Baths of Caracalla

Caracalla Baths tickets: what you get and what stays closed

You don’t need to book the Baths of Caracalla. Italy’s Ministry of Culture lists the site as needing no reservation, and the ticket office at the entrance sells on the day. The ticket we sell adds an audio guide app with 17 stops, from the great halls to the open-air pool: €20.50 for entry and the audio guide.

The app speaks English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Download it on Wi-Fi before you go and pack your own earphones, because the ticket doesn’t include them. Under-18s go into the baths free, so on our ticket their €5 pays for the audio guide. You can cancel or change the date up to 24 hours before.

The ticket’s description still promises Immaginare Roma, a show of Francesco Corni’s drawings, but that closed on 19 October 2025. The exhibition on now, of Frank Horvat’s work, runs until 10 January 2027, and the listing doesn’t say whether it’s included.

The baths don’t run guided tours or a skip-the-line entry of their own. If you’d like a guide, the guided tour from €89 spends an hour and a half on the baths and the Circus Maximus, the ancient chariot-racing ground down the road, with entry, the guide and headphones included. That price is for the tour in German, and you can cancel up to 24 hours before your time.

What no ticket on sale today gets you is the underground: the galleries beneath the baths and the Mithraeum, a shrine to the god Mithras, open only on special evenings.

Baths of Caracalla opening hours, and the Monday closing

The baths are closed every Monday, all year, so guides that still tell you to go on a Monday morning are out of date. From 25 October to the end of February they’re on winter hours, closing at 16:30 with the last entry at 15:30.

Our ticket is planned around a two-hour visit, so in winter go in by 14:30 if you want all of it before the gates close. Two parts shut earlier still: the Frank Horvat exhibition rooms close at 16:00, half an hour before the site, and so does the Domus di Vigna Guidi, the frescoed Roman house inside the grounds.

Caracalla Baths with the Roma Pass: why we’d pay the €2

The Roma Pass gets you into the baths in one of two ways. You can spend one of its included entries here (the 48-hour card has one, the 72-hour card two), or pay the card’s reduced ticket of €2.

With €2 as the alternative, an included entry spent at Caracalla saves you €2 and nothing more. We’d keep it for a site where even the reduced ticket is dear, like the Colosseum, and pay the €2 here. That €2 could go up while an exhibition is on, the Roma Pass warns, and the Frank Horvat show runs until 10 January 2027.

The card doesn’t book anything for you, and here there’s nothing you have to book. If you’d like to reserve, the Roma Pass’s help pages send you to Musei Italiani, the Ministry of Culture’s ticket site, and anyone with you who has no card reserves a ticket of their own.

The 24-hour Omnia Card, the Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass and the Turbopass leave the baths out, and how all of them compare across the rest of the city is on our Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes page.

Inside the Baths of Caracalla: the halls, the pool and the Domus

The central halls stand in a line, and each keeps the Latin name of its room in a Roman bath. The calidarium was the hot room, the tepidarium the warm one and the frigidarium the cold one.

Two courtyards, the palaestrae, were for exercise, and the outer enclosure held the libraries and the cisterns. For swimming there was the natatio, an open-air pool.

A modern touch went in beside the ruins in 2024: the Specchio d’Acqua, or “water mirror”, a shallow basin designed by the architect Hannes Peer to recall the natatio.

The Domus di Vigna Guidi is a Roman house in the grounds, and its frescoes were restored in 2022. Its shrine has Egyptian gods, Anubis and Isis, painted alongside Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

The great statues found at the baths, the Farnese Hercules and the Farnese Bull, are now in a museum in Naples, but the free Roma X-PAND app, out since August 2026, puts them back in place with augmented reality on your phone, along with a map and descriptions of the site.

The underground galleries and the Mithraeum

Beneath the baths run about 2 km of galleries, with the furnaces and boilers that heated the water and a mill. Down there too is one of the largest mithraea in Rome, where the fossa sanguinis, the “blood pit” of the god’s rites, can still be made out.

None of this is on the ordinary ticket. The underground opens only for events and special visits, like the summer evening openings that ended on 15 October, and no dates have been announced for this winter. On the evenings it does open, a step-free route goes down from Via Antonina 5.

Opera at the Baths of Caracalla moved in 2026

The Rome Opera’s summer season is staged at the baths, but in 2026 restoration works at Caracalla sent it to the Circus Maximus. Nothing has been announced for summer 2027, so check before you plan an evening around it. If the season comes back here, the Roma Pass lists 10% off the Caracalla summer season, except for its EXTRA programme.

Why the Baths of Caracalla are still standing

Emperor Caracalla, son of Septimius Severus, opened the baths in AD 216, after only five years of building. They rose on three terraces, fed by an aqueduct, the Antonine, built for them alone, and the work was finished under two later emperors, Elagabalus and Severus Alexander. Constantine restored them.

The end came in 537. During the Goths’ siege of Rome in the Gothic War, their king Vitiges cut the aqueducts, and the baths stopped working. Nobody built over the ruins afterwards, which is why they’re one of the best-preserved imperial buildings in Rome.

Getting to the Baths of Caracalla from the Circus Maximus or the Colosseum

The simplest way is on foot from Circo Massimo station, on metro line B: about 950 metres, around 12 minutes, to the entrance at Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 52. From the Colosseum it’s 1.2 to 1.6 km, a walk of 15 to 20 minutes. The metro only saves part of it, since Colosseo and Circo Massimo are neighbouring stops on line B and you still walk the same stretch from Circo Massimo.