Palatine Hill Tickets

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Highlights

• Stand on the founding hill of Rome and look down over the Forum on one side and the Circus Maximus on the other
• Walk the emperors’ palaces and the sunken stadium, and step into the painted rooms where Augustus lived
• Book online and the Palatine rides in on the same ticket as the Colosseum, valid across two days

Tickets & Prices

The Palatine isn’t sold by itself. It comes bundled into the standard Colosseum ticket, which covers all three sites, the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine, across two days.

• Under-18s enter free, whatever their nationality.
• EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay a reduced rate.

Choose your ticket:

• For most people the standard combined ticket is the one to book. You already pay for the Palatine the moment you book the Colosseum, so hunting for a Palatine-only option is wasted effort.
• Book the Palatine and Forum on their own if you’ve seen the Colosseum before, or don’t plan to go in. It buys a quieter morning, and it is the ticket that opens the painted houses of Augustus and Livia, which the standard combined leaves shut.
• If the frescoes are the whole reason you’re climbing, make sure the words SUPER sites appear on whatever you buy.
• The honest catch with the Palatine is that signage is thin, and one ruin runs into the next. The standard ticket already includes an audio-guide app. It talks you through the palaces as you reach them.
• For the fuller story, a guided walk of the Forum and Palatine adds a live guide and the Roman Domus, over about three hours. Take it on a first visit if you want the stories told. If you’d rather set your own pace, the audio app covers the same ground for far less.

Plan Your Visit

What to See & Do

The Palatine is where Rome starts. Legend puts Romulus here, founding the city on the hill above the marshy ground that became the Forum, and marks the Lupercal cave below as the spot where the she-wolf found him and his brother.

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The hill kept its status ever after. Augustus, Cicero and Mark Antony all had homes on it, and the emperors who came later built palace over palace until the summit was covered.

The word travelled with it. “Palace”, in English and half of Europe, comes straight from the Palatine.

What’s left is brick and roofless shell, sprawling and hard to read in places. It reads far better on foot, taken in the order below.

The imperial palaces

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Domitian’s palace is the big one. It split in two: the public Domus Flavia, where the emperor held court, and the private Domus Augustana, where he actually lived. Beside them lies a vast sunken oval, his stadium, though no one is sure whether races were run in it or it was simply a private garden.

Along the ridge runs the Domus Tiberiana, an imperial palace of nearly ten acres on its own. What survives across the hill is vaulted brick, huge and roofless. The palaces once spread across the whole summit.

The Palatine Museum, set on top of Domitian’s palace, gathers the finds lifted from the hill: the frescoes and mosaics, the inscriptions, the portrait heads.

The Houses of Augustus and Livia

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Two rooms repay the climb on their own.

The Houses of Augustus and Livia hold some of the best-preserved Roman wall painting anywhere: 2,000-year-old frescoes of gardens and mythological scenes, and in the Room of the Masks a wall of theatrical masks set into painted stage sets. The colour is still bright on the walls.

A light projection picks out the detail and rebuilds whole paintings as you watch. Give the pair under an hour.

They are SUPER sites, though, and a standard combined ticket won’t open them. You need one that includes the SUPER sites: the Palatine and Roman Forum ticket does, and so do the dedicated SUPER tickets.

The Farnese Gardens

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The Farnese Gardens were laid out over the ruins in the sixteenth century, the first botanical garden in Europe. A pavilion and a fountain are most of what remains. It’s a shaded green pause halfway round.

The view from the Belvedere

The hill ends at the Terrazza Belvedere, about forty metres up. The Forum spreads out below on one side, the long oval of the Circus Maximus on the other. From up here you can read the whole layout of ancient Rome. Walk a full circuit of the hill and you get the bird’s-eye view straight down into the Forum just before you descend into it.

Insider Tips

• Start on the Palatine rather than the Forum floor. The climb is gentler, there’s more shade, and you get the view down before you’re among the stones.
• Go at opening or in the late afternoon, and give the hill and Forum a proper half-morning. Four hours goes quickly.
• If the frescoed houses are the draw, book a SUPER ticket ahead of time.
• Keep the audio guide running, or bring a guidebook. Signage on the hill is sparse, and without it one palace looks much like the next.

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