Why you should avoid Rome in 2025 (and where to go instead)

In 2025 Rome is hosting the Jubilee of Hope, a Catholic celebration that happens once every 25 years. The Jubilee begins when Pope Francis celebrates Mass in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City on December 24, 2024, and runs until the end of 2025. As well as celebrations of faith and worship, the mega-event will encompass cultural events, saints canonised and a Pilgrimage of Hope that takes in churches and other places of spiritual significance.

The Jubilee will begin on December 24 in Vatican City.Credit: iStock

The Jubilee is expected to attract 35 million visitors to Rome’s Holy City. That’s in addition to non-Jubilee travellers, and Rome attracted 35 million visitors in 2023. Anyone planning to visit Rome in 2025 can expect premium hotel prices, attractions even more packed than usual, crowded markets and harassed locals.

A Jubilee of Hope (see iubilaeum2025.va) is something the world needs right now, and the Eternal City is investing massively in public works that will improve the visitor experience well into the future. The transport network is undergoing a major upgrade while the city is racing to complete more than 3000 public works that will put a fresh shine on some of its favourite attractions, such as the Pantheon and Piazza Navona. That should make post-Jubilee visits a sensation.

Meanwhile, if Italy is on your wish-list for 2025, you might want to steer clear of the capital unless you’re planning to join the pilgrims who will flock to the Vatican. Most of those Jubilee visitors will not venture outside Rome, and happily, Italy has much to discover outside its capital, including parts that see few tourists.

Umbria

Umbria is the green heart of Italy.Credit: iStock

Stretched across the hills and valleys on the western side of the Apennines between Rome and Tuscany, Umbria is the green heart of Italy. Olive groves creep across its hillsides, giving way to forests of oak, hornbeam and juniper and bald meadows where shepherds with enormous maremma dogs guard their flocks from wolves. Solitary monasteries are plumbed into its hillsides and hill towns ringed by fortified walls peer down into the valleys, rising to the church spires that crown their summits.

Umbria’s hillsides are threaded with trails trodden by pilgrims en route to Rome, while down on the wide plain of the Clitunno River, Roman legions once marched along the Via Flaminia. It’s a place of seasonal pleasures, ruled by the cycles of the vineyard and the olive tree. May is the month of poppies, followed by fireflies and sunflowers in June, heralding the mid-year Spoleto Festival, the mid-July Umbria Jazz festival and Spello’s Infiorate, when its streets are paved with flowers. Throughout August the local communes sponsor cultural festivals and exhibitions in the local piazzas, culminating in giant open-air feasts. Come September, the markets are ablaze with a rich palette of the harvest and attention focuses on that most Umbrian of all the organs, the stomach. In October and November the region celebrates the sagres, communal feasts that involve whole communities.

The hill town of Trevi hosts a sausage festival that packs out the town for days. The clear, bright skies of autumn melt into the November truffle season, another seminal moment in the Umbrian calendar. One of the classic dishes of the Umbrian kitchen is pasta with grated truffles moistened with local olive oil – simple and yet sublime.

Emilia Romagna

Lunch in Bologna, but food is only part of the picture in this region.Credit: iStock

What’s not to like about a region that’s home to Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, aged balsamic vinegars, lasagna al ragu, prosciutto di Parma, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis and one of Italy’s superstar restaurants, where whiskery men stalk the hillsides searching for truffles and where tourists are thin on the ground? Sandwiched between Tuscany, Lombardy and the Veneto, Emilia Romagna has been called Italy’s greatest gastronomic treasure.

Its capital is Bologna, a handsome, terracotta-brick medieval city that gives its name to the world’s favourite spaghetti dish, but food is only part of the picture. Since the time of the Etruscans, Emilia Romagna has been rich, its crops and cows nourished by the fine, dense alluvial soil of the Po Valley.

As well as filling its markets, the wealth spawned the cities of Parma, Modena and Ferrara, and endowed them with noble churches, regal palaces, galleries and festivals, and a population that looks like people just stepped off the fashion catwalk. Parma’s gigantic Pilotta Palace, the Byzantine frescoes in Ravenna’s churches, Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore and the Anatomical Theatre of the world’s oldest continually operating university testify to the wealth and splendour dating back to ancient times.

Naples

Naples is one of the most passionate, authentic and likeable of all Italian cities.Credit: iStock

Mad, bad and dangerous by reputation, Naples sits a long way down on the travel hot lists. Yet for those prepared to overlook the tawdry details and sail in with an open mind, Naples is one of the most passionate, authentic and likeable of all Italian cities. Crammed into the narrow shelf between the waterfront and the steep ramp of the Vomero district, the heart of Naples feels tight.

The streets are narrow canyons overshadowed by cliff-like apartments, too narrow for traffic for the most part, except for the helmetless sub-teens who slalom their Vespas through the twisting alleyways that cascade down from Corso Vittorio Emanuele, beware!

This is a city that bares its soul in public. Apartments are small, families are large and not much is private. Washing lines ladder the narrow chasms between the city’s apartment blocks. Laundry fluttering across the skyline is the flag of Naples.

Star attraction is the fabulous Farnese Collection in the National Archaeological Museum. As well as one of the finest collections of Greco-Roman antiquities, the museum also features some of the best artworks collected from the Vesuvius towns in the aftermath of the volcano – paintings, mosaics, jewellery and domestic objects that show a rich and sophisticated culture with a taste for leisure.

The one essential church is the Chapel of Sansevero, the creation of Raimondo di Sangro, known as the Leonardo da Vinci of 18th-century Naples. Di Sangro commissioned a series of marble statues that for sheer finesse rival the works of Bernini and Michelangelo. Every detail – rose garlands, hair, eyes, fingernails – is cast in exquisite detail. The centrepiece is a theatrically veiled Christ lying under a marble shroud so realistic you’d swear it was shrink-wrapped.