round a single column in pandas

You are very close.
You applied the round to the series of values given by df.value1.
The return type is thus a Series.
You need to assign that series back to the dataframe (or another dataframe with the same Index).

Also, there is a pandas.Series.round method which is basically a short hand for pandas.Series.apply(np.round).

>>> df.value1 = df.value1.round()
>>> print df
  item  value1  value2
0    a       1     1.3
1    a       2     2.5
2    a       0     0.0
3    b       3    -1.0
4    b       5    -1.0