New Year’s Eve in Rome: ideas Inspired by Our Guests’ Questions
New Year’s Eve in Rome: Ideas Inspired by Our Guests’ Questions
These lines grew out of simple conversations, the kind that happen when you arrive in a city and want to experience it properly. A few of our guests asked how best to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Rome, and it struck me that the answer is never a list: it’s a matter of atmosphere.
Rome, on the night of 31 December, never offers just one storyline. It’s a city that changes character depending on where you are: it can be lively and convivial, intimate and panoramic, impeccable and glamorous, slow and deeply gastronomic. Here I’ve gathered a few possibilities that I’ve seen work well over time for anyone who wants a beautiful New Year’s Eve without overcomplicating things.
Christmas in Rome. Instructions for getting lost
Rome in December doesn’t ask for approval. It doesn’t pose. It lights up because it’s December, not because it has something to prove. The lights on Via del Corso come on with the same inevitability as the moment Romans find themselves, at some point on Christmas Eve, sitting down at the table. It isn’t excitement, it’s familiarity, it’s home calling.
Anyone looking for Nordic perfection, the kind of cities that at Christmas seem to have stepped out of a tin of Danish biscuits, everything neat, everything scheduled, everything photo ready, has chosen the wrong latitude. Here it’s as it always is, beautiful and impossible, generous and chaotic. Capable of handing you a sunset that takes your breath away, and then leaving you at a bus stop waiting for a bus that never turns up.
The suitcase with space to spare (or how to buy less and choose better)
Rome, Monti district. There’s a different way to go shopping, one you’ll never see on Instagram. No piled-up shopping bags, no “haul” videos, no compulsory excitement in front of a shop window. In fact, sometimes you go home without having bought anything at all. Or maybe you’ve already “bought” everything you needed.
And that’s absolutely fine. Laura is the one who leads sustainable shopping tours in Monti. Key words: vintage, second hand and craftsmanship.
Rome Behind the Scenes: The Machine — Trajan’s Markets, when Rome stops being just a backdrop
These aren’t romantic ruins; they’re a machine. Six storeys climbing up the Quirinal, interior spaces that open out and stitch themselves back together, ramps locking different levels into place, a covered gallery linking rooms and functions. As you walk, you realise the plan was drawn to keep people, goods and documents moving – like a contemporary shopping centre, except the idea was born here two thousand years ago. Not a local street market with overlapping voices, but the operational back-room of imperial Rome: tabernae on the street front and, above all, storerooms, offices and archives serving the great Forum of Trajan. Grain, oil, cloth and spices reached Rome through a capillary system of ports, warehouses and administrations. The Markets belong to that network – not the shopfront, but the mechanism that makes the rest possible.
Stories of Home: Geena, henna artist from London
Some people arrive in Rome with a printed itinerary in hand.
Others come with a simpler intention: to pause, breathe, and let themselves be surprised by whatever happens.
When Geena, a professional henna artist from London, booked a week at La Casa al Colosseo, she wasn’t chasing monuments. She was looking for quiet – and for the kind of inspiration that only appears when you finally slow down.
The House Before the House
When I first stepped into this early twentieth-century home, I had a clear, almost physical sensation: it was not asking to be changed, it was asking to be listened to.
There was silence, but not neglect.
The walls, the floors, the traces of time, each spoke in their own way, quietly yet insistently.
Some rooms had been mistreated by makeshift lofts built to “gain space”, but they had taken away the one thing I value most, the breath of high ceilings.
They felt like rooms that had lost their voice, waiting patiently to be seen again.
They did not cry out, they simply waited.
Rome, Scene Open
Right now, the city is hosting the 20th edition of the Rome Film Fest (15–26 October).
If you’re here for a few days, wandering, visiting, simply letting yourself get lost, you might have already felt it.
Reflections from the Tiber
There exists a parallel Rome, one that isn’t measured in monuments, but in suspended moments.
It’s not made of marathons from one landmark to another, but of patient pauses and sidelong glances.
It’s the city of dawn reflections on the river, of alleyways that guard their silence, of cloisters drawn in quiet geometry.
The Roman Ottobrata
There is a word Romans use that has no real translation: Ottobrata. Literally, it means “the October days”, but in truth it describes something far more elusive: the lingering warmth after summer has gone, the golden afternoons when the sun hangs low, the way people stretch themselves out into the light as if storing it up before November closes in. It is not just climate. It is a shared state of mind that belongs entirely to this city and to this season.
Inside La Grande Bellezza
There is a moment in Sorrentino’s film when Jep Gambardella says:
“The most significant discovery I made after turning sixty-five is that I can’t waste any more time doing things I don’t want to do.”
Roman stories
Not every journey begins in the same way. Some are measured in miles, others in museum tickets or snapshots collected along the way. But there are journeys that begin between the pages of a book.
My Rome, one step at a time
Much of this blog will follow, though not always, the path of a small guide I wrote and continue to update for my guests. A guide to the everyday Rome, the city I actually live in. Not the postcard Rome, but the one that reveals itself to those who stay a while.
Who I Am (and Why This Space Exists)
My name is Stephanie Fazio. For years I worked in contemporary art, founding and directing a foundation in Rome. Exhibitions, residencies, institutional projects: work I loved deeply, but which at some point was no longer enough.