Is any tourist attraction on earth really worth enduring a madding crowd to see? My mother, denied international travel for half her life by the Soviet state, made up for this deprivation by becoming the world’s most fanatically rigorous tourist. A major site left unseen or portion of a museum unexamined was, to her, as morally repugnant as leaving food on the plate or abandoning a book half-way through.  

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I, spoiled frequent flyer that I am, find crowds the ultimate holiday buzz-killer. Nowhere is this more true than in Rome, which clocked a record 52.92 million overnight visitors for the Papal Jubilee year of 2025 and, according to pre-bookings tracked by the local tourist board, is expecting even more tourists this summer. Luckily, there is a solution. So loaded is the Eternal City with extraordinary museums, churches, hidden piazzas and parks that there are several un-crowded alternatives to every heaving tourist site.  

A basic rule of thumb is to avoid going anywhere near the Colloseum, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon and especially the Trevi Fountain any time before midnight. So crowded is the Trevi that last year the city authorities even introduced tickets to allow you to get close. Wait till the wee small hours to experience the magic of the place, the later the better. The same applies to Piazza Navona, which, being very large, is bearable during the day but lovely only in the dead of night when Borromini’s fountains are illuminated by the reflected light of shimmering underwater bulbs.  

St Peter’s Basilica is, in my opinion, Rome’s most overrated architectural monument. Add a minimum of an hour’s wait under the hot sun to shuffle through airport-style security and it’s unbearable. The antidote is Donato Bramante’s Tempietto in the cloister of San Pietro in Montorio, a tiny jewel of Doric high renaissance architecture built in 1502. It is as tiny and perfect as St Peter’s is stupefying and grandiose. If you can’t do........

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