Italy in April and May

You might want to be reading up on tourism in Rome, and a Rick Steves Italy would be a great place to start. It can help you decide what to do once you get to Rome. Most get reservations at the Vatican Museum to avoid huge waiting lines.
Your stand by flight status kind of puts your hotel plans on hold. I would suggest you carry a Chromebook or laptop where you can make travel arrangements from your departing airport. Once you get your boarding passes, go on Booking.com to make room reservations--before flying out. It wouldn't hurt to have some places scouted out to stay at your price range.
We're leaving for Rome in 4 weeks, and I'll be carrying a T Moble phone with the $.20 per minute voice plan and unlimited text and data. It works seamlessly in Europe with your home phone service--and hopefully they won't wake you up at 3:30 a.m.
Most hotels and B&B's now have free WiFi in Europe, and many restaurants also have it if you make a purchase. We communicate online when we're traveling--just like when we're home.
I don't obtain Euros until hitting the airport, and I use ATM's only from a bank.
Food's everywhere in Rome (and Italy), and I'd ask your hotel/B&B hosts where they suggest you go for meals.
For a day trip, you could take the 70 minute train ride up to Orvieto--a very nice and popular hill town. You could also go down to Naples and see Pompeii, but it's a much longer trip.

I would suggest you hire a personal guide for a day. Tell them what you want to see and maximize your experience. Thay are well worth it.

Hi Kris!
The best thing for you to do right now is get a good guidebook and spend some time with it! Advance research is highly advised and very helpful when starting from Square One. It will answer some of your questions and help you ask others here which are more specific. As you've found the RS forum, the RS Rome guidebook will be the logical companion resource.

It'll also be helpful to break your questions - once you've done some reading - into individual posts as trying to cover everything in a single post will eventually result in a very long, unwieldy thread both for you and for us to wade through! Make it easier on yourself, OK? Post by topic: transport, attractions, hotel, etc. Also, provide the exact dates of your trip, including date/location your flying from to the date you fly home.

The good news is the Rome is relatively easy, and settling in for a week with a day trip or two is a great way to get to know the Eternal City. There are umptybumpty things to see and do but you should make your own must-see list first, and then we can help flesh it out a bit, talk advance tickets, etc.

Whether to take tours or not is a personal preference; some people enjoy them and some don't so there's no right or wrong. We haven't had the need for them in Rome (yet) however there's an attraction or two which require them, and there can be specific advantages to booking one for the Vatican Museums.

Thank you to everyone who shared there advice. I will Get right on it by starting with a guide book😀