20 min
50 min
A · 19
11.5 / km²
1
2
1,807
+13% vs city
Counted from OpenStreetMap and Inside Airbnb (CC BY 4.0)
Staying in Prati
Prati was laid out in the 1880s on the flood plain north of the Vatican, which is why it is the one central district with straight streets, wide pavements and buildings that all went up at once. It contains the Vatican Museums entrance at one corner and Castel Sant'Angelo at the other, and between them, nothing a guidebook lists.
That is the trade. Rooms cost less than the centro storico for the same star rating, the metro is genuinely useful here with line A at Ottaviano and Lepanto, and Via Cola di Rienzo is a real shopping street rather than a tourist one. The restaurants are priced for the lawyers and broadcasters who work in the district, not for people staying one night.
Against that: Piazza Navona is a twenty-minute walk over Ponte Cavour, the Colosseum is forty, and there is no reason to be on these streets at 22:00 because everything local shuts. Families and anyone staying a week get the most out of it. Anyone here for three nights of sightseeing will resent the walk by the second day.
What works
- Cheaper than the streets around Piazza Navona for the same room
- Metro A at Ottaviano and Lepanto, plus tram 19 at Risorgimento
- The Vatican Museums queue starts a ten-minute walk from your door
- Restaurants priced for the people who work here, not for visitors
What does not
- Twenty minutes to Piazza Navona and forty to the Colosseum, on foot
- Nothing to see in the district itself once the Vatican is done
- Shops and kitchens close early and Sunday is genuinely dead
- The blocks are handsome but repetitive, and it feels like an office district
Wandering around the shopping and residential district of Prati, close to the Vatican, you may notice rather a lot of lawyers' nameplates outside buildings.The square is generally very crowded, even on weekdays, even during rain.