Rome, Italy | December 2025 · A family return during the Jubilee Year
Our supposedly early entrance to the Vatican Museums began with a long walk up a spiral ramp and a crowd that seemed to have arrived before us. We’d booked the Pristine Sistine Early Entrance tour partly because the name suggested a quieter start, but the Jubilee had brought so many visitors to Rome that whatever advantage the booking offered was difficult to detect. The escalators weren’t working either, which didn’t help. Even before we reached the galleries, I was beginning to appreciate that an early ticket doesn’t necessarily mean an easy morning.
This was my second visit to Rome, but the first time Leah and I had brought Tyler and Chase. We’d last been there in 2020, when a remarkable Vatican exhibition had made the Sistine Chapel feel like an almost unfairly fortunate experience. Five years later, we were visiting during the Catholic Church’s Jubilee Year, with four Holy Doors to pass through, museums and churches to revisit, and several walking tours designed to reveal parts of Rome we might otherwise have missed. The city was every bit as impressive as I remembered, although my tolerance for crowds, endless standing and unexpected staircases had perhaps become rather less generous.
What I increasingly like about travelling isn’t simply the chance to collect famous landmarks. I’m interested in the details that hold a place together: how buildings have changed, how art was paid for, which stories survived, and what people do in the streets between the monuments. Rome provides more of those details than any reasonably organised holiday can accommodate. There were also the usual family diversions, some very good food, a succession of friendly dogs that the boys insisted on calling Georgie, and one unfortunate bowl of noodles that prevented me from seeing the Colosseum altogether.
The Not-So-Pristine Sistine
Our guide for the Vatican tour, Paola, was one of its saving graces. She knew the collections extremely well and, equally importantly, paid attention to the people she was guiding. With the escalators out of service and lifts being reserved for elderly visitors, she tried to take routes that minimised unnecessary stairs. That mattered because the museums are enormous, and even on a comparatively quiet day it’s easy to underestimate the physical demands of moving from one gallery to the next.
The Gallery of Maps was as impressive as I remembered, its long vaulted ceiling drawing you through a sequence of monumental painted maps of Italy. Commissioned in the late sixteenth century, the works are fascinating not only as records of geography but as visual statements about knowledge and political power. I still find myself looking at the arrangement of lettering, decorative elements, terrain and perspective. Having worked in graphic design for so many years, I can’t help appreciating the labour involved in making information both useful and spectacular.
The Raphael Rooms were another reminder of just how much art is packed into the Vatican. The School of Athens is familiar from art books and reproductions, but seeing it within the room for which it was conceived changes the experience. Raphael’s organisation of figures, his use of architecture and the way the whole composition draws your eye towards its centre are easier to appreciate when you can see the surrounding space. Of course, appreciating those subtleties while other tour groups are moving through requires a fair amount of concentration.
The Sistine Chapel was inevitably the highlight, even in the middle of a crowd. Michelangelo’s ceiling and The Last Judgement are so familiar as images that it’s tempting to think you know them already, but their actual scale still takes some getting used to. The chapel isn’t a particularly comfortable place to linger when packed, and the usual restrictions on photography mean you’re meant to look rather than spend the visit behind a camera. As a photographer, that isn’t entirely a bad thing, although I admit I would have preferred a little more room in which to do the looking.
How Our 2020 Visit Spoiled Us
Our earlier Rome trip happened to coincide with something extraordinary. In February 2020, as part of the commemorations marking 500 years since Raphael’s death, the Vatican temporarily displayed the tapestries based on his designs in the Sistine Chapel, the setting for which they had originally been created. The tapestries, illustrating episodes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, had been woven in Brussels and are normally displayed separately from the chapel.
The exhibition lasted only a week. We happened to be in Rome during that narrow window, and on our visit we were allowed to take photographs inside the chapel, something that is normally prohibited. I still look back at those pictures with a degree of disbelief. We hadn’t planned the entire holiday around the event; we’d simply been fortunate with the dates.
The contrast with 2025 was difficult not to notice. This time the chapel was full, the morning was crowded from the outset and there was no special tapestry exhibition to discover. That didn’t diminish Michelangelo’s achievement, of course, but it did remind me how much the circumstances of a visit can affect your memory of a place. Rome is not a city that offers exactly the same experience twice, even when you return to the same rooms.
Four Holy Doors During the Jubilee
The 2025 Jubilee gave this visit an emphasis that hadn’t been part of our 2020 trip. An Ordinary Jubilee is traditionally celebrated every 25 years, and pilgrims travel to Rome to pass through the Holy Doors of the four major papal basilicas. The doors are opened for the Holy Year and have a particular spiritual significance within Catholic practice, making them more than another architectural feature to photograph.
At the conclusion of our Vatican tour we passed through the Holy Door at St Peter’s Basilica, and in the days that followed we managed to visit the other three: St Mary Major, St John Lateran and St Paul Outside the Walls. Doing all four became one of the threadlines of the trip, although naturally we also spent plenty of time looking at the buildings themselves. Some of the most interesting details in Rome reveal themselves when a famous destination turns out to be connected to several others you hadn’t quite placed on the map.
On 9 December we visited the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, which was our third Holy Door. Despite St Peter’s greater international fame, St John Lateran is actually the Pope’s cathedral in his role as Bishop of Rome and holds the highest rank among the four major papal basilicas. Its long nave, framed by enormous statues of the twelve Apostles, feels grand without quite the same intense atmosphere of sightseeing that surrounds the Vatican.
I’d also mistakenly assumed that the Scala Sancta, or Holy Stairs, were inside the basilica. They are actually housed in a separate sanctuary across the street. According to Christian tradition, the twenty-eight steps came from Jerusalem and are associated with the staircase Jesus ascended before appearing before Pontius Pilate. Whether you’re approaching the site through faith, history or simple curiosity, the arrangement is typical of Rome: you cross an ordinary street and discover that another major piece of the city’s religious heritage is waiting on the opposite pavement.
The Doria Pamphilj Palace and the Cost of Being Important
The Galleria Doria Pamphilj offered an entirely different perspective on Rome’s long relationship with the Catholic Church. The gallery occupies part of Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, a great aristocratic residence associated with families whose fortunes were closely tied to papal politics. Pope Innocent X was a member of the Pamphilj family, and the family’s collections make very clear the sort of wealth and influence that could accumulate around Rome’s most powerful households.
Walking through the galleries, I eventually gave up trying to photograph every painting and sculpture individually. The walls were packed with artworks, and there were elaborate ceilings, gilded details and mirrors almost everywhere I looked. The cumulative effect was more striking than any single room. I tried to capture the scale of the interiors instead, because a photograph of one painting could never explain what it felt like to stand among so many of them at once.
Velázquez’s portrait of Innocent X is one of the collection’s most famous works, and with good reason. It presents the pope as someone acutely aware of his authority, but without turning him into a flattering ideal. The painting is all the more interesting when considered against the luxurious setting in which it hangs. It’s easy to be impressed by these great private collections while also wondering about the concentration of power and resources that made them possible. The artistic achievements are undeniable; so is the staggering amount of money behind them.
The Borghese Gallery and Marble That Refuses to Behave
If the Doria Pamphilj impressed through sheer accumulation, the Galleria Borghese was more about encountering a collection of masterpieces in a building designed to show them off. Housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana, it was shaped by the collecting ambitions of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V and one of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s most important early patrons. The villa’s decorated ceilings, mosaics and rooms are attractions in themselves, although it’s difficult to concentrate on the interiors when the sculptures competing for your attention are so extraordinary.
Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne remains one of the most astonishing things I’ve seen carved from marble. The mythological scene shows Daphne transforming into a laurel tree to escape Apollo, with fingers becoming leaves and skin giving way to bark. The technical achievement is remarkable, but what fascinates me is how the sculpture captures an event that seems to be happening in the instant you’re looking at it. You walk around the figures and the story changes with your viewpoint.
His David uses an entirely different kind of movement, the body twisting as he prepares to release his sling. Meanwhile, The Rape of Proserpina, often titled The Abduction of Proserpina, presents a deeply unsettling myth with almost unbelievable technical precision. Pluto’s fingers appear to sink into Proserpina’s flesh, although every part of the sculpture is hard stone. That contrast between beautiful craftsmanship and a violent subject is part of what makes the work so complicated to admire.
The collection also includes Canova’s reclining Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix, Caravaggio’s Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Young Sick Bacchus, Raphael’s The Deposition, and Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. Any one of those would justify spending time in a museum. Having so many in the same villa made it almost impossible to decide where to look next.
During one of our tours, I ended up talking with our guide and another guest about the history of sculpture and the human figure. We discussed the influence of the ancient Greeks, who developed enduring ideas about anatomy, proportion and idealised form, and the Romans, who adapted those traditions while placing greater emphasis on portraiture and public representation. Later, Renaissance and Baroque artists returned to classical sources but found new ways to express movement, emotion and physical presence.
I’ve always enjoyed that sort of conversation because it turns the experience of seeing art into something more than recognition. As someone who has spent years drawing and thinking about form, I’m interested in the decisions artists make, not only the fact that the finished object is impressive. Bernini’s work makes those decisions seem effortless, which is probably the clearest sign of how difficult they were.
A Crypt the Kids Saw Without Me
After the Borghese Gallery, we still had enough time for the Museo e Cripta dei Cappuccini. Leah and I had visited during our 2020 trip, so I decided to skip this return visit and let her go in with Tyler and Chase. It wasn’t a matter of the crypt being uninteresting. Quite the opposite; I remembered it well enough that I didn’t particularly need to experience it again so soon.
The crypt is famous for chapels decorated with the bones of thousands of Capuchin friars and other individuals. Skulls, ribs and other skeletal remains form elaborate arrangements that can initially seem macabre, but the religious purpose is more contemplative than sensational. They belong to a tradition of remembering mortality and the temporary nature of earthly life, a theme expressed in the familiar sentiment that what we are now, those who have died once were.
Most of the photographs from this visit were taken by Chase, who’s involved in his school’s media club and is developing a good eye for pictures, particularly when the subject is something he wants to photograph. I enjoyed seeing the museum through his images afterwards. There’s an interesting difference between showing your children something you remember and having them come back with their own view of it. We may have visited the same place, but the details we notice are rarely identical.
Federica and the Darker Side of Rome
One of our more unusual bookings was Live Virtual Guide’s Dark Side of Rome with Underground Bones Crypt tour. Our guide, Federica, felt oddly familiar before we’d even met her because short videos of her explaining bits of Roman history had repeatedly appeared on my social media feed. Hearing the stories in person was a welcome change, particularly because our tour group turned out to consist only of our family.
Federica had a calm, conversational way of moving between locations and stories. She wasn’t simply reciting a collection of strange incidents; she helped us understand how the events, buildings and personalities fitted into Rome’s political and religious history. The small group made it easier to ask questions, and I appreciated that she paid attention to our walking pace, looked for opportunities to rest and made sure we were safely away from moving traffic before stopping to talk.
One of the figures she discussed was Donna Olimpia Maidalchini, the powerful sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X. Her reputation as the so-called Secret Pope grew from the extent of her influence over papal affairs, although the stories told about her also reflect how uncomfortable early modern society could be with a woman who exercised power in a male-dominated institution. It’s worth remembering that historical gossip is not the same thing as a reliable biography, particularly when the person being discussed had so many enemies.
There was also the long-lived tale that Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, accidentally poisoned himself at a banquet in 1503, supposedly after consuming poison intended for someone else. The story is certainly memorable, but it remains disputed, with historians offering other explanations for his death. Federica also told an urban legend about Pope Sixtus V and an innkeeper who discovered that criticising powerful people could have severe consequences. These stories work best when treated as part of the folklore surrounding Rome’s rulers rather than as proven accounts.
We visited the Church of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte, associated with a confraternity devoted to collecting and burying the dead who might otherwise have been forgotten, and stopped at a place connected with Giordano Bruno, executed for heresy in 1600. Those visits made the tour more than an evening of macabre entertainment. They raised questions about authority, social responsibility, religious belief and the lives of people who often appear only briefly in official histories.
The final visit to an underground bones crypt, normally closed to casual visitors, brought the evening’s themes together. Descending beneath the streets after hearing about the city’s forgotten dead was quietly effective, and the relatively small setting made it feel different from Rome’s larger, better-known crypt attractions. Federica’s restraint as a storyteller was a large part of the tour’s success; she gave the places enough context without trying to make every moment more dramatic than it already was.
Rome as a Lasagne of History
We booked another Live Virtual Guide tour with Federica, this time through Trastevere, Tiber Island and the Jewish Quarter. There were more people than on our private-feeling evening walk, but it was still a small enough group to have conversations and move comfortably. Once again, Federica connected the stops into a coherent story rather than presenting each church, bridge or ruin as an isolated item from a guidebook.
She described Rome as a lasagne of history, which struck me as particularly apt. The ancient city isn’t neatly separated from the medieval or modern one. Buildings have been adapted, rebuilt and repurposed, streets follow older routes and archaeological structures remain buried beneath busy public spaces. It’s perfectly possible to find yourself looking at a piece of imperial Rome while standing beside a shop that opened last year.
Inside San Francesco a Ripa, we saw Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, a sculpture that conveys an intense spiritual experience through drapery, posture and expression. After seeing his larger, more famous works at the Borghese, it was fascinating to encounter another side of his ability in a church where the setting contributes so much to the experience. We also visited Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, which carries centuries of religious history within a comparatively quiet interior.
Crossing towards Tiber Island, we learned about Ponte Fabricio, completed in 62 BC and still serving pedestrians more than two millennia later. The Theatre of Marcellus was another memorable stop. Its stacked arches give it a superficial resemblance to the Colosseum, although it’s an older structure with its own history of public entertainment and later adaptation. Nearby, the ruins of the Portico d’Ottavia show how the ancient city became entangled with the development of Rome’s Jewish Quarter.
The Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, were among the smallest but most affecting things we saw. These brass squares set into the pavement commemorate people persecuted and murdered under the Nazi regime, with individual names linked to specific addresses. They’re easy to miss while walking, but pausing to read one brings a very large history down to the scale of a person who once lived on that street.
We ended at the Fontana delle Tartarughe, the Turtle Fountain, in Piazza Mattei. It’s a lovely little space, especially after the more crowded and monumental attractions we’d seen elsewhere. There was something cinematic about the arrangement of the fountain and the buildings around it, and I was grateful we’d taken a tour that allowed us to appreciate places we might otherwise have walked past. Rome’s quieter corners are rarely separate from its history; they’re simply easier to overlook.
When an Archaeologist Knows Too Much to Tell It Simply
Another historic-centre tour, which included the underground remains beneath Piazza Navona, was less satisfying. Our guide introduced herself as an archaeologist, and her expertise was obvious from the detail she could offer about the buildings and excavations. Unfortunately, the information often arrived as disconnected facts rather than a story that developed naturally from one stop to the next. I found myself losing the thread from time to time, even though the subject matter was exactly the sort of thing that normally interests me.
The tour had also been described as a slow, relaxing walk, but some explanations were delivered beside roads with passing traffic. One participant used a wheelchair, and several of us would have benefited from better places to pause and sit. The guide seemed more concerned with completing the explanation than with checking whether people were comfortable or safely positioned to listen. It wasn’t a question of her knowledge, which was extensive, but of how that knowledge was delivered.
Under Piazza Navona, we saw surviving parts of the Stadium of Domitian, the first-century sporting venue whose long, curved footprint still shapes the square above it. That was one of the most worthwhile moments of the tour. Standing beneath a familiar public space and seeing what remains of an earlier city makes the layers of Rome unusually tangible. We also passed the Pantheon area and encountered architectural details we’d probably have missed without a guide, so I don’t regret taking the tour. I simply came away more convinced that good historical interpretation requires an understanding of the audience as well as the subject.
The Colosseum Tour That Happened Without Me
Our Colosseum booking changed before we even arrived in Rome. We’d originally reserved a semi-private visit to the Colosseum, Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, but the operator wrote to explain that changes in the reservation system might prevent the original arrangement from running. The alternative was a larger group of about twenty people, with special access through the Gladiator’s Gate onto the arena floor. It sounded like an excellent opportunity, particularly because that entry route provides a very different perspective from the standard visitor walkways.
Unfortunately, I never got to find out for myself. I’d eaten some bad noodles and spent the morning recovering at the hotel, while Leah, Chase and Tyler went ahead without me. It was an entirely unglamorous way to miss one of the most famous attractions in Rome, but I wasn’t in any condition to pretend that a lengthy archaeological walk would improve matters.
The family entered through the special-access route, stood on the arena floor and continued to the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill. They came back with stories, photographs and videos, and I was glad they hadn’t sacrificed the booking on my account. Leah mentioned that the tour involved a good deal of walking and stairs, which might have made it difficult for me even on a better day, particularly with a group moving at a fixed pace.
A short clip recorded by the family during the Colosseum tour.
That didn’t entirely remove the disappointment of missing the arena, but it did put things into perspective. I could enjoy their photographs from the comfort of the hotel, and I now have an excellent reason to return to Rome again. The Colosseum is unlikely to disappear before then, although I intend to be much more selective about the noodles.
A Roman Meal Worth Choosing at Random
We’d collected a long list of restaurant recommendations, many of them around Trastevere and the Jewish Quarter, but our usual approach on holiday is to eat one proper restaurant meal a day and keep the rest relatively simple. There was no realistic way to work through the entire list, so eventually we wandered into La Taverna del Ghetto without doing much more research and decided to try it.
The family ordered very differently, which is often half the entertainment when we eat out together. Chase started with a supplì al telefono, a fried rice ball filled with mozzarella, before moving on to tonnarelli cacio e pepe. Tyler was more conservative, choosing French fries and then salsicce alla brace, grilled sausages. He has his preferences, and travelling thousands of kilometres doesn’t necessarily alter them.
Leah went for two combinations of fried Roman-Jewish specialities. The tris di fritti ebraici included artichoke, a zucchini blossom with mozzarella and anchovies, and fried cod. Her other order included fried lamb brains and artichokes, which was certainly one of the more adventurous choices at the table. I ordered trippa alla Romana, tripe cooked in the Roman style with tomato and other traditional seasonings. Given the dishes I grew up eating in the Philippines, I don’t find tripe particularly intimidating, and I was curious about the local preparation.
It was a good meal and a reminder that Roman food extends well beyond the pasta and pizza most visitors immediately associate with the city. Its traditions include organ meats, inexpensive cuts, fried vegetables and the influence of the Jewish community, all shaped by the practical business of feeding people rather than impressing diners with elaborate presentation. After spending hours looking at the wealth accumulated by Rome’s aristocratic families, there was something satisfying about eating food with such strong roots in ordinary kitchens.
McDonald’s, Jollibee and the Triumph of Tired Feet
Whenever we travel, I tend to inspect the local McDonald’s menu. I’m not expecting a culinary revelation; I’m curious about how an international chain changes its familiar products for different countries. In Rome the selection looked relatively recognisable, although I noticed the absence of the Quarter Pounder with Cheese and the presence of the Big Tasty, which seemed to occupy much the same corner of the menu.
We’d also considered trying Jollibee near the Vatican, which would have been another interesting comparison with what we know from home. But McDonald’s was closer, and my feet had already registered their objections to any additional walking. The choice was therefore made on grounds of convenience rather than gastronomic ambition. There are days when a familiar burger and a chance to sit down are more appealing than another carefully researched restaurant.
The same practical approach applied to smaller meals during the trip. You can spend an enormous amount of time planning where to eat in Rome, but when you’re moving around as a family and covering a lot of ground, the place nearby sometimes turns out to be exactly what you need. Not every meal has to become a separate destination.
Gelato, Pizza and the Bakery That Was Far Too Convenient
Gelato became such an ordinary part of the days that I stopped thinking of it as a special treat. We tried Frigidarium, The Gelatist and at least one place whose name I’ve already forgotten, but Fatamorgana became our regular choice because it was both reliably good and conveniently located. I liked being able to stop for gelato between other activities without making a production of it.
Pizza worked in much the same way. The boys tried Pizzeria della Madonna dei Monti near the Roman Forum, where straightforward slices were a welcome option after sightseeing. Across the street from our hotel was Matrem Bakery, which was possibly too convenient for our own good. Its pizza was excellent earlier in the day, and later we noticed people lining up for the pangocciolo, soft buns dotted with chocolate chips. Once we’d tried them, the queues made considerably more sense.
Some of the meals I remember most clearly weren’t the ones we’d planned. They were the places discovered because we happened to be hungry, the bakery just across the road or the gelato shop that became familiar after several visits. Rome has more than enough celebrated restaurants, but I was perfectly happy finding our own favourites without treating every meal as a research project.
All Roman Dogs Were Apparently Georgie
One of the more endearing things we noticed was how often dogs appeared alongside their owners in cafés, shops and public spaces. Rome seemed very comfortable with pets, and we noticed some establishments had rings or dedicated points outside where dogs could be secured while their owners went inside. During one coffee stop, a friendly dog approached our table and behaved as though meeting visitors was a perfectly normal part of the day.
The boys had taken to calling every friendly dog ‘Georgie’, after our own George Michael back in Singapore. There was no need for the dog to resemble him, or even to share a single distinguishing feature. If it was approachable and seemed interested in us, it became another Georgie. It was an amusing little ritual that followed us around the city, and I suspect it will stay in our family memory just as clearly as some of the major sights.
What Rome Reveals on a Second Visit
I came away from this second visit with a different appreciation of Rome. The first trip, in 2020, had been unusually fortunate because of the Raphael tapestry exhibition. This time the Jubilee shaped much of the experience, and visiting the four Holy Doors provided a thread connecting some of the city’s major churches. The museums were every bit as extraordinary as before, but the crowds, tired feet and practical business of moving around with family were more noticeable.
The walking tours gave me some of my favourite memories, particularly those with Federica, because they made sense of places we could easily have passed without understanding what lay behind them. A good guide can turn a street or small church into something memorable, but expertise alone isn’t enough. Comfort, pacing and the ability to connect facts into a story matter just as much, especially when some of the people listening need to sit down occasionally.
Rome’s great collections also left me thinking about the relationship between art and power. The Doria Pamphilj and Borghese families accumulated wealth on a scale that’s difficult to comprehend today, yet their collections preserve work that continues to affect people centuries later. The uncomfortable questions about patronage don’t cancel out the artistic achievement, any more than admiring Bernini’s skill requires pretending every subject he depicted was comfortable to look at.
There were disappointments, naturally. The early Vatican visit wasn’t remotely as uncrowded as we’d imagined, one historic-centre tour was more tiring than advertised, and I missed the Colosseum after an unfortunate encounter with noodles. But there were good meals, unexpected conversations, a lovely little fountain at the end of a walk and the pleasure of seeing Leah and the boys experience places that were new to them.
I don’t think it’s possible to finish Rome, and I’m no longer sure why anyone would want to. Each visit changes depending on what you choose to notice, how much energy you have and who you’re sharing it with. Next time I’d still like to stand on the Colosseum arena floor, but I’d also be content with another long walk through Trastevere, a good gelato and enough time to sit somewhere and watch the city go about its business. I will, however, be considerably more careful about what I eat the night before an expensive tour.
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