Your Colosseum Ticket Already Includes the Forum and Palatine

Your Colosseum ticket already includes the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill, and a startling number of people never use that half of it. They queue for the amphitheatre, take the photographs, and walk out past the entrance to the place where the Republic actually happened.

What the Forum Was

The Forum began as marshy ground between the hills, drained in the seventh century BC by the Cloaca Maxima, one of the world’s earliest sewers and still, in part, functioning. What grew on the reclaimed land became the political, legal, religious and commercial centre of the Republic and then the Empire: the space where elections were contested, laws proclaimed, triumphs paraded and bodies burned.

The single most useful mental adjustment is this: you are walking about eight metres below the level of the Renaissance city. The Forum silted up, was quarried for stone, and by the sixteenth century was pasture known as the Campo Vaccino, the cow field. Everything you see was dug out from the eighteenth century onward.

What to Find, and Why It Matters

• The Temple of Vesta and the House of the Vestals. The sacred fire burned here, tended by six women bound to thirty years of service and buried alive if they broke their vows. The surviving statues of the chief Vestals line the courtyard.
• The Temple of Caesar. Behind an unremarkable brick shelter is the spot where Julius Caesar was cremated in 44 BC. People still leave flowers on it.
• The Rostra, the speakers’ platform, named for the ships’ rams mounted on it. This is where Cicero’s severed hands and head were displayed after his proscription.
• The Curia Julia, the Senate House, which survives almost intact because it was converted into a church in the seventh century. Its bronze doors are copies; the originals were moved to the Basilica of St John Lateran.
• The Arch of Titus, whose relief shows the menorah and spoils of the Temple in Jerusalem being carried in triumph after AD 70. It is a difficult monument, and for centuries Rome’s Jewish community would not walk beneath it.
• The Basilica of Maxentius, whose three surviving vaults give the clearest sense of the scale Roman concrete could achieve.
• The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, with a baroque church wedged inside the portico, showing exactly how these buildings survived.

The Palatine Is the Better Half

Most people run out of energy before climbing the hill, which is a mistake. The Palatine is where Rome supposedly began, where the elite built their houses under the Republic, and where the emperors then built palaces so large that the hill’s name gave English the word palace.

• The Domus Augustana and Domus Flavia, Domitian’s vast palace complex.
• The House of Augustus and House of Livia, with some of the finest Roman wall painting in existence, and modest by comparison, which was the political point Augustus was making.
• The Iron Age hut foundations, ninth century BC, on the traditional site of Romulus’s settlement.
• The Farnese Gardens, laid out in the sixteenth century over the ruins, and the best free view down into the Forum.
• The Stadium of Domitian, a sunken garden-arena within the palace.

Tickets and Timing

• One ticket covers Colosseum, Forum and Palatine, valid across 24 hours from first entry, though the Colosseum portion is a fixed timed slot. Book online; walk-up availability is poor.
• Do the Forum and Palatine first, Colosseum after. Everyone does the reverse and arrives at the Forum exhausted in full sun.
• Enter from Via di San Gregorio rather than the main Forum gate near the Colosseum. It is consistently the shorter queue and puts you on the Palatine first.
• Budget three hours for Forum and Palatine together. There is very little shade and the surfaces are ancient paving, so proper shoes matter.
• Upgraded tickets add the Colosseum arena floor, underground hypogeum and the S.U.P.E.R. sites (including the House of Augustus and Livia). If you have any interest in Roman painting, the S.U.P.E.R. upgrade is the best-value add-on in Rome.

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Where to Stay

Monti, immediately north of the Forum, is the neighbourhood most worth staying in for this part of Rome.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Parco archeologico del Colosseo — official site, tickets and opening times
• Britannica — the Roman Forum