National Roman Museum

National Roman Museum tickets: one entry for all three sites

The National Roman Museum’s ticket gets you into three buildings in different parts of Rome. Palazzo Massimo and the Baths of Diocletian stand opposite Termini station, and Palazzo Altemps is by Piazza Navona. The ticket we sell, at €28, is a reserved entry to all three, with a 25-minute multimedia video, a city map, WiFi and help at the meeting point. The museum’s fourth site, the Crypta Balbi, is closed.

You don’t have to book any of them. The museum doesn’t ask for a reservation, and on the day you buy at the self-service machines at each entrance, by chip card only, or on Museiitaliani, the Ministry of Culture’s ticket site. Bought from the museum, the combined ticket lasts a week from your first visit, with one entry at each site, and it can’t be refunded or changed.

Ours can be cancelled up to 24 hours before, and that’s the real difference between the two. It doesn’t include a guided tour or the temporary exhibitions.

The National Roman Museum on the Roma Pass: three sites, one entry

The Roma Pass counts the museum’s three open sites as a single included entry, and once those entries are used it gets you the reduced ticket instead. You choose which at the museum, and there’s nothing to book. Nor do you have to see all three on the same day: start with one and do the other two on the following days, as long as the card is still valid.

The museum is next free for everyone on Sunday 6 December. On a day like that an included entry would be spent on a door that’s open anyway.

The 24-hour Omnia Card has no Roma Pass in it, so it doesn’t include the museum, and neither do the Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass or Go City. Our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes adds the museum to the rest of your list and tells you which card comes out ahead.

National Roman Museum opening hours and the Monday closing

All three sites open Tuesday to Sunday and close at 19:00, with last entry at 18:00, and they’re closed on Mondays. The museum’s own pages disagree on the opening time, 9:00 on the ticket page and 9:30 on the page for each site, so plan on 9:30. Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 December 2026 have a special opening.

Palazzo Massimo: the bronzes and the painted rooms of Roman villas

Opposite Termini, at Largo di Villa Peretti 1, Palazzo Massimo spreads its collection over four floors, and you climb from the statues to the painted walls.

On the lower floors you meet Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, dressed as Pontifex Maximus, the city’s chief priest, along with the General of Tivoli and the Lancellotti Discobolus, a marble discus thrower. Two of the statues here are bronzes, the Boxer at Rest and the Hellenistic Prince, and the same floors hold the carved sarcophagi of Portonaccio, Acilia and the Annona.

Up on the second floor, the walls themselves are the exhibits: frescoes, stucco and mosaics from the villa of Livia, Augustus’s wife, at Prima Porta, from the Farnesina and from a villa found at Termini. Down in the basement are the coins and jewellery, though an earlier notice had the coin collection closed, so don’t plan your visit round it.

The building began as a college, put up by a Jesuit between 1883 and 1887. The state bought it in 1981 and opened it as part of the museum in 1998.

The Baths of Diocletian and the church Michelangelo designed inside them

Across the square are the Baths of Diocletian, built between AD 298 and 306 and big enough for up to 3,000 bathers, spread over 13 hectares.

The baths were in use until the middle of the 6th century, then stood abandoned for about a thousand years. In 1561 Pope Pius IV had a church and a Carthusian monastery built into them, to Michelangelo’s design, and the monastery’s cloister, the Charterhouse, is where the visit takes you today.

The church is Santa Maria degli Angeli, and it fills what was the frigidarium, the baths’ cold hall. The Natatio, the swimming pool, is one of the parts closed for now.

Palazzo Altemps, a cardinal’s palace of antique statues by Piazza Navona

Palazzo Altemps is a 15th-century palace that Cardinal Altemps bought in 1568, and the museum uses it to tell the story of art collecting. The statues on its two floors come from private collections, the Altemps, Boncompagni Ludovisi, Mattei, Del Drago and Gorga, and there’s an Egyptian collection too.

The Ludovisi statues have belonged to the museum since 1901. It had been founded in 1889, and opened in 1890, as the museum of antiquities for the capital of the new Kingdom of Italy, and Altemps became one of its sites in December 1997. You’ll find it at Via di Sant’Apollinare 46.

Getting to the National Roman Museum from Termini and Piazza Navona

Two of the three sites are at Termini, the station where metro lines A and B meet: Palazzo Massimo and the Baths of Diocletian both stand opposite it, so they’re easy to put together on one morning. Plenty of buses stop at Termini too.

Palazzo Altemps is on the other side of the centre, by the north end of Piazza Navona, with buses stopping nearby and a taxi rank close by. The museum’s own ticket lasts a week and the Roma Pass lets you spread the sites over its days, so either way you can keep Altemps for the day you’re at Piazza Navona anyway.