Out of my four stops in Civitavecchia, I only took the bus once — and not by choice. It was during the pandemic, when the cruise line required everyone to disembark on an organized excursion. The guide was genuinely good, but we had time left over in the afternoon and hit some traffic on the way back, which ate into our sightseeing time. Every other time, it's been the train. And that's not a coincidence.

I've been to Rome more than a dozen times in my life — mostly by plane, once even by car for work — so I know exactly what getting around that city is like: huge, chaotic, heavy traffic. That's why, except for that one forced excursion, I've always chosen the train.

The reason is simple: the train drops you right in the city center, at Termini station. If you go by bus or taxi, on top of the travel time you have to add the traffic on the ring road around Rome before you even reach the center. The train skips all of that.

Here's a fun fact I also leave in the guide: Termini isn't named after "terminal." It comes from "Terme" — because one of ancient Rome's main thermal bath complexes stood right next to where the station is now.

Talking real numbers, here's what I actually paid for each option:

And it's not just about price: the train lets you do a linear route instead of a circular one. You can head back from a different station than the one you arrived at — near the Vatican, for example — instead of having to loop back to the exact spot where you got off.

The connecting bus is paid for when you board, cash or card, no hassle. Train tickets can be bought through Trenitalia's official website (I recommend this — it lets you travel with more peace of mind), or once you're there, at the automated machines or the ticket counter.

My timing advice: if the ship announces disembarkation at 8am, I'd be ready by 7:30. They usually give you a set time, but you can often get off earlier — and if you're among the first off, you beat the bulk of the crowd, including people on the ship's own organized excursions, who tend to disembark later than announced.

For the return, I'd plan to arrive back in Civitavecchia (the town, not the ship) about two hours before the ship's departure, at the very latest. Why so much margin? Because if the train runs late, it's only a five-minute taxi ride from the station to the ship, and trains run frequently — if you miss one, there's usually another in 10-20 minutes. And even though nothing serious has ever happened to me in Rome across all my cruises, if the ship ever did leave without you, the next port (Genoa, Florence or Naples) has easy, cheap connections back by train or bus.

Across my four stops, I've never had a real train delay — if anything, we've sometimes finished the guided tour early and caught an earlier train back than planned. The only hiccup I remember was with a group of 10-12 people: two of them got off the ship late, caught the next connecting bus, and missed the first train. The fix was simple — instead of meeting at the Moses statue like the rest of the group, we just met up directly at the Colosseum, once the tour was already underway.

The one thing genuinely worth watching for is the heat. In June, July and August, Rome can get brutal, and sometimes the guided tour doesn't have time to finish in full — that's when it's worth cutting your losses and taking a bus to shorten the route.

The fewer people, the easier it is to move around — especially in crowded spots like the Trevi Fountain or the Colosseum, where getting the right photo angle is a very different experience with 4 people versus 20. I've done it with groups as small as 4 and as large as 30, and both worked fine.

With kids, they typically get tired halfway through — if it's tiring for an adult, imagine a child. The best fix: stop midway, grab an ice cream, and take a bus or taxi back to the station instead of finishing the full route on foot. The experience is still great for them, they just don't have the same stamina. It's similar with older travelers — they tend to tire sooner too, and shortening the route the same way works well.

You already know the first one if you've read my other post about Rome: going by road instead of by train. But the mistake underneath all of it, in my view, is not planning ahead. If your destination is more than half an hour of travel from the ship, you have two real options: book the cruise's own excursion — which guarantees that if it runs late (this happened to me once in Florence and Pisa, with the bus stuck on the road for hours), the ship waits for you — or go independently, in which case you absolutely need to check schedules in advance. And always, always have someone in the group keeping track of time with an alarm: "we need to be here by this time."

The other mistake, once you're in Rome, is trying to see everything. I was recently interviewing Costa Cruceros' head of sales, and she said exactly this: the most common mistake for first-time cruisers is trying to do and see absolutely everything. Truly enjoying a city is not the same thing as covering it completely.

Civitavecchia itself doesn't offer much beyond a walk around the port — it's not a particularly interesting town. But if you'd rather skip Rome, my real recommendation is Ostia Antica: ancient Rome's port city, remarkably similar to Pompeii in how well-preserved it is, and something almost nobody visits, simply because Rome has so much to offer that people rarely set aside a day for it. You can even climb a four-story building that's two thousand years old. It's genuinely impressive.

The guide to spending one day in Rome takes this exact same information and goes into full detail: which train to catch, where to buy the ticket before you even get off the ship, and the complete itinerary to make the most of every hour you have on land.

Get the guide here → link to linkmate.one/Borja_Rodriguez/p/rome-guide

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