Museum of Civilisations

Museum of Civilisations tickets: €10 at the door for both palaces

The Museum of Civilisations sells its tickets at the museum itself, and one ticket gets you into both palaces on Piazza Marconi. The main ticket office is in the Palazzo delle Scienze, at number 14, and there’s another desk across the square in the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari, at number 8. The main office takes card payments.

There’s nothing to book if you’re visiting on your own or as a family: you buy the ticket when you arrive. Only groups, of up to 25 people, have to book, and they pay a €10 booking fee.

Visitors with a disability go in free with one companion, and so do licensed EU tour guides and ICOM members. If you’re coming back to Rome or living here for a while, the €22 annual card pays for itself on the third visit.

At weekends the museum runs guided tours for €5 a person, booked by the Friday before through its education service at didatticamuciv@abintra.it. Groups of up to 20 can have a tour of their own for €100, or €120 in English.

Mind the name when you plan the trip. The Museo della Civiltà Romana sounds almost the same but is another museum, run by the city of Rome, at Piazza Agnelli 10, and the ticket here doesn’t get you into it.

Closed for now at the Museum of Civilisations: the ethnographic floor and the Guattari Cave

Part of the Palazzo delle Scienze is shut for building works, and it’s the part with the museum’s ethnographic collections, from Africa, the Americas and Oceania. The museum says the first floor stays closed until the works are finished, which it has scheduled for winter 2026, without giving a date.

The Guattari Cave room, with its Neanderthal finds, is closed too, for extraordinary maintenance and with no reopening date. If either of these is the reason you’re going, wait for the reopening; if it’s prehistory, the Asian collections or the palace itself, the rest of the museum is open.

The Museum of Civilisations on the Roma Pass: €5 or an included entry

The Roma Pass gets you in two ways here. You can spend one of its included entries, one on the 48-hour card and two on the 72-hour card, or you can pay the Roma Pass price of €5, half the full ticket.

Which one makes sense depends on where else you’re spending the card. At €10, this is one of the cheaper tickets on the Roma Pass list, so an included entry saves you more at the Colosseum or Castel Sant’Angelo, and here we’d pay the €5. On the first Sunday of the month, when entry is free anyway, and for under-18s, who never pay, don’t use an entry at all.

The 24-hour Omnia Card and the Smart version don’t include the Roma Pass, so they don’t help here, and the Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass, Go City and the Turbopass don’t list the museum. Our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes adds up which card works for the rest of your list, and the Roma Pass also covers metro line B, which is how you get out to EUR.

Museum of Civilisations opening hours and visiting rules

The hours are the same all year, with no winter timetable, so an afternoon visit after something else in the south of the city works in any month. Photos are fine for your own use, without flash or a tripod. Guide dogs and small pets carried in your arms go in free; other animals are allowed only between 14:00 and 19:00, and they pay the reduced ticket.

The rooms are step-free, with lifts to the first and second floors and adapted toilets on every floor. Wheelchairs and reclining wheelchairs are lent free at the ticket office (bring an ID document for the reclining ones), and each palace has a parking space for disabled visitors. There are Braille routes in the Early Middle Ages and folk arts collections, and in the African one once it reopens.

How the Museum of Civilisations became a museum of museums

The Museum of Civilisations is young as a name and old as a collection. In 2016 Dario Franceschini, then Italy’s culture minister, merged four national museums into one: the Pigorini museum of prehistory and ethnography, the museum of folk arts and traditions, the museum of the Early Middle Ages and the museum of Oriental art. The African Museum and the Geological Museum joined later, which is why one ticket now takes you from fossils to Japanese art.

The oldest part is the Pigorini, which opened in 1876 in a wing of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuit college in the centre of Rome, beside the collections of the Kircherian Museum. The Oriental art museum opened in 1957 in Palazzo Brancaccio, with finds from the expeditions of IsMEO, the Italian institute for the Middle and Far East co-founded by the scholar Giuseppe Tucci. Both collections ended up out here, in palaces built for the 1942 world’s fair that never took place.

Inside the Palazzo delle Scienze: prehistory, Asia and the Early Middle Ages

The Palazzo delle Scienze went up between 1938 and 1943, designed by a team of four architects under Marcello Piacentini, who was in charge of building the whole district. The building is part of what you come to see: the atrium has frescoes by Valerio Fraschetti, and on the second floor you’ll find a stained-glass window by Giulio Rosso from 1941–42 and the Hall of Sciences, with Mario Tozzi’s mosaic floor of 1943.

The collections fill the rooms around them. There’s prehistory and protohistory, the long stretch before written records, along with palaeontology and minerals from the national geological collections, shown here since 2022. The Asian collections, the old Colonial Museum and a section on contemporary arts are in this palace too, and the museum counts more than two million objects and documents between its rooms and its stores.

The Early Middle Ages collection has been in this building since 1967. It covers the centuries after the fall of Rome, the period between the ancient city you see in the centre and the medieval one.

Across the square, the Palazzo delle Arti e Tradizioni Popolari holds the collections on Italian folk arts and traditions. Your ticket covers it, so walk over before you leave.

Getting to the Museum of Civilisations on metro line B

EUR is south of the centre, and the easy way there is the metro: take line B to EUR Fermi, the station for the museum. The two palaces face each other on Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, with the ticket office at number 14.