Mamertine Prison

Mamertine Prison tickets: entry with an audio guide

A ticket to the Mamertine Prison takes you through the small museum at street level and down the stairs to both cells. The one we sell comes with a multilingual audio guide that plays on your phone, so download it before you go down: €11 for the Mamertine Prison with the audio guide. Children have a price of their own, €7, and the ticket can’t be cancelled or refunded, so buy it once your day is set.

There’s no state ticket office here. The prison is run by the Opera Romana Pellegrinaggi (ORP), the pilgrimage office of the Vicariate of Rome and the company behind the Omnia Card, so the tickets sold at the door are theirs. On the first Sunday of the month those door tickets cost €5 for adults, and visitors aged 6 to 17 and EU students up to 25 go in free.

Mamertine Prison, Roman Forum and Palatine Hill on one ticket

The prison stands right beside the Roman Forum, and our second ticket puts the two together: the Mamertine, the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill and the Imperial Fora for €29, with the prison’s audio guide. It doesn’t include the Colosseum or a guided tour. There are child and student prices at checkout. On the ORP’s own version of this ticket, the reduced rate is for 18 to 25-year-olds who are EU citizens or legally resident in Italy.

What you buy here is a voucher for the ORP’s SUPER ticket, which costs about what the Mamertine ticket and the Forum’s SUPER ticket do bought separately. What you gain is one purchase instead of two. On top of the Forum, Palatine and Imperial Fora, the SUPER ticket opens a set of extra sites, with limited places and subject to availability.

That same ORP office is where some Colosseum tickets are collected. The ORP’s combined tickets with the Colosseum, such as Mamertine Prison + 24h Only Arena, are picked up here with ID, which is why so many Colosseum combos send you to the Mamertine first. On the first Sunday of the month the Colosseum is free, and the ORP itself says to skip its Colosseum combos that day and visit the prison on its own ticket. For the Colosseum, see our Colosseum tickets page.

Mamertine Prison with the Omnia Card or the Rome Tourist Card

Both Omnia Cards include the Mamertine Prison with its audio guide, which fits, since the ORP sells the card and runs the prison. The Rome Tourist Card includes it too, on its option with the Colosseum and the Roman Forum.

The Roma Pass, the Turbopass, Go City and the Vatican City Pass don’t include the Mamertine, so with one of those you add the ticket above. The Omnia Card and Rome Tourist Card pages list everything else each one covers, and Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes puts all of them side by side.

Mamertine Prison opening hours, how long it takes and the stairs

The Mamertine opens every day from 9:00 to 17:00. The ORP doesn’t publish a last entry time, so give yourself the whole visit before 17:00.

Forty minutes is the ORP’s own figure, and it’s plenty for a site this small. The only way down to the cells is by stairs, which is why the ORP says the prison isn’t accessible for anyone with mobility difficulties.

Inside the Mamertine Prison: the museum, the carcer and the Tullianum

You start at street level, in a small museum of two rooms with finds from the site. Tablets there show in 3D illustrations how the complex changed over the centuries, and they’re the easiest way to picture the two cells before you see them.

From there, stairs take you down. The first level is the carcer, the prison itself, where you can still make out traces of medieval frescoes on the walls. Below it is the Tullianum, the cell where enemies of the state were left to die, and the oldest part of the whole complex.

Jugurtha, Vercingetorix and St Peter: who was held in the Mamertine Prison

The Tullianum was dug in the 7th century BC into the wall that protected the Capitoline Hill when Rome was still ruled by kings, and it may have begun as the cistern of a spring. The carcer above it followed in the 6th century BC and was rebuilt in the Republic and the early Empire, when it got its travertine facade.

It was never a jail for long sentences. Prisoners were held here for a short time before execution, and the best known were Jugurtha, king of Numidia, in 104 BC, and Vercingetorix, king of the Gauls, in 46 BC.

According to tradition, the apostles Peter and Paul spent their last days here before they were martyred. The story goes that Peter made a spring well up in the cell and baptised two of his jailers, Processus and Martinianus. It’s a tradition, though, and nothing outside it shows they were ever held here.

The names came much later. “Mamertine” is medieval, perhaps linked to a temple of Mars, and nobody is sure where “Tullianum” comes from: one theory ties it to a jet of water, which fits a cell that may have started out around a spring.

Finding the Mamertine Prison between the Forum and the Capitoline

The prison sits between the Capitoline Hill and the Roman Forum, so it’s an easy stop on foot if you’re already at either. The entrance is at Clivo Argentario 1, under the church of San Giuseppe dei Falegnami, St Joseph of the Carpenters, and the prison belongs to the Vicariate of Rome and the carpenters’ confraternity of that church. On the combined ticket, the Forum and Palatine entrance you use is on the same street.