What map of Rome to buy
Part 2

We'll finish this subject by saying a little more about the forementioned Daddy of them all, the 'Guidaverde A-Z L'AutoStradario':
This map of Rome's streets and outskirts is not really intended for tourists; it's more for people who actually live in Rome or are planning staying here for some time and really want to get to know their way around the place. It's a proper pocket atlas of the city and is built to last.
For a start, although it's a fairly compact paperback-sized soft-back publication, it's properly bound, with thread-stitched quires and printed on good quality paper. Five different scales are used throughout the book, from 1:40.000 for suburban areas as far out as the beach at Ostia Lido, right up to 1:7000 for the central area, which is colour-coded in blue pages, instead of green like the rest of the book. There's also a map of Fiumicino Airport which must have been a kindly after-thought as this is not mentioned on the masterplan on the fly-leaf spread. There's a map of the subway system, which you don't see on many other streetmaps of Rome, and also a schematic of the 'GRA' (Rome's ringroad/beltway) and all its junctions.
In fact all the major roads for some twenty miles around Rome are shown in the book, together with their names and numbers, so it's also good driver's guide to Rome.

If you're planning on staying in Rome for quite a while and starting a serious relationship with this city, driving around and across it regularly, this is the map to get. It even has a little 'you are here' icon at the top of each page, showing, well.. 'where you are' in the general jungle of things. That sounds obvious we know, but we've rarely come across this startlingly simple but useful feature in any map of a city before.

The Guidaverde is printed in full colour, easy to view and read, and every page has a half-inch overlap border around each edge, even down the centre join, to make it easier to follow roads across the pages. There's a picture guide of the chief sight-seeing landmarks with their map references, some more train-lines
mapped out, a list of repair phone-numbers for every make of car, and even a list of local FM radio stations,
of which there are many, (though mostly dance rubbish). Really, it's as if someone sat down and said 'Let's make the best street-map we can'. And they did. We have only one thing against it, but a minor one; there are no lines drawn to indicate the path the subway lines take across or underneath the city, like the London A-Z has, although the stations themselves are marked of course.

Oh and one more thing missing which in fact no map of Rome we've ever seen remembers to include: There's a foot-tunnel which runs about half a mile underneath the city, from the Largo Federico Fellini at the top of Via Veneto, all the way down to the subway station at Piazza di Spagna. We've even met some Romans that don't know about this, but you do now, thanks to the tireless efforts of the team at Romebuddy.

Three maps then - Just staying overnight? - Nick your landlady's Tutto Citta.
Staying a few days or more and wanna see all the sights? Get the Roma Metro-Bus Map, or the Falk Plan, if you can still find one.
Planning on hanging around Rome for a while and getting serious? Then it's the Guideverde A-Z. We
bought ours at the Economy Book & Video Centre a shop specialising in English books on Via Torino. You can get the Falk nearby at the Nel bookstore on Via Nazionale.

Finally again, don't forget you can also check out our own online street maps of Rome which completely cover the extremities of the average tourist's wanderings around central Rome; from the Vatican cathedral on the west side, across to Termini station on the east, and from the Villa Borghese gardens in the north of the city centre, down to the rambling medieval markets and piazzas of the Trastevere 'village' south of the river.

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