Ara Pacis Museum Tickets

Highlights

• Stand in an almost-empty hall with the Ara Pacis Augustae, the marble Altar of Peace at the heart of Augustus’s Rome
• Read the carved friezes up close: the emperor’s family in procession above, and snails, scorpions and a snake climbing to a bird’s nest hidden in the vines below
• See the ancient altar wrapped in Richard Meier’s much-argued-over box of glass and white stone
• Book online and skip the ticket-office wait

Tickets & Prices

Reduced entry covers younger visitors, and under-18s go free, as do disabled visitors and a companion.

Ara Pacis Museum: Entry Ticket

Mobile ticketInstant confirmation

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The pass that does cover the Ara Pacis is the city’s own Roma Pass, its civic-museum card. Worth a look if you are taking in several of Rome’s municipal sites.

Official City Card

Roma Pass

Valid 2 – 3 days

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Tips:

• The wall labels are thin, so most of the story comes from the audio guide or the museum’s free app, both picked up at the door.
• Temporary exhibitions run in the lower gallery on their own separate ticket, so check what is on if a show is your reason for coming.
• Booking is a mobile voucher you show at the entrance, and you can cancel or move it up to the day before.

Plan Your Visit

What to See & Do

Step in off the Tiber and the traffic falls away. You are in a tall, pale room full of daylight, one ancient marble altar sitting in the middle of it.

Most people are through in half an hour, longer if you slow down over the carving.

The building: Richard Meier’s glass box

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The box around the altar is a story in its own right. Richard Meier’s pavilion of glass, travertine and white walls opened in 2006, the first major new building in the historic centre of Rome since the Second World War.

Not everyone wanted it there. Vittorio Sgarbi, then a culture-ministry official, called it a Texas petrol station and set a model of it alight in the piazza outside in 2004. Even the New York Times’ architecture critic thought it absurdly overscale for the dense old city around it.

Stand inside, though, and the point of it lands. The glass wall pulls river light across the marble, and the calm, pale space lets the carving do the talking. Sit on the bench for a minute and the contrast is the thing: delicate ancient stone inside a stark modern shell.

The altar and its reliefs

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The Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, is white Carrara marble carved on every face. The Senate ordered it to celebrate the peace Augustus brought home after years of war in Gaul and Spain.

Walk around the outside first. The upper panels carry a procession of real people: Augustus himself, his general Agrippa, his wife Livia, the priests and the wider imperial family filing towards a sacrifice. It reads like a stone photograph of the Augustan court, and picking the figures out is half the pleasure.

The lower band is a different thing entirely, a deep tangle of curling acanthus and vine. Look closely: snails in the leaves, scorpions, a snake winding up towards a bird’s nest.

On the short ends sit the allegory panels. The famous one shows a serene seated woman, usually read as Tellus, Mother Earth, or Peace herself, twins on her lap and the land fat and green around her.

Then step inside the altar. The table where animals were once sacrificed still carries the channel cut into the stone to carry the blood away.

All of it was painted in bright colour once, long since weathered back to bare white. On some evenings the museum brings the colour back, projecting the original reds and blues and golds onto the friezes while you sit with a set of headphones and watch the altar light up as its makers meant it to look.

Across the piazza: the Mausoleum of Augustus

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Come out of the museum and the great circular ruin across the square is the Mausoleum of Augustus, the emperor’s own tomb, reopened after a long restoration. The same man built both within a few years of each other. It needs a separate ticket, but it is a two-minute walk that rounds out the story of Augustus’s Rome.

Insider Tips

• Treat it as a connoisseur’s stop. If you are choosing between this and the Forum on a short first trip, take the Forum. Come back for the Ara Pacis when you have time to slow down.
• Come when the rest of Rome is booked out. On the days the Colosseum and Capitoline sell out, you can have this room almost to yourself.
• There is no café or restaurant inside. The bars around Piazza del Popolo are a few minutes north when you want a coffee.
• For the evening colour show, book well ahead. It runs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, it sells out, and you can end up waiting outside for your slot, so dress for the hour.

Did You Know?

1. The Roman Senate voted to build the altar in 13 BC and inaugurated it in 9 BC, to mark the peace and plenty of Augustus’s reign.
2. It once stood out in the open on the Campus Martius, then lay buried and scattered for centuries under the streets and cellars that grew up over it.
3. Archaeologists pieced it back together in the 1930s and first showed it under cover in 1938. Meier’s glass museum replaced that shelter in 2006.

FAQs