I don’t live in Rome. I live in Belgium, and I’ve been coming back to Rome since 2022, at least once a year. Long enough to have made every first-timer mistake worth making: visiting the Roman Forum at noon in July, paying €18 for a carbonara next to the Pantheon, taking the Leonardo Express from the airport into the centre… while staying in Trastevere.

Romans who live there write beautifully about their city, but they’ve forgotten what it’s like to arrive at Fiumicino at 8am with a suitcase and no Italian. I haven’t. I remember exactly which things confused me, which advice turned out to be wrong, and which small decisions made the difference between a great day and a frustrating one.

That’s what you’ll find here: practical, honest, opinionated guidance from someone who’s done the trip enough times to know what matters, and still arrives every time feeling like a visitor.

A note on the name

Max is a pen name. I value my privacy, but everything I write about Rome is real, tested, and based on my own visits. The photos are mine. The opinions are mine. The mistakes were definitely mine. The trattorias I list are places I’ve eaten at and would happily eat at again; the hotels are places I’ve stayed or walked past and checked.

If you’d like to verify a specific claim on this site, I’m happy to share documentation — receipts, booking confirmations, the timestamped photo metadata — by email. The privacy is about my name, not the integrity of the work.

Why you can trust what you read here

No badges, no “as seen in” logos. Just the specific, falsifiable commitments that make this site different from the summaries you scrolled past to get here.

  1. I’ve been here, a lot. Five visits since 2022, most recently September 2025; the next one is September 2026. Long enough to have eaten badly, slept in the wrong neighbourhood and missed the museum I most wanted to see — and now to help you skip those particular mistakes.
  2. I pay my own way. Every ticket I write about, I bought. Every meal, I paid for. Every night, I booked. No press trips, sponsored stays or comped tours: the moment I accept one, you can’t trust me to tell you when something isn’t worth your money. (Disclosure for how the site does earn money.)
  3. The photos are mine. Every image on this site is one I took unless explicitly credited otherwise, with the date it was taken under it. If a guide shows you a street at dawn, I was standing there.
  4. Every price is checked against the official source before it goes on the page, and every page says when that happened (“Facts verified …”). Rome changes — hours shift, restaurants close, ticket systems get redesigned — so I re-check the most-read pages after each trip. If a price is wrong, the page is stale and I want to know: hello@maxinrome.com.
  5. I write for first- and second-time visitors. If you want deep-cut nightlife or where Romans get their car serviced, this isn’t the site for you, and I’ll point you elsewhere when I can. What I do well: the major sights without the queues, where to eat without getting fleeced, how to get in from the airport, which neighbourhood to sleep in, and the small practical things nobody warns you about.

Have a question I haven’t answered yet?

I read every email. I can’t always reply quickly, but I will, usually with a longer answer than you expected. If the question is good enough, it becomes a page: hello@maxinrome.com.