Castel Gandolfo Papal Palace and Gardens

Castel Gandolfo tickets: Papal Palace, Secret Garden or the minibus

We sell three tickets for Castel Gandolfo, and they aren’t three prices for the same visit.

The base ticket, at €16, takes you into the Papal Palace and out through the Secret Garden, with views over Lake Albano and the town. The second, from €24, covers the same Papal Apartments and Secret Garden and lets you add the Astronomical Domes. That’s the adult price for the apartments and the garden alone, and children have a cheaper ticket of their own.

The eco minibus tour, at €30, is a different visit. It drives you through the gardens of the Pontifical Villas with an audio guide, and it doesn’t include the Papal Apartment. Those gardens can only be visited aboard the minibus, so this is the ticket for them, at the same price for adults and children.

The base ticket also has a reduced price, €8, for young people aged 7 to 18, priests, religious and seminarians with a document, and students up to 25 with proof of enrolment. Those are the Vatican Museums’ rules, and if you buy it without qualifying you pay for a full ticket at the door.

The base ticket and the minibus tour can’t be cancelled. The ticket with the Domes option is the flexible one: you can move it to another date up to 54 hours before your visit, which matters more than usual here, as the next section explains.

Is the Papal Palace at Castel Gandolfo open to visitors in 2026?

This is the question to settle before you book, because this summer the palace went back to being a papal home, and we haven’t yet found the new visiting hours announced for it.

So there’s an exhibition inside, and the palace tickets we sell show dates available. What we couldn’t confirm is that the papal apartments themselves are open to the public this autumn. If the palace is the reason for your trip, we’d take the ticket with the Domes option, the only palace ticket you can move. If it’s the gardens you’re after, the minibus tour doesn’t depend on the palace at all.

Castel Gandolfo with Go City, and 20% off with the Turbopass

Two of Rome’s passes reach out as far as Castel Gandolfo. Go City counts it as included, and the Turbopass takes 20% off. The Roma Pass, the Omnia Card, the Rome Tourist Card and the Vatican City Pass don’t cover it.

Go City’s listing doesn’t tell us whether its entry is the palace, the gardens or the minibus, so check that as you book it on the Go City pass. The Turbopass has its own page, and Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes puts all of them side by side for the rest of your Rome list.

Inside the Papal Palace: the private apartment and the popes’ portraits

Whichever way you pay, the visit starts at the palace on Piazza della Libertà, the town’s main square, where the ticket office is too. The museum route takes you through the popes’ Private Apartment and a gallery of portraits of the pontiffs, then out into the Secret Garden.

These are also the rooms where the exhibitions in the timeline above are hung. Staff start moving visitors out 30 minutes before closing, so plan to be through the last rooms half an hour before closing time.

On the ground floor there’s a bookshop in the Chinese Room, and the palace has a café-bistro, opened in December 2024, with a terrace over the lake.

The Secret Garden, the Moro Garden and the Barberini gardens

The Secret Garden, where the museum route comes out, isn’t the only garden on the palace ticket: the Moro Garden is on it too.

Beyond them lie the gardens of the Pontifical Villas, the Barberini gardens, open to visitors since 2014 and seen only from the eco minibus. The complex is also home to the Specola, the Vatican Observatory, and on the second palace ticket you can add a visit to the Astronomical Domes.

From Domitian’s villa to Leo XIV: how Castel Gandolfo became the popes’ summer home

Long before the popes, the gardens were the grounds of a villa of the Roman emperor Domitian. In the Belvedere gardens of Villa Barberini, the box hedges are laid out right against the long arched wall of its cryptoporticus, a covered Roman walkway.

The Holy See took the castle in 1596, over a debt owed by the Savelli, a Roman noble family, and in the 17th century Pope Urban VIII had the architect Carlo Maderno restore it. Today the palace and gardens are Vatican territory, though they sit outside Vatican City.

Pope Francis didn’t use it as a residence, and in 2016 he opened it to the public instead. Leo XIV brought the popes back: in July 2025 he stayed at Villa Barberini, and in July 2026 he moved into the palace itself.

Getting to Castel Gandolfo from Rome by train

Castel Gandolfo is about 25 km from Rome, and none of our tickets includes the trip. A local train from Rome is the easy way, and from the station you walk up into the town to Piazza della Libertà and the palace entrance.