Rome: New Rome Free Tour

Since we do a lot of research on TripAdvisor we found a way to see the city for free (plus tip) with the New Rome Free Tour. It had super high reviews on TripAdvisor so we added it to our itinerary to do one evening. The leader of the tour was very friendly and enthusiastic and gave us a few tidbits about the city that we wouldn't have gotten with only our Rick Steves guidebook. He gave us the courage to drink water out of the public water fountains and explained a little about them. He also gave us some pointers on how to cross the street and showed us that pedestrians have the right of way. So in the sense that we had a "local" showing us around part of the city, it was a good experience. However, there were a handful of stops on the tour that we didn't have much interest in seeing, which is always the risk with a group tour. So we spent extra time seeing these sights, and less time seeing the ones that we were more interested in, like the Pantheon.

We should have gotten to the meeting point (at the bottom of the Spanish Steps) a little earlier so we could've at least climbed the stairs. This was the only time we got to see them and we met up with the group and never came back.

Since the tour starts at 5pm every day, the tour isn't great for photos because it starts getting dark rather quickly. We were able to get some decent photos of the Pantheon from the outside, but inside it was really dark. And again, we never made it back here to get photos inside during daylight hours.

The one site we saw after dark that actually worked out for the better was Trevi Fountain. We're glad that we got to see this all lit up at night and weren't upset that we didn't get to see it during the day.

Summary: Overall, we wouldn't do this tour again but we did pick up a few helpful hints that made it not a total disappointment. It is a solid operation, led by a couple of fun people but we should've known that we wouldn't enjoy the whole tour when over half of the sights on the list didn't sound interesting to us in the first place.