Circus Maximus

Is the Circus Maximus free? The valley, the ruins and the Experience

The valley is. The long grassy stretch between the Palatine and the Aventine is open all the time and needs no ticket, though it can be fenced off when a concert or an event takes it over.

Two things at the Circus have a price, and they’re separate tickets. The archaeological area is the excavated curve at the south-east end, with the Torre della Moletta, and it closes on Mondays. The Circo Maximo Experience is a visit with augmented and virtual reality visors, and the area’s ticket doesn’t include it. Both are run by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina, Rome’s city heritage office, which sells them online, by phone on 060608 and at the ticket office on Viale Aventino.

On the Experience, the reduced price is for visitors up to 26, teachers, groups and Roma Pass holders, among others, and anyone booking a reduced ticket online brings proof. A family ticket for two adults and their children under 18 costs €22, but only by phone on 060608 or at a city tourist Infopoint.

Neither of those tickets is on sale here. What we have is a guided tour of the Baths of Caracalla that takes in the Circus Maximus, at €89 for adults, for an hour and a half in groups of up to 10. It includes the entry ticket to the Baths, the ruins of an ancient Roman bath complex, and a guide for both sites, with headphones, in English, German, French, Italian or Spanish. Its listing has no Circus Maximus ticket, so don’t count on it taking you into the paid area.

The tour costs €74 for children aged 7 to 17, and under-7s go free. You meet the guide at Viale Aventino 3, at the Circo Massimo metro exit opposite the FAO building, by a yellow TOURIKS sign, about 10 minutes before the start, and you can cancel for free up to 24 hours ahead.

What you see at the Circus Maximus today

In the valley you walk on the outline of the track, about 600 metres by 140, with the Palatine’s palaces on one side and the Aventine on the other. The stone seating is gone. Today the space holds Rome’s big crowds instead: Travis Scott played here to about 60,000 people in August 2023, and the Giro d’Italia, the Italian cycling race, finished here on 31 May 2026.

At the south-east end, the archaeological area brings you down among what’s left of the curve. You walk along the galleries that led up to the cavea, the tiers of seats, over the ancient paving and past the rooms that were shops, taverns and offices. Above them stands the Torre della Moletta, a tower the Frangipane family built in the 12th century and named after a mill. It has been restored, and a staircase inside climbs to a viewpoint over the excavations. The area is only partly accessible.

The Circo Maximo Experience puts back what you can’t see. Through the visors you follow eight stages, from the valley’s origins and the Circus under Caesar and Trajan to the seating, the Arch of Titus that stood here, the shops, the medieval and modern Circus and, at the end, a day at the races. It takes about 40 minutes, in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese or Japanese, with Italian and English subtitles for deaf visitors, and it’s accessible to visitors with reduced mobility.

The Circus Maximus with the Roma Pass: two sites, two ways in

On the Roma Pass, the archaeological area and the Circo Maximo Experience count as two separate sites, so you can use the card at both. Either one can be an included entry (the 48-hour card has one, the 72-hour card two), and you tell the staff at each site whether to use it. Wherever you don’t, the card gets you the reduced price: €4 in the area and €10 for the Experience. That’s why an included entry is better spent on the Experience, where it saves you €10, than in the area, where it saves €4.

The 72-hour Omnia Card works the same way, because its Roma Pass is the one that gets you in. The other cards on our Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes page don’t help here: the 24-hour Omnia, the Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass and the Turbopass leave the Circus Maximus out, and Go City lists only a bike hire that comes with the Experience.

Booking with the card is free and strongly recommended, on 060608. One more thing to plan around: on the first Sunday of the month the area is free for everyone, so keep an included entry for another day, unless you’re using it on the Experience, which is paid that day too.

Circus Maximus opening hours this winter

The paid area went onto its winter hours on Sunday 25 October, closing at 16:00 until late March. The Experience keeps similar daytime hours until the end of the year. In summer it moved to the late afternoon and evening, and the city hasn’t published its 2027 timetable.

The free first Sundays have run on the area’s normal hours, until 16:00 in winter.

The view of the Circus Maximus from the Palatine Hill

For the whole valley at once, go up rather than in. The Palatine Hill rises along one side of the Circus, and the Domus Augustana, the private palace of the emperors, had its rooms over the valley, so from the palace’s upper level you look straight out over the track.

That view comes with the Colosseum ticket, which also covers the Roman Forum and the Palatine: €25 for all three sites, with an audio guide app. Our Roman Forum and Palatine Hill page explains how to plan the hill around your Colosseum time.

So the choice at the Circus comes down to what you’re after. The Palatine gives you the view, the archaeological area puts you among the galleries and under the tower, and the Experience shows you the Circus full of people.

How the Circus Maximus went from racetrack to gasworks and back

Races were held in this valley from the time of Rome’s kings, and the legend of the abduction of the Sabine women is set here. Julius Caesar gave the Circus its first masonry stadium. Fire struck it in AD 36 and again in 64, when the great fire of Nero’s reign broke out in the shops along the Circus, and both times it was rebuilt as it was.

What you see today is mostly Trajan’s Circus. The emperor rebuilt almost all of it in stone, and a coin from AD 103 records the work. Its Arch of Titus, put up by the Senate in 81, is a different arch from the one in the Forum, and it’s one of the stages of the Experience.

Two of the Circus’s obelisks still stand in Rome. Augustus’s was moved to Piazza del Popolo by Pope Sixtus V in 1587, and the one from the reign of the emperor Constantius II, dated 357, stands at St John Lateran. The last race was run in 549, and the valley then turned into vegetable gardens; a gasworks stood on the track from 1852 to 1910, and the excavations of the 1930s brought the curve back to light.

Circo Massimo metro station and the Circus Maximus entrance

Metro line B has a stop named after it, Circo Massimo, and its exit comes out on Viale Aventino, the street with the entrance to the paid area and the Experience. By bus, the stop to get off at is Aventino (Circo Massimo).