Interesting Facts

A read rather than a plan. Where a city guide answers “what should I do in Rome”, a facts page answers “what is actually true about Rome” — 253 sourced facts across 4 places in 4 countries, every one of them carrying a link to the source it came from. If you are working out how to spend a day rather than settling an argument, the guides are indexed at Cities.

The claim is researched first, then checked against a primary source — a city’s own records, a national statistics office, a museum, the operator itself — and cited on the page where you can follow it. A claim that only ever traces back to other listicles does not make the cut. And where our sources hedge, we hedge: if the honest answer to “how many did the Colosseum hold” is a range rather than a number, the page gives the range instead of the confident figure everyone else quotes. Our editorial guidelines set the method out in full.

It is cut, not softened. That is also what the number in each title means: “102 Interesting Facts About Rome” is 102 claims that survived the check, not 102 that were researched. So the totals on this page count verified facts rather than published sentences.

On the same rolling basis as our guides. Figures move — a visitor total, an entry price, a “largest in the world” that quietly stopped being largest — so a re-verification pass confirms that every cited source still resolves and that each figure still matches what that source now says. A page that has been through one carries a dated “Last verified” line at the top.

Deliberately. Someone searching “Rome” wants one answer, and returning both the guide and the facts page splits a single city into two results that answer different questions. So facts pages are kept out of the header search and out of the sidebar on our guides, and get this shelf instead. Each one is also linked from its own city’s guide and from the “Nearby cities” block at the foot of the guides around it, which is how most readers reach them.

The facts are not ours to own, so yes — but follow the link, read it at the source, and credit that source rather than us: it will carry the detail and the caveats a one-line fact has to leave out. The photographs are a different matter. They are licensed to us rather than owned by us, so we cannot pass those rights on; each caption links to the original image and its licence.

Please do — a page built on citations is exactly the kind that should be checked, and we would rather be told we are wrong than leave a mistake standing. Send it through our contact page, ideally with the source you are reading it from, and we ask for nothing in return for making the correction.