Esquilino

It changes street by street

Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II is the centre of it: the largest square in Rome, arcaded on all four sides, a garden in the middle, and the most international shopping in the city around the edges. This is where Rome's Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian and North African communities have settled, and it's the one place you can eat something other than Italian food properly.

Santa Maria Maggiore holds the western edge. One of the four papal basilicas, with fifth-century mosaics running along the nave that are among the oldest Christian images anywhere, and a coffered ceiling gilded — by tradition, and probably true — with the first gold Columbus brought back from the Americas, given to the Pope by Ferdinand and Isabella. It's free, it's extraordinary, and it's never as busy as it deserves.

And then the streets immediately south and east of the station, which are the ones people mean when they warn you. Transient, badly lit, the usual problems that collect around any large railway terminus in any large European city.

The best-connected point in Rome

Both metro lines stop at Termini. So does the Leonardo Express from Fiumicino, every regional train, and every airport coach. Vittorio Emanuele on Line A puts you on the main square.

If your trip involves day trips by rail, an early flight or a late arrival, being five minutes from Termini is worth real money.

The Colosseum is fifteen minutes' walk south-west. Monti is ten minutes west, and a considerably nicer walk.

The best cheap eating in the centre

Two quite different things going on here.

For Roman food, Trattoria Monti is the standout — family-run, cooking from the Marche rather than strictly Roman, and an egg-yolk-and-ricotta tortello that people reserve weeks ahead for. Small room. Book.

For everything else: this is where you find genuinely good Chinese, Bangladeshi, Eritrean and Indian food in a city that is otherwise famously stubborn about eating anything foreign. Via Principe Eugenio and the streets off Piazza Vittorio.

The Nuovo Mercato Esquilino is worth walking through even if you're not shopping. Spices, whole fish, chillies, produce that never appears in Testaccio. It's the least postcard-like market in Rome and the one professional cooks actually use.

Where we'd tell a friend to stay instead

Monti. Ten minutes' walk, similar money, much more pleasant. That's our honest answer for most people and we'd rather say it plainly.

The real case for Esquilino is transport and price — if you're moving on to Florence in two days, or you land at eleven at night, the proximity to Termini genuinely matters, and the rates are among the lowest in the centre.

The case against: the immediate station surrounds are unpleasant after dark, there's more petty crime and street drinking than elsewhere centrally, and the feel is transient rather than neighbourly. If you do book here, look north and west toward Santa Maria Maggiore rather than south and east of the tracks, and take a taxi rather than walking back late. That single decision removes most of the problem.