A Sketchbook in Rome

Watercolours, pen and ink, and a week of wandering through the Eternal City.

Some cities ask to be photographed. Rome asks to be drawn.

Late in February 2025, sketchbook, pens, and a travel watercolour palette in hand, I set off — with a stop in Manchester first, where an unplanned half hour turned into a page of its own: cups lined up along a café counter, a cheerful barista mid-pour, and a scrawled note that this coffee stop was firmly “on the to-do list.” It’s often the way with sketchbooks — the journey there gets a page just as much as the destination.

Arriving on the Tiber

The first proper page of Rome opens with the word itself, lettered boldly down the margin: ROMA. A double-page spread across the Tiber, looking toward the bridges and, in the distance, the unmistakable dome of St Peter’s rising above the rooftops. I’d tucked a little posy of watercolour flowers into the corner — daffodils and something pink, loose and quick — a habit I can’t seem to shake, marking the start of a new sketchbook with something growing.

The bridges over the river became a recurring motif over the following days: their reflections in soft golds and blues, arches doubling in the water, endlessly paintable in the late-afternoon light.

The Colosseum, Twice Over

No trip to Rome is complete without the Colosseum, and I gave it two goes. The first was a proper watercolour — that honeyed stone glowing gold and ochre against a cool turquoise sky, with two broken columns standing sentinel in a bed of vivid green, and a couple of tiny figures for scale, dwarfed by it all. I’d tucked the entrance map from the ticket office into the opposite page, a little piece of ephemera that always helps me remember exactly where I was standing.

Later that same day — 26th February, “Colosseum. Awesome,” reads the caption — I went back with just a pencil, working faster and looser, capturing the rhythm of those stacked arches in graphite alone, alongside a small watercolour study of an umbrella pine silhouetted against the sky. Sometimes the quickest sketches say the most.

Vatican City

The Vatican took up a full day of its own. I started with the Michelangelo trio — the Pietà, the Moses, the David — postcards glued in as reference alongside my own notes, and then turned to sketching St Peter’s dome itself from the colonnade, all buttery yellow stone and that extraordinary rhythm of columns marching away into the distance.

Inside the Sistine Chapel — no sketching allowed, of course — I pressed a postcard of The Creation of Man into the book instead, and made do with a pencil study of the dome from outside afterwards: the lantern, the cross, the great curved roof washed in cool green and gold, with two saints standing guard on the balustrade below.

Rooftops, Domes, and Pine Trees

Some of my favourite pages from this trip aren’t of famous monuments at all, but of the view between them — Rome’s parasol pines, the pino umbrella pines that punctuate every skyline, their dark trunks and green canopies criss-crossing in front of terracotta rooftops and campanile towers. One spread, painted from the Gianicolo Hill, has those pines rising tall against a wash of soft green sky, the city’s domes and towers glimpsed through the branches in pink, orange and ochre.

Another — my last page here, worked mostly in blue pen and loose washes — pairs a delicate architectural sketch of a domed church with three more of those pines, their trunks painted so dark they read almost as ink.

The Spanish Steps and a Roman Doorway

From the top of the Spanish Steps at noon on the 27th, I caught the twin domes of Santa Maria in Montesanto and Santa Maria dei Miracoli glowing warm against the sky, with a splash of red geraniums tumbling down the page below — a happy accident of watercolour that turned into one of my favourite passages in the whole book.

The following day took me to Via del Governo Vecchio, No. 73 — I’d noted down the buzzer instructions (“ring once after 9–0, ring twice — I have a fast motorbike,” it says, half in jest) — and sketched the wrought-iron balcony above the door, dripping with trailing yellow flowers against a wall glowing orange and gold in the evening light.

Postcards and Paper Scraps

Threaded through the sketchbook are the little paper fragments that make a travel journal feel truly lived-in: a bakery flyer for Forno Castel Sant’Angelo with its bold red cut-paper silhouette of the castle, a glossy postcard of the Trevi Fountain, entrance tickets, café receipts. They’re not just decoration — they’re a kind of visual diary entry in themselves, and years from now they’ll bring back the smell of fresh bread or the sound of coins clattering into a fountain just as vividly as any painting.

Looking Back

What strikes me most, flicking back through these pages now, isn’t any single view — it’s the rhythm of the week itself: quick pencil studies snatched between queues, careful watercolours worked slowly in the golden hour, scraps of ticket stubs and bakery wrappers pressed in alongside them. That’s what a sketchbook does that a camera never quite can — it holds the pace of a place, not just its likeness.

Rome, it turns out, is a very generous city to draw. There’s always another dome, another pine tree, another bridge catching the light — and always, always, another page to fill.

All sketches shown here are original watercolour and pen studies from Sheila Gill's personal travel sketchbook, February 2025.