Largo Argentina Sacred Area

Largo Argentina Sacred Area tickets: €7, booked ahead, in 20-minute slots

Until 2023 the Largo Argentina Sacred Area was something you looked down on over the railings of the square. Since 20 June 2023 you can go in: a raised walkway takes you through the four temples, visitors are let in every 20 minutes, and the visit lasts about 45 minutes. The temples date from the Roman Republic, the centuries before Rome had emperors.

Booking ahead is compulsory, and it adds a €1 booking fee to every ticket. The site belongs to Rome’s city museums, and they sell the tickets themselves: online, on the Musei in Comune ticket shop, or at the ticket office in the Torre del Papito, the medieval tower on Piazza dei Calcarari. You can book up to five tickets at a time. We don’t sell this one ourselves, so you book it with the museums.

The official page for the site doesn’t say who qualifies for the reduced price, so check that before you book one. People entitled to free entry, residents among them, collect their ticket at the Torre del Papito office.

The next free first Sunday falls on 6 December 2026. On those days the free entry depends on how many people are already inside, so with only one group let in every 20 minutes, arriving early is the safer plan.

When the Largo Argentina Sacred Area is open, and how the 45-minute visit runs

The site opens from Tuesday to Sunday and closes on Mondays. Since the clocks went back at the end of October it keeps winter hours, with the last entry at 15:45.

There are no toilets on the site, so sort that out before you go in. Small dogs can come in a carrier. For blind visitors and those with low vision, there are two large tactile panels and finds from the excavations scanned in 3D.

Roma Pass and Go City at the Largo Argentina Sacred Area

With the Roma Pass you have two ways in: one of the card’s included entries, one on the 48-hour card and two on the 72-hour card, or the reduced ticket. You choose at each site, and the booking still applies here, with its €1 fee.

Our advice is to save the included entry for somewhere else. The full ticket here is €7, so an included entry is worth more at sites with dearer tickets, and the reduced ticket is the better use of the card at Largo Argentina. Our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes does those sums for your own list.

The 72-hour Omnia Card works the same way, because it has a Roma Pass inside it. The Go City pass includes the sacred area as well. The Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass and the Turbopass don’t list it.

The four temples on the Largo Argentina walkway

Down on the walkway you’re on the paving of a Roman square, with the four temples standing side by side. Nobody knows for certain which god each one belonged to, so archaeologists still call them by letters, A to D.

The round one is Temple B, and although it catches the eye first, it’s the youngest, from the end of the 2nd century BC, probably dedicated to Fortuna huiusce diei, the Fortune of this day. Next to it, Temple C is the oldest, from the early 3rd century BC, and probably belonged to the goddess Feronia, while Temple D, from the early 2nd century BC, is thought to be the temple of the Lares Permarini.

Behind temples B and C, look for the foundations of the Curia of Pompey, the hall built by Pompey, Julius Caesar’s great rival. Tradition places Caesar’s murder here.

Temple A, from the middle of the 3rd century BC and probably for Juturna, has a second life you can still see. In 1132 it became the church of San Nicola, and part of its 12th-century apse is still standing among the Roman columns.

How a demolished district uncovered the Largo Argentina Sacred Area

What you see isn’t how the temples were first built, because each one was rebuilt more than once. After a fire in 111 BC the square got its first paving, and after another fire, in AD 80, Emperor Domitian rebuilt the temples and the portico on the north side and laid the travertine paving you walk over today.

The square was abandoned in the 5th century, and noble families built houses over it in the 8th and 9th. That’s how it disappeared under the city until 1926, when the old district on top was demolished and the temples came to light. Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, opened the site on 21 April 1929.

For almost a century after that, the temples were a view from the street, until works sponsored by the jeweller Bulgari added the walkway you use now.

Getting to Largo Argentina from the Pantheon

The sacred area fills the middle of Largo di Torre Argentina, in the historic centre, close to the Pantheon, so it’s an easy walk before or after a visit there. The ticket office sits round the side of the square from the entrance, in the medieval tower.