You’ve probably heard the news. Rome is hot this summer, and not in a good way. Roman summers are typically hot and humid, but this season has been one for the record books, with daily temperatures routinely topping 39C. It's beastly — bestiale, as we say in Italian. Yet it hasn't kept visitors away. In July, Rome averaged 60,000-80,000 visitors a day in its centro storico. That's a lot of sweaty people crowding into the Colosseum.
Every guidebook will tell you to duck into a church for a break from the heat, and that’s good advice: marble floors, high ceilings and thick walls do their job. But if you really want to escape the Roman summer, you need to go underground. Below the churches, below the streets, below 2,000 years of layered history, there’s a level of Rome that’s always cool: its underground archaeological sites where the temperatures are pleasant — sometimes even chilly — year-round, with temperatures as low as 10C, no matter how sweltering it is up on street level.
