Arriving at Roma Termini? Here is what to do with your bags
It is nearly always the same problem: you arrive in the morning and the room is ready in the afternoon, or you leave the hotel at ten and the train goes at eight in the evening. In between there are good hours of Rome, and a suitcase that stops you doing any of it.
Finding your way at the station
Roma Termini has exits on three sides and they are a long way apart: taking the wrong one means walking round the entire block. The Piazza dei Cinquecento side is the main one, facing the taxis and buses. Via Giolitti is the south side, where the station's own left-luggage office is. Via Marsala is the north side, where the high-numbered platforms are.
Both metro lines, A and B, run through the station, and the airport trains for Fiumicino and Ciampino leave from here: which is why almost every route across the city starts or ends at Termini.
The uncovered hours: before check-in and after check-out
Hotels hand over the room in the afternoon and want it back in the morning. Those are the two windows where you end up carrying your luggage with nothing to do.
Leaving the cases in a locker near the station solves both: you come back for them when you need them, without returning to the hotel and without dragging a case around the city.
Arriving very early or leaving very late
Night trains arrive before anything is open, and evening flights stretch the day long past check-out. In those hours a storage point with counter hours is no use to you: it is shut exactly when you need it.
An automated locker has no hours. Book while you are still on the train, and when you arrive the code works: at five in the morning as at midnight.
Seeing Rome hands-free
From Termini the centre is walkable or one metro stop away, and the difference between doing that with a suitcase and doing it without is the whole day.
We are at Via Marghera 47d, a seven-minute walk from the Via Marsala exit. Drop the bags, walk back to the station and start from there with your hands free.