Day trips from Rome

Freccia tickets are available now for your dates. What a great way of saving money for that extra scoop of gelato!

Have you thought of: Ostia Antica? Orvieto? Frascati? These are all good one-train day trips from Rome. I'll be interested in hearing from others since I have 2 weeks in Rome coming up and am always looking for new places to discover.

Robert, thanks for your response. I'll probably book my Freccia tickets this week, but I may go down to Naples during my second week, and those tickets won't open until three months before. I'm thinking about Orvieto, Bagnoregio, Civita as a day trip. If I leave early in the morning from Rome and take the last bus from Bagnoregio back to Orvieto, I think it could make for a nice day. There are trains all day long back and forth from Rome, and the bus schedule seems pretty straightforward. I've never seen any of the hill towns, so it would be nice a break from all the hustle and bustle of Rome.

For "...a break from all the hustle and bustle of Rome" check out Ostia Antica and see what you think. Easy to get to on public transit and has many ruins and much history without the crowds of Rome itself.

The nice small towns north of Rome generally require train+bus or two buses. You'll find that in some cases it appears the train goes there, but the town is on top of a hill and a bus or taxi is still pretty much required. I'm sure you're familiar with that phenomenon from Tuscany.

I spent 2 weeks in Orvieto last summer and would recommend not squeezing Orvieto and Civita di Bagnoregio into a single day. Orvieto is really nice to wander in and has some actual sights that you'll want to visit--definitely the cathedral, possibly a museum or two. The train station is below the town; you take a funicular up to the old town, then must walk 10 to 15 minutes to the center of town. There are side streets to explore, too. Check with the tourist office for walking tours. It's not a tiny town and would make a nice day by itself; it's truly worth a two-night stop, though I understand why you won't be doing that.

Although Rome2Rio says the bus from Orvieto to Bagnoregio takes 23 minutes, I thought it was longer than that. Maybe I ended up with a strange connection somewhere. Once in Bagnoregio, though, you must walk a good way (or wait for a shuttle bus), and you're still not where you want to be, in Civita. It will almost certainly take longer than you expect to reach Civita. At the least, check that bus schedule carefully and try to verify the return times with the driver on the outbound bus. Remember that buses don't run at all on Sundays.

Bolsena is small and on a lake; it's not a top sight, but there's some old architecture and the lake setting gives it a different feel. I found it very pleasant for a few hours. There's a castle you can visit. Accessible by bus from either Orvieto or Viterbo (which is on a spur railroad line and about 1:35 from Rome). I wonder whether Bolsena and Civita could be combined into one day-trip. It seems theoretically possible by changing buses in Montefiascone; Rome2Rio says the trip takes 2 hours. I think Montefiascone is one of the hill towns I noticed but didn't visit. I'm not sure the bus stop is near the old town, though.

In that same area and also accessible by bus from Viterbo is the small and very picturesque town of Tuscania. I liked this more than Bolsena, but it's a hill town without a lake. It might be pretty similar to the Tuscan hill towns you've seen. Not an awful lot of other tourists around, which is always nice.

I used Viterbo primarily as a base for side-trips, but it's a walled city with a large historic center, and you could probably spend a full day there easily. It's not a small town; though not huge, it has two train stations. I should perhaps warn that the tourist office there, though friendly and trying to be helpful, gave me serious misinformation about buses to surrounding towns on more than one occasion. There are (or were last year) at least two different places from which buses depart and I had a difficult time finding out which buses left from each, and when. One of the departure points is an actual bus station with clear signs, but not all buses to the surrounding towns leave from there. Unfortunately, that bus station is a bit out of the way, so it's not terribly convenient to just pop in and check the schedule.

I've not visited Tarquinia (about 2 hours by train+bus from Rome) but it's an historic town with nearby Etruscan tombs.

You should be able to buy your Freccia tickets 120 days out.

Tivoli is a nice day trip for Villa d'Este. Hadrian's Villa is harder to get to without a car, but the gardens at Villa d'Este are a great couple of hours and the town is nice.

I also loved Tivoli (Villa Gregoriana and the waterfalls as well as Villa d'Este). Bolsena is on the edge of a volcanic crater lake, and the best artiginal gelato in the world is on via Santa Cristina, just past the bus drop off.

Castel Gandolfo and Frascati are also good daytrips.