Ostia Antica

How to get to Ostia Antica from Rome on the Metromare

The ruins have a station of their own on the Metromare, the suburban line from Rome to the sea that used to be called the Roma-Lido. You catch it at Roma Porta San Paolo, right beside Piramide on metro line B, and about 30 minutes later you’re at Ostia Antica.

The trip back takes another BIT, unless you have a Roma Pass, whose transport covers the line. Since July 2022 the Metromare has been run by Cotral, the Lazio region’s transport company, so older guides that still send you to ATAC, the city’s company, are out of date.

In September the trains ran every 20 minutes. The line has had its share of breakdowns and closures, though, and this autumn there are a few things to check before you set out:

Ostia Antica tickets: one price for eight days and every site in the park

Once you’re at the gate, one ticket does it all. It opens every site and museum in the archaeological park, once each, over eight days in a row: the excavations and the Museo Ostiense, the castle of Pope Julius II, the Imperial Ports, the Ship Museum at Fiumicino and the Isola Sacra necropolis.

You don’t need to book, since the ticket office at the entrance sells on the day, by cash or card. The ticket we sell costs €18: you show the voucher at the ticket office and they hand you a paper ticket. It can’t be refunded or changed, and it doesn’t come with a guide or a shuttle.

Under-18s go in free, and so do visitors with disabilities and one companion. EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay €2, a rate our ticket doesn’t sell, so they buy at the gate. On the first Sunday of the month entry is free for everyone, with nothing to book (the next one is 6 December), though the Museo Ostiense closes on those days.

The other ticket we sell, from €34 with the audio guide, is sold as Skip The Line, but Ostia has no time slots and the park mentions no queue to skip. You still swap the voucher at the ticket office, so what the extra money buys are the options you pick as you book:

If the audio guide is what you’re after, the park rents its own at the entrance for €7, with about two and a half hours of commentary in English and four other languages, so our entry ticket plus the park’s audio guide comes to less.

For a guide in person and the train sorted, the semi-private half-day tour, at €49, takes you from Rome with an English-speaking guide, in a group of up to 12. Return train tickets and entry are included, it lasts four hours, and you can cancel up to 24 hours before.

Ostia Antica with the Roma Pass and Rome’s other passes

The Roma Pass is the one card that covers the whole day out. Its transport includes the Metromare, listed in the card’s FAQ under the old name Roma-Lido, and Ostia Antica is one of the sites where you can use an included entry, of which the 48-hour card has one and the 72-hour card two. Nothing needs booking.

The open question is the reduced ticket. The Roma Pass price list gives €2 here, the same as the park’s own rate for EU citizens aged 18 to 25, and we couldn’t confirm that the ticket office gives it to every cardholder. If it does, a €2 ticket is all Ostia costs you on the card, and your included entry goes much further at a dearer site, such as the Colosseum (the Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes page has the sums). Ask at the ticket office before you hand over the card.

The Rome Tourist Card and the Vatican City Pass leave Ostia out, and the Omnia Card and Turbopass pages list everything else those two include. Go City’s Touristation desk is at Piazza d’Aracoeli 16, the same address given by Ticketstation, the company behind our skip-the-line ticket with the golf cart.

Ostia Antica opening hours this winter, and how long to stay

Winter hours started on 25 October: the excavations open at 8:30 and close at 16:30 until the end of February, and the time that matters is 15:30, when the ticket office shuts and the last visitors go in. After that the days stretch, to 17:15 in March, 19:00 from April to September and 18:30 from 1 to 24 October, always with the last entry an hour before closing. Public holidays are open days, so the only closures are Mondays and 25 December.

Give the excavations three to four hours at the least. The park’s long audio guide route lasts seven, more than any winter day leaves you, so aim to be through the gate by late morning. Go earlier if you want the Museo Ostiense too, since in winter it lets in its last visitors at 15:00.

What to see at Ostia Antica, in the order you walk it

You come in through the Porta Romana, the town gate on the road from Rome, and onto the Decumanus, the main street that runs through the town. The sights below come roughly in the order you meet them along it.

Early on are the Baths of Neptune, named after the large floor mosaic of Neptune, the sea god. A little further is the theatre, built for plays rather than gladiator fights, and laid out in the time of Augustus, the first emperor, together with the square behind it.

That square is the Piazzale delle Corporazioni, the Square of the Guilds, ringed by porticoes added under Emperor Claudius. Along them were the offices of the town’s trading guilds and shipping firms, and the mosaics on their floors still show what each one traded in, with ships, dolphins, a lighthouse and elephants among them.

Off the Decumanus, on Via di Diana, the Thermopolium is a Roman bar with its counter in place, marble shelves, paintings of food on the wall and a courtyard with a fountain. On the same street stands the House of Diana, one of the town’s insulae, the apartment blocks where people lived, and others are worth finding, such as the House of the Paintings, the Garden Houses and the House of Cupid and Psyche.

The street brings you to the Forum, the main square, closed at one end by the Capitolium, a temple to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva rebuilt around AD 120. Just off it are the Forum Baths, from around 160 and the largest in the town, with a public latrine of 20 marble seats. Elsewhere in the town you’ll come across the fishmongers’ shops and a synagogue.

How Ostia Antica grew from a river-mouth fort into Rome’s harbour

The name comes from ostium, Latin for a river mouth, because the town stood where the Tiber met the sea. Roman tradition says Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome, founded it around 620 BC, but the oldest remains found here are of a fort from the 4th century BC.

By the 2nd century BC Ostia was Rome’s port. Emperor Claudius began a new harbour, Portus, in AD 42, and Nero completed it in 64. Between 100 and 112, as silt built up, Trajan added a new inner basin. Their remains are the Imperial Ports, on the same ticket. Some estimates, the park says, put the town at 50,000 people at its height.

The town declined from the middle of the 3rd century and was abandoned around 550. More than half of it is still unexcavated, so the streets you walk are only part of the town that stood here.