Palazzo Valentini and the Domus Romane

Palazzo Valentini and Domus Romane tickets: which route to book

Every visit to the Domus Romane under Palazzo Valentini is a narrated route that starts at a set time, so what you book is a slot, not just a day. We don’t sell tickets for it. You book on the museum’s own ticket site, tickets.palazzovalentini.it, or go in on the Roma Pass, which counts it as an included entry.

Two routes leave from the ticket office. The Domus route takes an hour through the houses. The Domus and Trajan’s Column route takes an hour and a half and carries on to the foot of the column, but it only runs twice a day, so if that’s the one you want, grab one of those slots first and plan the rest of your day around it.

In practice the reduced price is for children: over-65s visiting from abroad pay the full €15. Under-6s and disabled visitors go in free, but the museum still wants a pre-booked ticket for them, so book theirs along with yours.

The museum recommends booking by the day before, and with the Open ticket you have to book, since that’s how you fix your time. Groups book through the museum’s contact centre rather than online.

Palazzo Valentini opening hours: closed on Tuesdays, shorter days from 1 November

Palazzo Valentini closes every Tuesday of the year. From 1 November to the end of February it also runs a shorter winter timetable, open from 10:00 to 18:00 with the last slot at 16:30, and the afternoon slot for Trajan’s Column moves forward from 17:00 to 15:30.

Booking Palazzo Valentini on the Roma Pass or the 72-hour Omnia Card

The Roma Pass gets you into the Domus Romane in one of two ways. It can be one of the card’s included entries (the 48-hour card has one, the 72-hour card two), or you pay the €9 reduced ticket, which you can choose even before your included entries are used up. Either way you book your slot on the museum’s ticket site, where “Roma Pass - Domus” and “Roma Pass - Domus + Colonna” are tickets of their own, with the €1.50 booking fee. Ticketone books them too, for a €2 fee.

Since the full ticket here is €15, an included entry saves you €15 and the reduced ticket €6. We’d keep the included entries for the dearer tickets on your list and pay the €9 here, and our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes does that sum for the sites you actually plan to see.

The 24-hour Omnia Card has no Roma Pass inside, so it doesn’t cover the Domus, and we haven’t found the Domus on the Rome Tourist Card, Go City or Turbopass.

Under the glass at Palazzo Valentini: mosaics, marble floors and private baths

Below the palace are the remains of two domus, the Latin word for a family’s town house, and these two belonged to influential patrician families, the old aristocracy of ancient Rome. You walk over them on glass walkways, looking straight down onto mosaics, floors of coloured marble, painted walls and the houses’ own private baths.

Light and projections fill in what’s gone. As the narration takes you from room to room, 3D reconstructions put the walls and decoration back where they stood. The audio is in English, Italian, French, German and Spanish, and part of the route is also in Japanese and Russian.

Two things visitors mention: it’s cool down there, so bring a layer, and walking on glass unsettles some people at first.

The Domus and Trajan’s Column route, through a 1939 air-raid shelter

The longer route keeps going after the houses. It passes the remains of a temple and an air-raid shelter dug under the courtyard in 1939, and ends at the pedestal of Trajan’s Column, which stands just outside the palace, so you finish right underneath it.

Who lived in the Domus Romane, and how Palazzo Valentini got its name

The two houses are not the same age. One was built early in the reign of the emperor Hadrian, around AD 125, and the other towards the end of the 2nd century, around 180. What you see on the visit comes from rebuilding between 320 and 350, when the floors you walk over were laid.

The palace on top is much younger. Cardinal Michele Bonelli had it renovated in 1585, and in 1752 it was sold to Cardinal Spinelli. The name comes from Vincenzo Valentini, a banker who bought it in 1827, and in 1873 it passed to the province of Rome, whose successor, the Metropolitan City of Rome, still has its seat here, alongside the Prefecture.

Nobody knew the houses were down there until 2005, when works near Trajan’s Forum uncovered them. The multimedia route, by Piero Angela and Paco Lanciano, opened two years later, in 2007.

Finding the Palazzo Valentini entrance on Via Foro Traiano

Palazzo Valentini is in the historic centre, between Piazza Venezia and the Imperial Forums, and the visitors’ entrance is at Via Foro Traiano 84.