Rome for Conferences: ESORICS 2026 and CIKM 2026 Travel Guide

Rome hosts two CORE A conferences this autumn. ESORICS 2026, the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, runs 14 to 18 September. CIKM 2026, the ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, follows 7 to 11 November. Both are hosted by Sapienza University of Rome.

Which makes it sound as though they happen in the same place. They do not, and neither does CIKM.

CIKM notifications go out on 7 August, so a lot of people are about to book a November trip to Rome on a few hours’ notice. This is the thing to know before you do.

Three venues, not one

Between the two conferences there are three separate sites, and the two CIKM ones are 4.3 km apart from each other.

Event	Dates	Venue	District
ESORICS main track	Sep 14 - 16	Sapienza, Città Universitaria	San Lorenzo, by Termini
ESORICS workshops	Sep 17 - 18	Sapienza, Città Universitaria	San Lorenzo, by Termini
CIKM tutorials, workshops, PhD symposium, industry day	Nov 7 - 8	Sapienza, San Pietro in Vincoli	Monti, by the Colosseum
CIKM main conference	Nov 9 - 11	Auditorium Parco della Musica	Flaminio, 4 km north

ESORICS is straightforward: everything is on Sapienza’s main campus at Piazzale Aldo Moro, about a kilometre from Termini, walkable in fifteen minutes or one stop on Metro line B.

CIKM is the one that catches people. The first two days are at Sapienza’s Faculty of Engineering in Monti, a former monastery beside the basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, which is central and near the Colosseum. Then on the ninth the whole conference moves to the Auditorium Parco della Musica, which is 4.3 km north in Flaminio. If you attend the workshops and the main track, you are changing neighbourhoods mid-conference.

Where to stay

Rome’s hotel stock is not evenly spread across those venues, and our own data shows the split cleanly. Of the twelve Rome hotels we list, six sit within 1.7 km of Sapienza and San Pietro in Vincoli but 3.4 km or more from the Auditorium. The other six are the exact mirror image. No hotel in the city serves both clusters well. Pick by the days you are actually attending.

Termini and Monti, for ESORICS and the CIKM workshop days

This is central Rome, the widest range of prices, and a fifteen minute walk or a single metro stop from both Sapienza campuses.

Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Rome Hotel (details) is the splurge, a five-star on Piazza della Repubblica with a rooftop pool, 1.4 km from Sapienza. Hotel Artemide (details) and iQ Hotel Roma (details) are the reliable four-star middle, both on Via Nazionale and both about 800 metres from San Pietro in Vincoli.

For tighter budgets, MEININGER Roma Termini (details) is 900 metres from Sapienza, the closest thing we list to the ESORICS venue. The Beehive (details) is a long-running small guesthouse near Termini with private rooms and dorms, and Generator Rome (details) is the design hostel option with a rooftop bar.

Flaminio and Parioli, for the CIKM main conference

Quieter, greener, residential, and almost entirely absent from generic “where to stay in Rome” advice, because tourists have no reason to go there. For three days in November you do.

Hotel Villa Glori (details) is the closest we list at roughly 500 metres, under ten minutes on foot. Best Western Hotel Astrid (details) and Radisson Blu GHR Rome (details) are both about 700 metres, the first a three-star with a breakfast terrace over the Tiber, the second a full-service four-star with a gym.

Hotel degli Aranci (details) is a converted villa with a garden a kilometre out, and Mangili Garden Hotel (details) is the value pick at 1.3 km, small and consistently well reviewed. Albergo Etico Roma (details) sits between the two districts near Piazza del Popolo, and is run on an inclusive-employment model, staffed and managed by people with disabilities.

The full list is on the Rome city page, and we covered the block-versus-independent question here.

Getting in, and getting across

Fiumicino (FCO) is the main airport, 32 km out. The Leonardo Express runs non-stop to Termini in 32 minutes, which puts you within walking distance of the ESORICS venue and most of the central hotels. Ciampino (CIA) handles low-cost carriers and needs a bus.

Getting to the Auditorium is the part worth rehearsing. It is not on the metro. Take Metro line A to Flaminio, then tram 2, which runs every six minutes and reaches the Apollodoro or Flaminia/Reni stops in about eight minutes. From Termini, bus 910 goes direct. Budget half an hour door to door from a central hotel and rather less from Parioli.

Between sessions

The Auditorium is worth arriving early for. Renzo Piano won the competition in 1994, and the complex is three separate concert halls in lead-clad shells, arranged around an open-air amphitheatre. During construction the remains of a Roman villa were found on the site. Rather than move or bury them, the plans were changed: the amphitheatre was reoriented, an elevated ring corridor was built to open onto the excavation, and the finds are displayed in a small museum inside the complex. A building redesigned mid-construction around an archaeological accident is a decent thing to look at on the way into a conference session.

MAXXI, Zaha Hadid’s national museum of 21st century art, is a few minutes’ walk away in the same district, which makes Flaminio an unusually good corner of Rome for anyone who likes buildings.

Villa Borghese sits between Flaminio and the centre: the largest park in central Rome, with the Galleria Borghese in it. The gallery requires booking a timed entry in advance and it does sell out, so decide early rather than on the day.

Then there is the obvious. The Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Palatine are a cluster, and the CIKM workshop venue at San Pietro in Vincoli is a few hundred metres from them, which is a rare piece of conference geography. The basilica next door to that campus holds Michelangelo’s Moses, and entry is free. Vatican City, the Pantheon, Trastevere in the evening for dinner: all standard, all worth it, all busy.

On timing, both dates are decent. September is still warm and the summer crowds have thinned. November is properly quiet, cooler and often wet, but it is the cheapest month to see Rome and the queues are the shortest they get.

If you are submitting rather than attending

Both venues are more accessible than their reputations suggest.

CIKM accepted 19.0% of full papers in 2024, which puts it in the same band as the data mining and database venues generally, tighter than the machine learning conferences and looser than systems or security. ESORICS runs a two-cycle review process with acceptance rates typically in the 15 to 20% range, so if you miss one deadline the next is not a year away. Two cycles is a meaningful advantage when you are building a record on a schedule.

We mapped both against the wider field in the acceptance-rate analysis, and if security is your area specifically, the PhD publishing guide covers where ESORICS sits relative to the big four and what to target at which stage.