125 Captivating Rome Quotes to Inspire You

Table of Contents

1 Best Quotes About Rome
2 Rome Quotes by Famous Individuals
3 Rome Travel Quotes
4 Meaningful Rome Quotes
5 Quotes About Ancient Rome
6 Long Rome Quotes
7 Rome Quotes About Food
8 Short Rome Quotes
9 Rome Puns About Food
10 Short Rome Puns for Instagram
11 Best Rome Captions for Instagram
12 Funny Quotes and Captions About Rome
13 Conclusion
14 Pin it for Later

Last updated on February 15th, 2023

Whether you are looking for something to inspire your trip or have already been to Rome and need some catchy phrases to share your experiences, the following list of Rome quotes is sure to help.

The city of Rome is one of the most visited places in the world. Sites like the famous Colosseum, Spanish Steps, and Roman Forum are just a few of the reasons thousands of people stop by each year. Rome is undoubtedly one of the best places to visit in Italy and share your experiences with others.

I’ve covered all the top puns, sayings, captions, and quotes about Rome in one place to help you share those memories of the Eternal City with others.

Found the perfect quote, but still need some more travel advice? Check out my other posts about Rome, including how to visit the city on a budget.

Best Quotes About Rome

“Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; when the Coliseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.’ – Venerable Bede

“When in Rome, live as the Romans do; when elsewhere, live as they live elsewhere.” – Saint Ambrose

“All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveler knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal.” – Richard Le Gallienne

“I love Rome and the way that you can wander around and find something interesting around every street corner. You can smell the history.” – Jonathan Agnew

“In the evening we came upon the Coliseum when it was already twilight. When one looks at it, all else seems little. The edifice is so vast, that one cannot hold the image of it in one’s soul: in memory, we think it smaller, and then return to it again to find it every time greater than before.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Rome is not like any other city. It’s a big museum, a living room that shall be crossed on one’s toes.” – Alberto Sordi

“There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.” – Marcus Aurelius

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” – Edward Gibbon

Rome Quotes by Famous Individuals

“Yes, I finally arrived at this Capital of the World! I now see all the dreams of my youth coming to life. Only in Rome is it possible to understand Rome.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“From the dome of St. Peter’s one can see every notable object in Rome. He can see a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.” – Mark Twain

“I spent a lot of time in Paris, in Milan, and in New York, and Rome is a little bit different. There is something in Rome, incredible, like a Fellini movie. Everybody’s screaming and laughing very loud. It’s something that can give me more energy in terms of freedom.” – Alessandro Michele

“Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” – William Shakespeare

“I sometimes fancy that Rome will crowd everything else out of my heart.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Each, in its own way, was unforgettable It would be difficult to – Rome! By all means, Rome. I will cherish my visit here in memory as long as I live.” – Audrey Hepburn

“I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble” – Augustus

“I just love Rome It really does cast a spell on you.” – Alec Baldwin

Rome Travel Quotes

“I walked across Tuscany from Siena to Rome, which was a lovely way to see the landscape. It was sunny but not too hot, and we made detours to look at treasures – churches, paintings, little hill villages. The first couple of days, you feel your knees are turning to jelly. But, in the end, you feel very limber. I hope I can always do it.” – Diana Quick

“In Italy, there are so many significant architectural structures in history such as the Pantheon in Rome, or the Duomo.” – Tadao Ando

“Going around Rome, you can find beauty because, quite simply, Rome is very beautiful. But the beauty of the people is sometimes harder to discover.” – Paolo Sorrentino

“I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly, Rome, as well as these other cities, can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are effected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognized, then it becomes another matter entirely.” – C.G. Jung

Meaningful Rome Quotes

“As a city, it has been built and destroyed and rebuilt by – and has celebrated and signified and outlasted – caesars and barbarians and popes and Fascists and prophets and artists and pilgrims and schemers and migrants and lovers and fools.” – Shawn Levy

“The traveler who has contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome may conceive some imperfect ideas of the sentiments which they must have inspired when they reared their heads in the splendour of honoured beauty.” – Edward Gibbon

“The thing I love about Rome is that it has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interest you: town planning, architecture, churches, or culture. It’s a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There’s nowhere else like it.” – Claire Tomalin

“Rome lifts you up but won’t let you settle down – it turns you into a bird without a nest.” – Glenn

“It was important to me to become day-to-day fluent and functional in another language, and about 10 years ago, I went to Rome for the first time and felt an instant gut connection and wanted to get to know the city.” – Jhumpa Lahiri

“I like things that are kind of eclectic when one thing doesn’t go with another. That’s why I love Rome. The town itself is that way. It’s where Fascist architecture meets classic Renaissance, where the ancient bangs up against the contemporary. It has a touch of everything.” – Giambattista Valli

“You look at passers-by in Rome and think, ‘Do they know what they have there?’” – Frank McCourt

“Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” – G.K. Chesterton

“I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just face home: I want to create!” – Taiye Selasi

“In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures, and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain.” – Philip Treacy

Quotes About Ancient Rome

“The ancient Romans build their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.” – Voltaire

“The fall of Rome seemed unthinkable to people at the time but inevitable to historians reflecting upon it with the benefit of context.” – Mary Pilon

“Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.” – Arthur Erickson

“This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” – Voltaire

“In ‘Roma,’ I wanted to get across the idea that underneath Rome today is ancient Rome. So close. I am always conscious of that, and it thrills me. Imagine being in a traffic jam at the Coliseum! Rome is the most wonderful movie set in the world. As was the case in many of my film ideas, it was inspired by a dream.” – Federico Fellini

“Rome is the capital of Europe; it’s as simple as that. You need to see what the Romans did 2,000 years ago. They were so advanced compared to the rest of the world. They showed us how to make roads, toilet seats, how to do irrigation, and more. When you see the Colosseum you won’t believe it was built so long ago.” – Gino D’Acampo

“Rome has not seen a modern building in more than half a century. It is a city frozen in time.” – Richard Meier

“Rome is a city where in every corner you have a reminder of the sacred world. That’s why I have sacred music, minimalist sacred music, which is also music I like because, at the end of the day, that’s what I want to do.” – Paolo Sorrentino

“She has always been fond of history, and here in Rome was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.” – Henry James

“Rome will exist as long as the Coliseum does; when the Coliseum falls, so will Rome; when Rome falls, so will the world.” – Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“The Roman Empire was very, very much like us. They lost their moral core, their sense of values in terms of who they were. And after all of those things converged together, they just went right down the tubes very quickly.” – Ben Carson

“Rome in an enormous mausoleum. There, the past lies visibly stretched upon this bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday.” – Saint Venerable Bede

“Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn’t have Rome. We wouldn’t have Florence. We wouldn’t have the marvel that is Venice.” – Matteo Renzi

Long Rome Quotes

“Rome is a city of ruins. Ruins are to Rome what canals are to Venice, and while other cities build over the past, Rome builds around it. My neighborhood, Testaccio, is mainly made up of nineteenth-century apartment clocks, and it seems almost modern compared to the crumbling centro storico. But on one otherwise ordinary street, a stretch of Roman wall rises out of the ground like the back of a sea monster. The contrast between the modern apartments and the ancient wall is startling when you see it for the first time, but locals walk past without giving it a second glance. It’s just the remains of a 2,000-year-old port – no big deal.” – Alexandra Turney

“After about the first Millennium, Italy was the cradle of Romanesque architecture, which spread throughout Europe, much of it extending the structural daring with minimal visual elaboration.” – Harry Seidler

“Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one imagine in its full and awful grandeur! We wandered out upon the Appian Way, and then went on, through miles of ruined tombs and broken walls, with here and there a desolate uninhabited house: past the Circus of Romulus, where the course of the chariots, the stations of the judges, competitors, and spectators, are yet as plainly to be seen as in old-time; past the tomb of Cecilia Metella: past all inclosure, hedge, or stake, wall or fence: away upon the open Campagna, where on that side of Rome, nothing is to be beheld but Ruin. Except where the distant old-times bound the view upon the left, the whole wide prospect is one field of ruin. Broken aqueducts, left in the most picturesque and beautiful clusters of arches; broken temples; broken tombs. A desert of somber and desolate beyond all expression; and with a history in every stone that strews the ground.” – Charles Dickens

“There’s a power struggle going on across Europe these days. A few cities are competing against each other to see who shall emerge as the great twenty-first-century European metropolis. Will it be London? Paris? Berlin? Zurich? Maybe Brussels, the center of the young union? They all strive to outdo one another culturally, architecturally, politically, fiscally. But Rome, it should be said, has not bothered to join the race for status. Rome doesn’t compete. Rome just watches all the fussing and striving, completely unfazed, exuding an air like Hey – do whatever you want, but I’m still Rome.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

Rome Quotes About Food

“If you’re going to do a spaghetti legs routine where else but in Rome to do it. The home of spaghetti!” – Bruce Grobbelaar

“If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat Cacio e Pepe, the most uniquely Roman pasta, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me” – Anthony Bourdain

“From food trucks to hot dog stands to country fair favourites, ‘street food’ has enjoyed a rich and storied history in American cuisine. However, street food has been around for thousands of years. In fact, street food is believed to have originated as far back as Ancient Rome.” – Homaro Cantu

“Rome is possibly my favourite city in the world. I have such fond memories there – most of them food-related.” – Mallory Jansen

“We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war.” – Vegetius

“I am a sucker for those old traditional places, and Rome is as good as it gets, particularly when you throw in Italian food.” – Roger Federer

“The beauty of Rome is that you can wander into a pizzeria just about anywhere and get a real Italian pizza that’s thankfully worlds away from the Super Supreme I used to order at Pizza Hut as a kid.” – Ed Stoppard

“It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.” – Neel Burton

“Here is Rome, you’ll find a legion of chefs and artisans working to redefine the pillars of Italian cuisine: pasta, pizza, espresso, gelato, the food that makes us non-Italians dream so ravenously of this country, that makes us wish we were Italians, and that stirs in the people of Italy no small amount of pride and pleasure.” – Matt Goulding

Short Rome Quotes

“Oh Rome! My country! City of the soul!” – Lord Byron

“Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.” – Robert De Niro

“To Rome, for everything.” – Miguel de Cervantes

“Veni, Vidi, Vici.” – Julius Caesar

“Rome, the city where memories were chiseled in marble.” – Elif Shafak

“Rome has grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.” – Livy

“Rome holds my psyche in balance. Whenever I’m there, it’s like a holiday.” – Giambattista Valli

“In Rome, one had simply to sit still and feel.” – E.M. Forster

“Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city” – Anatole Broyard

“How is it possible to say an unkind or reverential word of Rome. The city of all time, and of all the world!” – Nathaniel Hawthorn

“In Rome, it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.” – George Eliot

“Every one soon or late comes round by Rome.” – Robert Browning

“I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.” – Elizabeth Gilbert

“Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.” – Giotto di Bondone

“Her smile, I’m sure, burnt Rome to the ground.” – Mark Z. Danielewski

“Rome is one of my favourite cities in the world.” – Erin Heatherton

“In the Eternal City, time is elastic, and new discoveries live among the most ancient things.” – Erica Firpo

“I thought I knew everything when I came to Rome, but I soon found I had everything to learn.” – Edmonia Lewis

“Rome is magic.” – Maris Grazia Cucinotta

“Rome is but a wilderness of tigers.” – Titus

Rome Puns About Food

“Rome stole a pizza my heart.”

“Sending you olive my love from Rome!”

“Words can’t espresso how much you mean to me.”

“Maybe we should ask him to join us? He looks cannelloni.”

“Wine flies when you’re having fun.”

“Scoops, I did it again!”

“Olive you.”

“You cannoli do so much.”

“Here today, gone tomato.”

“When in Rome, eat a Caesar salad.”

“All roads lead to espresso.”

Short Rome Puns for Instagram

“Home sweet Rome.”

“Just Roman around.”

“What a Rome-antic city.”

“Just Romeing around after dark.”

“It’s impossible to ruin the view of the Coliseum.”

“It’s only May, but it’s so hot it feels like Augustus.”

“Rome more, worry, less”

“Don’t call me, I’m Rome-ing.”

“This city of Roma is my favorite aroma.”

“Caught in a bad Rome-ance.”

“Leave some Rome in your suitcase for souvenirs!”

“Dear Rome. We’re better together.”

“The Pantheon has a tight Agrippa on my heart.”

“We built this city on rock and Rome.”

“Honey, I’m Rome!”

“I’m having Trevi saying ‘goodbye’ to Rome.”

Best Rome Captions for Instagram

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

“There is no place like Rome, there is no place like Rome”

“Dear Rome, We’re better together.”

“Rome is always a good idea.”

“I’m in love with a city on the other side of the world.”

“Let’s go Rome.”

“I’m in love with a city on the other side of the world.”

“Meet me under the stars in Rome.”

“I’ve got a crush on Rome.”

“Rome is built on ruins and is quite breathtaking, what makes you think you can’t be too?”

“We can watch the sun in Rome. Sparkling on a palace dome, While we’re holding hands at home. Just close your eyes.”

“Rome, are you shining just for me?”

Funny Quotes and Captions About Rome

“I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.” – Julius Caesar

“One week after moving to Rome, I started writing in my diary in Italian.” – Jhumpa Lahiri

“My happy place is anywhere with pizza and wine.”

“Came to Rome for the sights, stayed for the gelato.”

“Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?” – Will Rogers

“They say Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.” – Brian Clough

“A fool is one who admires other cities without visiting Rome.” – Francesco Petrarca

“There’s one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there’s a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic.” – Paolo Sorrentino

“Found a Roman romance while roaming in Rome.”

Conclusion

Rome is full of food, culture, and a long, interesting history, making it the perfect city for some unique sayings. I hope these Rome quotes, captions, and puns helped to inspire you to visit the Eternal City. Have some fun, and interesting Rome quotes I missed? Let me know in the comments below!

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SCHEDULE YOUR TOURS | There are many top companies available in Europe. Get Your Guide is one of the best sites for tours, excursions, and activities. Viator is another terrific website for all types of experiences.

GET TRAVEL INSURANCE | Having travel insurance is always a good idea. World Nomads is one of the top travel insurance companies. It will cover you if you must cancel your trip or if something unexpected happens.

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