Domus Aurea

Domus Aurea tickets: the VR visit, the park’s own tickets and the Thursday Highlights

You can’t just walk into the Domus Aurea. Every visit is guided and starts at a time you book, and apart from one Thursday a month the doors only open from Friday to Sunday, so the day you can book decides the rest of your plan.

The ticket we sell, at €90, is entry with the virtual reality experience, with the VR headset included. A guided tour isn’t on the list of what that price covers, and you can cancel up to 72 hours before your date.

The site is run by the Parco archeologico del Colosseo, the archaeological park that also runs the Colosseum and the ruins around it. It books the weekend visits itself on its ticketing site, ticketing.colosseo.it, with or without the VR experience.

The park also opens the Domus Aurea on one weekday a month. On the third Thursday it runs Domus Aurea Highlights, themed visits with a guide at 16:00, which we don’t sell and you book with the park.

Domus Aurea opening days: Friday to Sunday, never the first Sunday

Three days a week is all you get, and the first Sunday of the month isn’t one of them. That’s the Sunday the rest of the Colosseum park lets everyone in free, and it’s the day the Domus Aurea stays shut, so plan your weekend around it.

The park’s winter timetable runs until 28 February 2027.

The Roma Pass doesn’t cover the Domus Aurea

No. The Domus Aurea isn’t one of the Roma Pass sites, and the card’s own ticket for the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill doesn’t take you in here either. It isn’t on any of the other Rome passes we sell, so for this one you buy a ticket.

Where the pass does help is next door. If you’re seeing the Colosseum the same weekend, the Roma Pass ticket covers it, the Forum and the Palatine, and our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes works out whether it covers enough of your list.

Inside the Domus Aurea: the Octagonal Room and the painted vaults

The visit itself is underground, beneath the Colle Oppio park on the Oppian Hill. You walk through part of Nero’s palace, where more than 100 rooms survive under the Baths of Trajan, among them the Nymphaeum of Polyphemus.

The best-known room is the Octagonal Room, a hall under a dome with five rooms opening off it. The round opening at the top of the dome, the oculus, is closed today by a protective glass structure.

Around it, the paint is still on the walls and vaults, in faded colours, with panels framed in stucco on some ceilings. Visitors also mention what’s left of the mosaics.

The visit got longer in December 2024, when the west wing opened with a new entrance. In one of its rooms you can find the name “Pintorichio” scratched into the wall, the signature of the painter Pinturicchio, and there’s a nymphaeum whose vault is decorated with shells.

How Nero’s Domus Aurea survived under Trajan’s baths

Nero built the Domus Aurea, the Golden House, after the great fire of AD 64, to replace his earlier palace, the Domus Transitoria. His architects were Severus and Celer, and they worked fast: it was nearly finished when Nero died in 68.

What came next is why you can still see it. Early in the 2nd century the part of the palace on the Esquiline Hill was filled with earth and used as the foundation for the Baths of Trajan, and being buried is what kept those rooms and their paint.

Walking to the Domus Aurea from the Colosseum

The Domus Aurea is right next to the Colosseum, in the Colle Oppio park, so from there you walk over. The entrance is on Via della Domus Aurea, a brick building with arched doors set into the hill, and from further across Rome the nearest metro stop is Colosseo, on line B.