Best Tours of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus
Highlights
Tour Tickets & Prices
The standard guided tour entry covers admission and the 40-minute tour, down through the galleries to the Crypt of the Popes and the Crypt of St. Cecilia. Show the voucher on your phone at the ticket office and staff will point you to your language group.
Note: The entry tour is nonrefundable and can’t be rescheduled, so fix your day before booking, and remember the catacombs close on Wednesdays.
At the gate:
- Reduced: ages 7 – 16, clergy, and archaeology, architecture or art-history students under 25, with proof
- Free: under-6s, and disabled visitors with their assistant
Choose a Ticket
- Skip-the-line tour + roundtrip transfer is the same tour with the journey solved – a hop-on hop-off bus out from Piazza d’Ara Coeli, back again when you surface.
- Add the Capuchin Crypt if you want the bone chapel in the same afternoon.
- Combined ticket with the Colosseum includes the same tour plus the Colosseum arena floor, Roman Forum, and Palatine Hill, in one booking that works out cheaper than two separate tickets.
Plan Your Visit
| Period | Opening hours |
|---|---|
| Morning | 09:00–12:00 |
| Afternoon | 14:00–17:00 |
- Open daily except Wednesday.
- Closed 1 January, Easter Sunday and 25 December, plus an annual winter closure from mid-January to mid-February – check the official calendar before a winter trip.
- Tours depart every 30 minutes. Last morning tour at 12:00, last afternoon tour at 17:00, ticket office shuts at 16:50.
The entrance is at Via Appia Antica 110, about 4 km south of the Colosseum. Bus 118 from Colosseo or Circo Massimo (direction Appia/Villa Dei Quintili) stops right at the gate, at the stop called Catacombe di San Callisto. Bus 218 from San Giovanni stops at Fosse Ardeatine, directly opposite the entrance.
You can also walk it from the Colosseum: head south past the Baths of Caracalla, out through the Aurelian Walls and onto the old Appian Way. Drivers will find public parking near the entrance, though the Appia Antica closes to private cars on Sundays and public holidays.
- Knees and shoulders covered – this is a working religious site.
- No photography below ground.
- Steps and uneven floors throughout, so the visit is not wheelchair accessible, and the tight corridors are hard going for claustrophobic visitors.
What to See & Do
Your group forms at the ticket office, and the guide takes you down a long staircase cut into the tuff. The temperature drops with every step. What you are walking into is a city of the dead that early Christians dug level under level through the persecution years, when the religion was still illegal. They buried their dead down here, and they gathered and prayed down here too.
The galleries
The corridors close in fast, narrow enough that two people can barely pass, and both walls are burial niches from floor to ceiling. Look at the size of them: person-length but barely 40 to 50 cm high, stacked four tiers up. All of them open, all of them empty. Your guide decodes the symbols cut beside the names, the fish and the anchor among them, and keeps you found – the network runs to roughly 20 km, and on your own you would be lost inside five minutes.
The Crypt of the Popes
Then the corridor opens into the chamber they call the little Vatican. Nine popes of the 3rd century were buried in this one room – when the archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi rediscovered it in 1854, the nickname followed. Five of the original marble tombstones are still in place, and the lettering on them is Greek, the church’s first language. Pope Pontian’s reads simply “bishop, martyr”. A century after the burials, Pope Damasus set a verse epitaph here in praise of the place, and you can still read it today.
The Crypt of St. Cecilia
Next door is the crypt of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music. She rested here until 821, when Pope Paschal I carried her remains to her basilica in Trastevere. When her tomb there was reopened in 1599, her body was reportedly found incorrupt. Stefano Maderno carved her exactly as she was found – lying on her side, three fingers extended for the Trinity. The copy of his statue lies in the crypt in front of you, under early frescoes of Cecilia at prayer.
Then you climb the stairs back up, and the exit does half the work of the visit: out of the cold, into umbrella pines and sunlight, on a stretch of the Appia that feels emptied of the modern city. The two small three-apsed basilicas by the exit are the Trichorae.
Best Catacombs in Rome: which one should you visit?
For a first visit, San Callisto. Rome has around a dozen catacomb complexes you can tour, and the tunnel fabric feels much the same in all of them – rooms dug out underground, empty slabs in the walls.
What varies is what the tunnels lead to, and San Callisto leads to the grandest chambers of the lot, the popes’ crypt above all. Even locals who suggest quicker in-town alternatives tend to concede that the full catacomb experience out here is still the best.
The alternatives each have their own pull. San Sebastiano, a short walk further down the Appia, is smaller at four levels but keeps a Bernini-attributed bust of the saint, pagan mausoleums and ancient graffiti reading “domus Petri” – a possible link to Peter the Apostle. Domitilla keeps human remains in place, and frescoes of bakers and grape vines. Priscilla, across town on Via Salaria, holds some of the best-preserved painting of them all, including the earliest known image of the Virgin Mary – budget about an hour by bus to reach it.
The niches at San Callisto are empty, and nobody is going to show you a skull. If what you’re picturing is bones arranged floor to ceiling, that is the Capuchin Crypt near Piazza Barberini, an ossuary chapel in the city centre. A catacombs and Capuchin Crypt combo with transfer covers both in an afternoon. On most dates its catacomb stop is Domitilla rather than San Callisto.
Some visitors would send you elsewhere entirely. For a fair few people who have done all three, the underground layers of San Clemente or the Baths of Caracalla rank higher. If your Rome days are few and ancient underground is the draw, San Clemente sits right by the Colosseum.
Insider Tips
- Bring a jumper even in July. Visitors who came in summer clothes spent the tour cold – the tunnels hold around 16°C all year.
- Never plan the catacombs for a Wednesday, and check closing days before combining complexes. They stagger through the week, and turning up to a locked gate is a well-worn Rome story.
- The 118 and 218 buses run infrequently enough that the waiting can outlast the riding. Walk one leg past the Baths of Caracalla if the weather is kind, or rent a bike afterwards – walkers on the Appia regret how little ground they cover.
- There are patio restaurants on the Appia between San Sebastiano and the tomb of Cecilia Metella. Lunch there after the tour, and the bus back into town stops across the street.
FAQs
Can you visit the catacombs in Rome without a tour?
No. San Callisto admits visitors only in staff-led groups of at least two, and every visit is guided.
How many bodies are in the catacombs of Rome?
Around half a million people were buried at San Callisto alone, 16 popes among them. Rome has about a dozen catacomb complexes you can visit.
Where can I buy catacombs tickets in Rome?
Book a guided-tour slot online – the San Callisto tours are fulfilled by Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi, the officially authorised seller. The official website’s own booking form is reservation-only: you still pay at the gate on arrival.
Catacombs of San Callisto or San Sebastiano – which is better?
San Callisto for scale and the popes’ crypt. San Sebastiano is smaller but keeps a Bernini-attributed bust and the “domus Petri” graffiti, and the two sit a short walk apart – pick one, since back-to-back tunnels feel repetitive.