Circus Maximus Tickets

Highlights

• Walk the whole track for free, any hour of the day, with the Palatine Hill rising along one side
• Put on the headset and watch the stadium rebuild itself around you across eight stops, ending on a chariot race
• Book a timed slot online, and check the forecast before you go

Tickets & Prices

The valley itself is free to walk. You pay only to have the empty field filled back in, and a few tickets do that:

• Circo Maximo Experience. The self-guided one. You pick a slot and go at your own pace.
• Circus Maximus virtual-reality game. For a guided, more playable version, this ninety-minute one adds a live guide and turns the finale into a chariot race you steer yourself.
• Caracalla, paired with the Circus. A guide takes a small group round the great brick baths down the road, then the track.

You pick a start time when you book. In summer, book ahead, because the cooler evening slots go first.

The headset runs outdoors on a working archaeological site, so rain cancels it. Check in at the desk on Viale Aventino about ten minutes before your slot.

For a wider Rome trip, the Rome Tourist Card bundles the Colosseum, the Vatican and more.

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Plan Your Visit

What to See & Do

Walking the free valley

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On the ground, the Circus Maximus is a long grassy hollow. The old racetrack is gravel and dirt now, sunk a little below the streets around it, running 600 metres between two low banks where 150,000 people once sat. Not much else survives.

The Palatine Hill rises straight up along the north-west side. The emperors watched the races from the palaces on top, looking down over the whole track from their own front rows.

It’s a quiet place. On a normal morning you’ll pass a jogger or two and a few dogs, and you can walk the full loop in about half an hour. Plenty of Romans just come to sit on the grass in the middle of the city.

It does take some imagination, though. Standing on the empty field, you build the stadium in your own head: the roar off the banks, the emperor’s box in the far corner, chariots going flat out and coming apart at the turns.

Look at the bare grass and you either fill it in or you don’t.

The Circo Maximo Experience: the eight stops

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This is what the headset is for. It lays the reconstruction over the real ground in front of you, so you keep sight of the actual valley the whole way, the ancient one built over the top.

You walk it in eight stops. The bare Murcia valley where it began, then the Circus that Julius Caesar widened and Trajan later rebuilt in stone.

Next comes the imperial stadium at full height, the banked seating, the triumphal arch of Titus raised again at its true scale. Then the tabernae, the little shops and bars that ran under the stands, the ground turning to farmland in the Middle Ages, and a chariot race to finish, the stop they call “A Day at the Circus”.

The race reads clearly even on the dated viewer, and it’s the part younger visitors react to.

Without the headset, this is a field with a couple of rocks. With it, the field becomes a stadium you can actually see. That trade is the whole visit. Pay for the headset, and walk the free grass afterwards.

Pairing it with the Palatine and Caracalla

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The valley sits between two other sites worth your time. The Palatine Hill rises right above the track, and from up there you look down on the Circus the way the emperors did.

The Baths of Caracalla are a ten-minute walk south-east, and the guided ticket above ties them to the Circus in one go. Either turns a quick look at the grass into a proper half-day.

Insider Tips

• Book a timed slot and check the experience is actually running before you go. People do turn up to a fenced-off meeting point with no one on the desk.
• Take a cooler-hour slot. The valley sits in full sun, which is exactly why the summer sessions run into the evening.
• The viewer is hand-held, with dated 360-style footage, and it tires your arm over forty minutes.
• The ground is dusty and uneven. Wear something you don’t mind getting scuffed, and leave the stroller behind.
• Kids from about eight get the most out of it. The narration is over the heads of much younger ones, but the chariot race lands for everyone.

Did You Know?

1. The track ran 621 metres, and the banks of seating around it made the Circus the largest venue of the ancient world, bigger than any stadium standing today.
2. The first wooden stands went up in the 6th century BC under King Tarquinius Priscus. Julius Caesar widened the seating around 50 BC, Trajan rebuilt the whole thing in stone in the early 2nd century AD, and the last races ran in 549 CE.
3. Teams raced in four colours, red, green, white and blue, and fans backed them like football clubs. One charioteer, Diocles, is reckoned the highest-earning athlete in history.
4. The original track lies about 10 metres below today’s surface. The obelisk that once stood on the central barrier was hauled across Rome and now stands outside the basilica of St John Lateran.

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