This is getting to be last minute but I would appreciate some help with my upcoming Rome trip and with the new search interface the FT archives aren't divulging the information I need. I will be arriving in Rome on Thu 2/28 and departing on Mon 3/3. As the Monday flight is at 7:30am I plan to spend the last night (Sun to Mon) at the Hilton Garden Inn Rome Airport hotel for either $192 or 30,000 HHonors points (0.6 cents/point, not the best value but I'll be Gold by then and I will never qualify for diamond on stays and gold re-qual will be through AmEx).

In the meantime though, I need a place to stay in Rome proper. Given my current lack of a guidebook (which I just realized) I have no idea where anything is in Rome. So I would appreciate some suggestions on general locations where one should stay for a first, short trip to Rome where I plan to do all the usual tourist things during the day. I don't plan to get a car and may not take any day trips out of Rome as I'll be in the city for just over 3 days. I've seen some things about catacombs tours which sounds like something I'd be interested in trying.

I looked at some Termini hotel reviews but it's not clear from Tripadvisor whether it really is somewhat grim there at night or just the usual Tripadvisor paranoia.

I've looked at a few places on booking.com which is helpful as it lists whether places offer internet access (I'm bringing my laptop and there's a chance I need to do a tad of work that weekend). But right now I'm pretty much picking blindly as I don't know which general area of Rome to focus my search on.