From Croatia to Rome
· Updated · BootsnAll
Croatia and Italy face each other across the Adriatic and the two pair naturally on a trip: Dalmatia for the coast and the islands, Rome for everything else. Getting between them is straightforward, and there are three genuinely different ways to do it.
Flying
An hour and a quarter or so from Zagreb, Split or Dubrovnik to Rome, and in summer there are direct flights from all three. Outside the season, the coastal airports thin out and you may find yourself connecting.
Check which Rome airport you are being sold. Fiumicino is the main one, with a direct train, the Leonardo Express, into Termini in about half an hour. Ciampino is the low-cost airport, further out and served by buses, and the transfer eats into the saving.
The ferry and the train, which is the better trip
This is the one to consider if you have a spare day.
Jadrolinija runs overnight ferries across the Adriatic to Italian ports: Split to Ancona and Dubrovnik to Bari are the useful ones, both taking somewhere around eight to eleven hours and both sailing overnight. Take a cabin.
From Ancona, the train to Rome takes around three to four hours. From Bari it is about four hours on the fast services.
So the whole thing is an evening sailing, a night's sleep, a morning in an Italian port town and an afternoon train. You arrive in Rome having seen something, rather than having queued at two airports.
The ferries are seasonal in frequency, with the fullest timetable in summer and much less in winter. Check Jadrolinija before planning around them.
Driving and buses
You can drive around the top of the Adriatic through Slovenia and Trieste, and from Zagreb to Rome that is roughly ten to eleven hours without stops. From Dubrovnik it is a very long way indeed.
That said, the route around the head of the Adriatic passes through Istria, Slovenia and Venice, which is a good trip in itself rather than a slog. Buses cover the same ground and take longer.
Paperwork, which got simpler
Croatia joined the Schengen area on 1 January 2023 and adopted the euro the same day.
That means no border controls between Croatia and Italy, whichever way you travel, and no currency change. Anyone who did this journey before 2023 will remember queues at the Slovenian and Italian borders and changing kuna. Both are gone.
Rome, briefly
Book the Colosseum and the Vatican Museums in advance and with timed entry. Turning up on the day in season means hours in a queue, and the Vatican queue in August is genuinely punishing.
The Pantheon now charges admission, which it did not for most of its two thousand years. Go early, and go to the Protestant Cemetery and the Baths of Caracalla when the centre gets too much.