Rome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International Airport

Rome–Fiumicino Leonardo da Vinci International is Italy's busiest airport and the principal intercontinental gateway for the Italian peninsula, handling roughly 49M passengers in 2024. FCO serves 116 airlines on 488 routes to 216 nonstop destinations, and its airline count is notably high — among the top five in Europe — reflecting Rome's role as a required destination for virtually every European and many Middle Eastern, African, and American carriers. The airport sits 32 km (20 mi) southwest of central Rome on the Tyrrhenian coast near the mouth of the Tiber, and its 13 ft (4 m) elevation makes it one of Europe's lower-lying major hubs. ITA Airways (the state successor to Alitalia) operates its primary hub here and is in the process of integration into the Lufthansa Group, which will reshape FCO's position in Star Alliance's European network. Three runways — two parallel 12,801 ft (3,902 m) northwest–southeast strips and one east–west 10,849 ft (3,307 m) — support a mix of long-haul, intra-European, and charter traffic. The airport uses four terminals (T1, T2, T3, T5), with T3 the primary international pier and T5 dedicated to non-Schengen and high-security flights including U.S. and Israeli operations. Fiumicino is heavily shaped by Rome's role as a leisure destination and religious-tourism pole: pilgrimage traffic associated with Vatican events materially affects peak planning, and summer Mediterranean charter volumes rival those of any European airport. The facility has undergone sustained ACI ASQ-rated quality improvements in the 2010s and 2020s, repositioning it from a historically-criticized operation into a recognized European service leader.