How to Spot a Tourist Trap: Street Food with a Licensed Guide

Part of what you are paying for here is being taught to tell a real place from a bad one. The guides say so directly: by the end you should be able to read a menu board, a display counter and a location, and know which of the three restaurants on a given square is worth sitting down in. In a city centre where the ratio is not in your favour, that is worth more than any single tasting. The food is Roman street food and all of it is in the price. Supplì, the deep-fried rice balls. Pizza. Proper panini. More along the way. The guides are licensed, which in Italy means an examined qualification rather than a job title. The group is capped at fourteen, close to semi-private. The walk starts at the fountain in Piazza San Simeone and works down Via del Governo Vecchio, then to Campo de' Fiori, where morning departures go into the fresh market and evening ones do not. Through the Jewish Ghetto for one of the Roman classics. It ends at Largo di Torre Argentina, where Caesar was killed, with artisanal gelato. Along the way the guide covers the murder of Caesar, the theatre of Pompey the Great and the Pantheon, which you see from the outside on this tour rather than going in. Book it for your first day and the rest of the trip gets easier.