Rome tours and day trips from Rome including Colosseum tours, Rome walking tours & food tours. With small group sizes and passionate local guides.

ROME: In Rome and its surrounding region, Lazio, you’ll encounter two pasta dishes as robust and hearty as Romans themselves: spaghetti alla carbonara (with sauce made of pecorino cheese and guanciale (pork cheek), with an egg whisked in at the finish, and spaghetti cacio e pepe (made with cheese and black pepper). Skip those touristy places with long menus featuring photos of their food, and instead sample one of these Roman classics at a simple trattoria. TUSCANY: Tuscany may be every traveler’s dream of Italy, but it’s also a meat-lover’s dream come true. Even if you only eat meat once in a while, Tuscany is the place to indulge in a bistecca alla Fiorentina, a thick-cut steak of Chianina beef that usually weighs in at an artery-busting 1-2 kilograms. Cooked over an open flame, it’s seared on the outside and very rare on the inside—we’ve even had a waiter refuse our request to give ours a few more minutes on the fire—and dressed with olive oil and salt. Expect to spend €50 and up for this monster cut of meat, and look for places with the hearth ablaze and slabs of raw meat on display – it’s all part of the experience.

If it’s hot, airy churches like San Giovanni provide the weary pilgrim with a spiritual and physical oasis. Most likely, you’ll be sweaty and your feet sore from treading the miles of cobblestone streets in the Eternal City. Walk up the worn marble steps of San Giovanni and enter. Head down the left aisle and, at the end, you’ll notice a striking silver reliquary in the shape of…a foot. Inside this reliquary is the foot of Saint Mary Magdalen. (This is Rome, folks, so get used to seeing bones encased in elaborate gold and silver surrounded by vigil candles and corpses under altars and many other things that will certainly strike some Americans as odd or macabre. The Church has been doing this for ages.)