Coding From Rome: Ancient City, Modern Workflow

April in Rome. Not peak summer crowds, but busy enough - especially with Easter bringing both tourists and Italian bank holidays. I spent the entire month working from an Airbnb in Quadraro, a residential neighbourhood in the southeast of the city. No coworking spaces this time. No cafe hopping. Just me, my laptop, and a wifi connection that mostly cooperated.

The Setup

After the Lisbon experience, I knew what I needed: a reliable Airbnb with decent wifi and a proper desk setup. Quadraro delivered on both counts. The neighbourhood is about 20 minutes from the centre by metro - far enough to be residential and quiet, close enough to reach the historic sites after work.

The wifi fluctuated throughout the month but stayed usable. There were moments where speeds dropped noticeably, usually in the evenings when the whole building was online, but I never lost connection entirely. My GL.iNet travel router from the Lisbon trip continued to earn its keep - consistent local network, automatic VPN, and no fumbling with new wifi credentials every time I moved rooms.

One thing that surprised me: cafes in Rome are not remote-work friendly. The culture is very much "order, drink, leave." Lingering with a laptop for hours isn't done. In Lisbon, I could camp out at a cafe for an afternoon. In Rome, I got looks after 20 minutes. So the Airbnb became the office full-time, which honestly worked out fine.

The Workflow

The AI-first development workflow I've been refining continued to improve. I'm fully in Team Lead Mode now - orchestrating multiple Claude Code agents in parallel rather than writing code myself. The Monitoring the Situation dashboard I shipped during this trip is the flagship example. Multiple agents working different parts of the codebase, me directing traffic and making architectural decisions, everything coming together faster than I could have built it solo.

The big learning this month: I hit API rate limits. A lot. When you're running 4-5 agents in parallel, each making their own API calls for context and tool use, you burn through quotas quickly. I had to learn to be more strategic about when to parallelise versus when to sequence work. Not every task benefits from throwing more agents at it - sometimes a single focused agent is more efficient than a swarm that keeps hitting rate limits.

The workflow isn't location-dependent. That's the point. Whether I'm at home in Manchester or in a Roman apartment, the pattern is the same: define the task, spawn the agents, review the output, iterate. The code doesn't know or care where I am.

The Routine

I kept UK hours - starting around 9am UK time (10am local), finishing by 5pm UK time (6pm local). This meant I had evenings free to explore, and the time zone difference was small enough to not cause any problems with async communication.

Weekends were entirely for exploring. Over the four weeks, I saw everything: the Colosseum, the Forum, the Vatican, the Pantheon, Trastevere, the Borghese Gardens. Easter weekend was chaotic in the centre but I pushed through - you don't go to Rome without doing the tourist things properly. The highlight was Good Friday at the Colosseum, where I saw the Pope in person carrying the cross during the Via Crucis procession. Surreal moment - thousands of people, torchlight, and the Pope walking past ancient ruins. Not something you forget. The UK bank holidays during April gave me a few extra long weekends, which I used for longer walks and day trips.

The beauty of Rome is that after finishing work at 6pm, you can walk 20 minutes and be standing in front of something that's 2000 years old. That never got old. The Colosseum at golden hour, the quiet streets of Trastevere after dinner, stumbling across yet another ancient ruin tucked between modern buildings. The history is everywhere and it's casual about it.

The Unexpected

Mid-month, my neighbour's dog ran into the Airbnb. Just wandered in through the door I'd left open for air. Super friendly, had a little explore, got retrieved by an apologetic owner. A nice reminder that I was living in a real neighbourhood, not a tourist bubble.

The metro was worse than I expected. Busy, crowded, and I kept my hands on my pockets the entire time. Pickpocketing is apparently a real problem on the Rome metro and I saw a couple of near-incidents. Next time I'd try to stay more central and avoid the metro altogether - walking or buses seem safer and more pleasant.

The Food

It's Italy. Italian food is my favourite cuisine. I didn't have a single bad meal when I stuck to local spots away from the obvious tourist areas. The one time I ate near a major landmark - overpriced, mediocre, exactly what you'd expect from a tourist trap. Lesson learned immediately. After that, I walked a few streets away from anything famous before looking for food, and the quality jumped dramatically.

I won't name specific restaurants because honestly, the strategy is simple: avoid anywhere with photos on the menu or someone outside trying to get you in. Walk into the places where locals are eating. Order the pasta. You'll be fine.

What I'd Do Differently

Stay more central. Quadraro was fine and the metro connection worked, but I'd trade the larger apartment for a smaller one in Trastevere or near Piazza Navona. Being able to walk everywhere after work would have been worth the premium. The metro commute added friction that I didn't need.

I'd also plan for the cafe situation. Knowing that you can't work from cafes in Rome, I'd have ensured the Airbnb had a better outdoor space. Working from a balcony with a view would have been ideal for the afternoons.

The Bottom Line

Rome was a different experience from Lisbon. Less cafe culture, more apartment-based focus, but with incomparably better post-work exploration. The AI-first workflow continued to prove itself - the code shipped, the projects progressed, and hitting rate limits taught me useful lessons about agent orchestration.

The Italian work culture observation is real: Rome feels slower, more relaxed, less hustle. That's fine when you're keeping UK hours anyway. But if you're trying to match local energy, it might throw you off. I found the contrast useful - focused intensity during work hours, slow meandering through ancient streets after.

Next up: Split, Croatia. More coast, more sun, hopefully more outdoor working options. The nomad experiment continues.