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day-trips · 3 min read
Day Trips from Rome: Where to Go
The best day trips from Rome by train or coach — Tivoli's fountains and Hadrian's Villa, ancient Ostia Antica, and the lakeside towns of the Castelli Romani.
By Todo Rome · Published 2025-01-01
Tivoli: Fountains and an Emperor's Retreat
An hour east of Rome by regional train or coach, Tivoli holds two UNESCO sites that pair naturally into one full day. Villa d'Este is a Renaissance cardinal's fantasy of terraced gardens and hundreds of fountains, some musical, cut into the hillside in the 1550s — genuinely one of the great garden designs in Europe. Hadrian's Villa, a few kilometres away, is the vast, sprawling ruin of the emperor's private retreat — a scale model of the empire's greatest hits (an Egyptian canal, a Greek theatre, a miniature version of the Athenian Stoa) built for one man's leisure. Coach tours combine both with transfers; independent travellers can reach Tivoli by regional train from Roma Tiburtina, then a local bus or taxi between the two sites.
Ostia Antica: Pompeii Without the Crowds
Rome's ancient port city, abandoned and buried in river silt rather than volcanic ash, is extraordinarily well preserved and a fraction as crowded as Pompeii — mosaic floors, a working amphitheatre, multi-storey apartment blocks (insulae) that give a clearer sense of ordinary Roman life than almost anywhere else in Italy. Thirty minutes from central Rome on the regional train from Piramide station (covered by a standard Rome public transport ticket), making this the easiest and cheapest genuinely great day trip on this list.
Castelli Romani: Wine and Lake Towns
The volcanic hills southeast of Rome hold a string of small towns — Frascati (the wine), Castel Gandolfo (the papal summer residence, on a crater lake), Nemi (wild strawberries and another crater lake) — that make for an easy half-day or full-day escape with lunch built around local white wine and porchetta. Best reached by car or a guided coach tour; train and bus connections between the individual towns are workable but slower than most visitors expect.
The Appian Way: A Half-Day, Not a Full One
Unlike the trips above, the Via Appia Antica doesn't require leaving Rome at all — it's within the city's own edge, reachable by bus, and easily done as a half-day rather than a full one. A bike tour along the original Roman paving, past pine-lined tombs, out to the underground catacombs of San Callisto, covers kilometres of early Christian burial tunnels that most day-trip itineraries skip entirely in favour of Tivoli or Ostia. Worth combining with one of the trips above if you have the stamina, or standing alone as a lighter half-day.
Orvieto and Umbria (Further Afield)
For a full day trip with a genuinely different landscape, Orvieto's cathedral and hilltop old town are roughly ninety minutes by direct train — doable but tight if you want more than a few hours there. Best attempted with an early start.
Planning Notes
Regional trains (marked "R" or "RV" on Trenitalia) are considerably cheaper than the high-speed Frecce services and entirely adequate for Tivoli and Ostia Antica, both under an hour away. Buy tickets in advance online or via the Trenitalia app — queues at station ticket offices can eat into your day. For the Castelli Romani, a half-day or full-day small-group tour is usually more time-efficient than public transport unless you're committing to just one town.