Airfares

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for getting the cheapest tickets. About the best you can do is sign up for fare alerts on websites like Kayak and various airlines that fly out of your home airport. Watch the fares for awhile so you get a sense of how fares are running. Then you will be able to recognize a good price when you see one. The key thing is being ready to jump as soon as you see something you like. Good fares don't last long. Oh, and after buying - stop looking at the fares.

Use a site like Kayak or Hipmunk to check prices. Do you want the cheapest flight or a good experience? Right now, Kayak is showing flights into London back from Rome, May 15 to June 6, at $1028 on U.S. Air, which is not an airline I would consider ( bad reputation and we don't like flights that connect on the east coast). For $11 more you can fly British Airways, non-stop to London outbound and one stop ( also in London) on the return. That is a good price for British from the west coast in May and I would book that now. But that is just me. Others might advise you to wait- but make sure the people saying that have experience with flights from the West coast. It is a different market than East coast.

As mentioned above, there is no good or bad time to find deals. A friend of mine flies to Italy twice a year and she never books the tickets more than a week or two in advance. Yet she always manages to find great deals, albeit often with multiple stops (can't remember the websites she uses). For convenience, however, coming also from California, I will always look for a flight that doesn't connect in the East Coast. Even if I have to pay a little more, I always try to fly directly from California to Europe through the Arctic Circle route. Connecting in the East Coast dramatically prolongs the journey and increases the chance of missing the connection due to unpredictable weather in the East Coast. If you can get a non stop to London and back from Rome also via London (only Alitalia flies non stop from FCO to LAX) you should try. British Airways mentioned above sounds good.

That $1040 on British Airways sounds pretty good to me. I am familiar with Seattle prices, but I think they are pretty comparable to LAX. That is as low as I've seen for prime time travel on BA.