Rome - The Rione

Rome holds its history the way stone holds heat, not visibly but pervasively, still present against the skin long after the source has moved on. The rione provides the frame for understanding why the city remains coherent despite its scale. Descended from the fourteen administrative zones Augustus drew across the city in 7 BCE, Rome’s twenty-two current rioni function as overlapping villages with independent rhythms, each with its own morning bar, its own Saturday market, its own particular sense of itself. The best itineraries are essentially rione-led, even when the traveller does not know it.

Where to Stay

Hotel de Russie (Rocco Forte Hotels) stands on Via del Babuino in the Tridente, where the three streets diverge from Piazza del Popolo toward the Spanish Steps. The terraced garden behind the main building, descending the Pincian hillside through four planted levels of jasmine and orange trees, is the most generous private garden in central Rome and the detail guests consistently return for. Portrait Roma (Lungarno Collection), fourteen suites on Via Bocca di Leone above the Ferragamo flagship, is the most precisely positioned address in the Tridente for the intersection of fashion, discretion, and a rooftop with an unobstructed view of the Steps. The Hotel Eden (Dorchester Collection), a few streets north near Villa Borghese, carries a new Michelin star at La Terrazza following the 2026 Guide, where Chef Salvatore Bianco’s kitchen runs on the top floor with the city spread below.

Where to Eat

La Pergola has held three Michelin stars since 2005, Chef Heinz Beck’s contemporary Italian-Mediterranean kitchen at the Waldorf Astoria Rome Cavalieri on Monte Mario, at an elevation that makes the city a backdrop rather than a context. Il Pagliaccio, at Via dei Banchi Vecchi 129a near Campo de’ Fiori, holds two stars in a room with fewer than forty covers, where Chef Anthony Genovese runs a menu that processes Italian technique through direct reference to Japanese, Malaysian, and Calabrian cooking. The result is specific in a way that requires eating rather than describing. Roscioli, on Via dei Giubbonari in the Rione Sant’Angelo, operates as both delicatessen and restaurant. The cacio e pepe uses aged Pecorino Romano at a maturity where the wheel is brought to the table as the central act of the service.

Where to Drink

Drink Kong (World’s 50 Best Bars 2025, #40) is set at Piazza di San Martino ai Monti in the Monti rione, where Patrick Pistolesi presents cocktails without descriptors. The menu lists only the base spirit. The drink arrives as a structured experience rather than a category, and the room rewards repeat visits. Freni e Frizioni (World’s 50 Best Bars 2025, #58), in Trastevere, occupies a converted car mechanic’s workshop with a street terrace that opens at dusk. The aperitivo programme draws much of the neighbourhood through the hours between seven and ten. The Jerry Thomas Project, behind an unmarked door near Via della Croce in the Tridente, still runs a password admission system, a deliberate commitment to pre-Prohibition cocktail form and a quality of ceremony that has sustained its reputation for fifteen years.

How to Move

The rione structure is the argument for walking. Trastevere and Monti reward slow morning circuits; Testaccio, south of the Aventine, holds the city’s most serious food market and a concentration of neighbourhood trattorias that have not needed to change much in twenty years. Pigneto, east of the historic centre, is the least tourist-facing of the inner neighbourhoods, with a younger, looser evening culture and a food and drink scene that has not yet fully resolved itself, which is part of what makes it worth the journey. The centro storico is compact enough that almost nothing within it is more than three kilometres from anything else.