what's the best street map of rome to buy?

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Before we answer that question, you might like to click the link below for:

instant on-screen
street maps of Rome...

...zoomable to super-high magnification of the most popular central areas for sightseeing, namely the Central Historical and Trastevere districts. We hope they'll whet your appetite for exploring the tiny maze-like but facinatingly picturesque streets of this ancient Italian city without fear of getting lost.

However...
...when you actually get to Rome, you may wish to purchase a more detailed guidebook with an index of street names. As there are perhaps more than a hundred different maps, guides and guide books of Rome available for sale from bookshops at home or in Italy, as well as from street vendors in Rome itself, we thought we'd offer some recommendations on which of these may be the most useful to purchase.
Most are pretty much the same, but on the other hand, we live here in Rome and have had to seriously get to know the city, so taking the time to choose a good map was important to us. Below we discuss our favourites...

recommended maps of rome:

The 'Guidaverde A-Z L'AutoStradario' is a superb publication, and excellent value at L.15.000 (about £6), and we'll tell you more about it in a moment after first mentioning two other maps you should also know about.

The first is free and is the 'Tutto Citta', which is given free with every phone book to all telephone subscribers. There's a new one published every year, and if you're friendly with the people you're staying with, they might let you borrow it. Even if you're not friendly with the pensione management, they've probably got half a dozen back-issues from previous years stuffed in the cupboard under the phone, and won't notice if you swipe one for a day or two. You will put it back before you go though won't you?
The only drawback with this map is its size - It's as big as a magazine, and thus clumsy and fiddly to use, is printed on cheap paper, so gets ripped and dog-eared easily, has an awkward-to-follow page-numbering and street-indexing system, doesn't indicate where the subway stations are, and also carries a lot of advertisements. But it's free if you can get hold of one, and better than a kick in the teeth...

There's dozens of different maps available in the bookshops and kiosks of Rome when you get here, or in fact any halfway decent local bookstore in your home town should stock at least one map of Rome that you could buy well in advance of coming to Italy, to orient yourself with the city.

But when you get here, a pretty good deal is the
'ROMA METRO-BUS' map, published by M.R.S. (Map Studio Roma). It folds out to reveal almost the whole city (or the whole of the parts that the average tourist would need anyway, ie, you mostly ain't gonna need to know the suburbs in detail), clearly drawn and labelled streets in soft but clear colours. It also contains a bus map of the most central area, a list of most of the central bus route numbers, a subway map, a topographical map of the main motorway roads out of Rome, a list of theaters, some other bits and bobs of info, and most important, an alphabetized street index, all for about four or five Euros. I'd go with this one.

At one time, an even better map for short-term visitors to Rome who were intending to do the normal tourist-route was once the 'Falk Plan'. Problem is, it seems not to be sold anymore
It cost about 6 Euros and was in fact a map of ingenious design that handles like a book, allowing you to see a large area of the city on each page by folding down flaps. Absolutely marvellous if you're making long traverses of the city on foot, as you don't have to flip pages back and forth all the time or wrestle to manipulate a large fold-out map. It's hard to explain it really, but easier to understand by seeing one.

The reason we're fussy about street maps is because we don't see any point in buying a map which doesn't come with a street index. And normal fold-out maps are fine for rambling through the countryside, or useful for driving if you have a navigator with you, but in cities, fold-outs can be dashed awkward to use and when you've got them all folded out and flapping in the Roman breeze, they mark you out from a great distance as a tourist. That's why we liked the Falk Plan so much; It had a complete written street index but was surprisingly compact and you could use it neatly and discreetly. It costed a little extra, but it was worth it. Too bad it doesnt sem to exist eny more. if anyone does track down a stockist, let us know.

On the next page we'll tell you more about our favourite commerially available map of Rome, the Guidaverde A-Z L'AutoStradario...

...click for more map recommendations