to watch the satellite TV (with VCR and DVD) located in this room.  (The VCR plays European PAL tapes only – please don’t try to play US tapes.  The DVD player plays Region 0 or 2 DVDs, not Region 1, i.e., not North America.) 
• An opera-and-classical CD collection
• English-language books, mostly Trollope, Dickens, George Eliot, others of that sort, plus the OED, many Italian-English dictionaries and English-language cookbooks.
• Once-weekly visit from Fiorella, our delightful Italian housekeeper who will change the bed and bath linens, launder and iron the sheets and table linens, clean house, care for the terrace, and change the cat litter if necessary.  She will not do personal laundry and ironing.  You can, if you wish, make a separate arrangement with her on this.  She gets 11 euros per hour for a minimum of 3 hours.  She does not speak English but makes herself understood by gesture and sign language and smiles.

Minuses - PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

The whole flat has a somewhat faded quality to it.  Though paint isn’t peeling off the walls, the place ought to be repainted throughout.  The bathroom is fully functional and clean, with good pressure and plenty of hot water, but it’s pretty basic as far as we’re concerned, needing regrouting, repainting, and re-tiling at a minimum.  The kitchen is from about 1960, with limited work space.  Again, it’s fully functional, and we are fine with it, but you can’t be a suburban Republican here.

Essentially, it’s a full-of-character flat owned by an artist (not us) and lived in by folks (us) who have better things in life to worry about than a perfect house.  Essentially, we’d rather be reading a Trollope novel or watching a Taiwanese movie than caring about whether the room in which we’re reading or watching it needs a new paintjob.  Take a look at the accompanying photos which we took ourselves, and you’ll see exactly what the place looks like.

Finally, the place is “delicate”, and you have to be careful about certain things, for example: opening and closing windows and French doors; carefully pulling out the detergent drawer for the washer; being careful not to plug 120v appliances directly into the wall sockets but rather through the transformers provided; and other things like that.

We’ve rented tons of places in the UK – and indeed in the US – of similar type and loved the experience.  But it isn’t a carefree, responsibility-free vacation.

We love our apartment in Rome.  When I first walked into it and saw the light, felt the quiet, walked out onto that terrace – I was in heaven.  And I still am.

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