Christmas in Rome

Private Mass at St Peter's and the Eternal City in lights — Rome in the most ceremonial week of its year, for the traveller who wants to attend it properly.

There is a particular hour on the morning of the twenty-fifth of December in St Peter's Basilica — somewhere between half-past nine and ten, when the Pope's Midnight Mass of the previous night has been concluded for some hours and the morning's papal Mass has not yet begun — when the great basilica is at its most still. The cleaning teams have finished. The Swiss Guards are at their posts but at ease. The light through the upper windows of the dome is at its early-winter slant. And the basilica, which by midday will be filled to its capacity of fifteen thousand for the Pope's Christmas blessing, is briefly itself again. To be in the basilica at this hour, with private access arranged through the right channels, is to experience the most ceremonial building in Christendom in a moment of ceremony specifically not in progress.

The Roman Christmas Calendar

Christmas in Rome is, after Easter, the most active liturgical week of the Vatican calendar, and the city around the Vatican is correspondingly mobilised. The major events of the week, with their times and their public-versus-private distinctions, are: the Pope's Midnight Mass on the twenty-fourth (in fact celebrated at half-past nine in the evening rather than at midnight, in deference to the Pope's age and security considerations), the Pope's Christmas Day Mass at half-past nine on the twenty-fifth, the Urbi et Orbi blessing from the central loggia of the basilica at noon on Christmas Day, and the various smaller liturgical events throughout the octave through to the Epiphany on the sixth of January.

Each of these can be attended, with the right planning, with seats reserved well in advance. The Midnight Mass is the most demanding to arrange — the basilica fills three hours before the start, and the reserved-seat areas have a strict protocol — but the Christmas Day Mass and the Urbi et Orbi are more readily accessible. We work with the same office in Rome that arranges the Easter access, and the planning typically begins in the previous September.

The City in Lights

Rome at Christmas is, in addition to its religious calendar, a city in particularly good aesthetic form. The Christmas tree on the Piazza San Pietro and the larger municipal tree on the Piazza Venezia are both seriously made affairs. The illuminations along the Via del Corso and the Via Condotti are tasteful and not overdone. The major piazze — the Piazza Navona with its small Christmas market, the Piazza di Spagna with its temporary nativity, the Piazza del Pantheon — are particularly atmospheric in the afternoon and evening hours.

The Roman Christmas, importantly, is largely an outdoor experience. The temperatures in late December typically run between four and twelve degrees, with limited rain and many sunny days, and the city — designed for outdoor life — operates fully in this weather. We arrange afternoon walks through the centro storico with private guides who can speak to the architectural and ceremonial history of the Roman Christmas, lunches at the major institutions (Pierluigi remains open through the holidays, as does the Hotel de Russie's Stravinskij Bar), and the slow late-afternoon visits to the major basilicas in their Christmas dressings.

The Tables of the Holiday

Christmas in Rome is the major culinary event of the city's calendar, and the Roman families take it with the seriousness that the New England families take Thanksgiving. The Cenone della Vigilia — the Christmas Eve dinner — is traditionally a fish dinner of seven courses, often eaten at home but also celebrated at the major restaurants. The Christmas Day lunch is the meat-based counterpart, with the abbacchio (suckling lamb) and the roast capon as the central dishes. The leftovers are eaten through the twenty-sixth (Santo Stefano).

We arrange Christmas Eve dinners at Pierluigi, where the kitchen takes its annual peak of fish work for this evening, or at La Pergola at the Rome Cavalieri, the only three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the city, which prepares a particularly considered Christmas Eve menu. For Christmas Day lunch we typically recommend the home-based meal — a chef hired for the day, the ingredients sourced from the major markets the previous morning, the meal taken in a private apartment or the suite at one of the major hotels — as the more authentic Roman experience. The restaurant lunch is available, but the Roman Christmas is, in its essence, a domestic occasion, and the experience that most resembles the Roman experience is a domestic one.

Where to Stay, And When to Book

The Christmas week in Rome is one of the two annual peaks for the city's hotels (Easter is the other), and availability at the highest level is, by November, almost entirely committed. Our office allocates Christmas-week rooms to our most established clients in March of the same year. The Hotel de la Ville, the Hotel de Russie, the Hassler, the Six Senses, the Bulgari, the recent Rosewood — all are typically full a year in advance for the twenty-third through the twenty-sixth of December.

For clients who require more than a hotel during this week, we arrange a small number of private apartments and palazzo floors that come to us through long-standing relationships. A floor of an old Roman palazzo near the Piazza Farnese, with three or four bedrooms, taken with a butler and a chef, is for the right party an experience the hotels cannot match in this week. The Christmas Day lunch in such an apartment, with the doors open onto a terrace, the bells of the surrounding churches ringing, and the chef's abbacchio coming out of the oven, is the most distinctly Roman version of the holiday we know how to arrange.

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