Handpicked experience · Rome
Rome, Italy
Numbered entrances and pottery tokens, senators' names carved into their seats, and a detachment of sailors kept in Rome to work the awning.
Experience the magnificence of the Colosseum with ease using your fast track ticket!
Visit the ruins of the once important government buildings of ancient Rome.
Uncover the rich Roman history embedded in the walls of the Colosseum
Stroll across the Roman Forum and see imposing landmarks like the Arco di Settimio Severo and the Curia.
Priority entry to the Colosseum at a booked time
One admission covering both the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill
Temporary exhibitions covered where they are running
Booking charges already settled
One ticket covering the three sites that sit together at the centre of ancient Rome: the Colosseum, entered at a booked time without the main queue, and a single admission to the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill, which share one continuous archaeological area. Whatever is showing in the temporary galleries is included too.
You arrive at the Colosseum at your allotted time and go in through the priority line, then move around the two surviving tiers at your own speed. The Forum and Palatine ticket is one entrance rather than several, so it is worth walking the whole area in a single visit rather than leaving and coming back. This ticket admits you to the standing building; the arena floor, the tunnels beneath it and the highest level are separate arrangements. There is no guide and no audio guide, so the pace and the route are yours.
Eighty entrances ringed the building, most of them numbered, and the numbers are still carved above the arches on the north side. Spectators arrived holding a small pottery or bone token stamped with an entrance, a tier and a seat, and simply followed the number. The stairways were laid out so that each sector filled from its own staircase without crossing another, which is how a building holding some fifty thousand people could empty in a matter of minutes.
Rank decided your height above the sand. Senators sat at the front on marble, and many of them had their names cut into the stone to reserve the place — some of those inscriptions survive and can still be read. Above them came knights, then ordinary male citizens, and at the very top, farthest from everything, women, slaves and the poor stood under a wooden gallery.
A vast awning could be drawn over the seating on hot days, worked from two hundred and forty timber masts set around the top of the wall. Ordinary attendants could not handle it, so a detachment of sailors from the imperial fleet was stationed in Rome specifically to run the rigging. The stone corbels that carried those masts are still in place along the upper cornice.
The surviving walls are covered in small holes, and they are not weathering. Iron clamps held the blocks together, and in the centuries after the building fell out of use people quarried them out for the metal, chipping away the stone around each one. The missing southern half went the same way, taken down after earthquakes and carried off to build churches and palaces across the city.
The Forum began as marshy ground between hills, drained in the sixth century BC by a sewer that still functions. It ended, after Rome shrank, buried under ten metres of rubble and grazed by cattle — its nineteenth-century name meant simply the cow field. Everything you walk past was dug out from under that.
The Palatine is where the emperors built, one over another, until the hill was a single vast residence. The Latin name of the hill became the word for a grand house in language after language: palazzo, palais, palace.
The Forum and Palatine are largely unshaded and the ground is uneven. Cancellation is not free on this booking.
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Timed entry to the Colosseum without the main queue, plus one admission to the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, which form a single archaeological area, and any temporary exhibitions running at the time.
Not on this ticket. The arena floor, the tunnels beneath it and the highest level are arranged separately; this admits you to the standing building and its two surviving tiers.
The Forum and Palatine ticket is a single entrance, so it is best to walk the whole area in one visit rather than exiting partway through.
Yes. Eighty entrances ringed the building, most numbered — the figures are still carved above the north arches — and spectators carried tokens stamped with an entrance, a tier and a seat.
By law and by rank. Senators sat at the front on marble, often with their names cut into the stone to reserve the place, and women, slaves and the poor stood at the very top under a wooden gallery.
Iron clamps held the blocks together, and later generations chipped the stone away to get at the metal. The missing southern half was taken down after earthquakes and reused across the city.
No guide and no audio guide come with this ticket, which leaves the route and the timing entirely to you.