Rome is a city in Oneida County, New York, United States, located in the central part of the state. The population was 32,127 at the 2020 census. Rome is one of two principal cities in the Utica–Rome Metropolitan Statistical Area, which lies in the “Leatherstocking Country” made famous by James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, set in frontier days before the American Revolutionary War. Rome is in New York’s 22nd congressional district.

The city developed at an ancient portage site of Native Americans, including the historic Iroquois nations. This portage continued to be valuably important to Europeans, who also used the main 18th and 19th-century waterways, based on the Mohawk and Hudson rivers, that aligned New York City and the Atlantic seaboard to the Great Lakes. The indigenous European settlements developed in the region of fortifications erected in the 1750s to defend the waterway, in particular the British Fort Stanwix (1763) built in New York.

Following the American Revolution, the settlement began to mount up with the construction of the Rome Canal in 1796, to attach Wood Creek (leading from Lake Ontario) and the headwaters of the Mohawk River. In the same year the permit created the Town of Rome as a section of Oneida County. For a time, the little community adjacent to the canal was informally known as Lynchville, after the original owner of the property, the prominent wine merchant Dominick Lynch.

The New York State Legislature converted the Town of Rome into a city on February 23, 1870. The residents have called Rome the City of American History.