Roman Forum and Palatine Hill

What a Roman Forum ticket covers, with or without the Colosseum

The standard Roman Forum ticket is the Colosseum’s: one ticket takes you into the Colosseum, the Forum and the Palatine Hill, and ours comes with an audio guide app, €25 for all three sites. If you’d rather skip the Colosseum, the park’s Forum Pass SUPER, at €18, covers the Forum and the Palatine without it.

With the Colosseum ticket, the Forum part has no time slot. You go in once, at any time in the 24 hours before or after your Colosseum time, and that single entry covers the Palatine as well, because the two share one site. Booking means choosing the Colosseum time, and the Colosseum tickets page explains how far ahead to do it.

What the standard ticket doesn’t open are the SUPER sites, buildings that the Colosseum archaeological park, which runs all three sites, lets a limited number of visitors into at a time. In the Forum they’re the Curia Iulia, the Senate house, the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, the Temple of Romulus and the Horrea Piperataria. On the Palatine they’re the House of Augustus, the Aula Isiaca and Loggia Mattei, the rooms of the Domus Tiberiana and the lower floor of the Palatine Museum.

The park sells the Forum Pass SUPER online and at two of the Forum’s ticket offices. What we do sell without the Colosseum is a Forum and Palatine ticket with a 25-minute video on ancient Rome, for €38, collected at the Touristation office in Piazza d’Aracoeli. It lists most of the SUPER sites, but not the Curia Iulia or the rooms of the Domus Tiberiana, and it still names the House of Livia and the Domus Transitoria, neither of which can be visited right now.

When to visit the Roman Forum around your Colosseum slot

The Forum and the Palatine open at 9:00, half an hour after the Colosseum, and close at the same time as it. The last entry is an hour before closing, and the SUPER sites keep shorter hours, from 9:30.

This winter, from 25 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, they close at 16:30, with last entry at 15:30. In March closing is 17:30, from the last Sunday of March to 30 September it’s 19:15, and in October it’s 18:30, until the Saturday before the clocks go back. They’re closed on 25 December and 1 January, and on Good Friday they close early.

Start in the morning if you can. A visit to both takes two and a half to three hours, the SUPER sites let people in only until they’re full, and there’s little shade down in the Forum once the sun is high. The Colosseum slot is the part that can run out, so book it first and fit the Forum around it.

An afternoon slot changes the order. With a 13:00 slot you’re out of the Colosseum around 14:15, and with the Forum’s last entry at 15:30, a visit of two and a half hours runs past the 16:30 closing. See the Forum and the Palatine first, from 9:00, or use the 24-hour window to do them the day before or the day after.

Roma Pass and city cards at the Roman Forum: two ways in

On the Roma Pass, the Forum, the Palatine and the Colosseum count as one site and use up one of the card’s included entries, of which the 48-hour card has one and the 72-hour card two, used wherever you choose. That entry is the 24-hour ticket, booked for a Colosseum time like any other, so it doesn’t open the SUPER sites.

The card has a second way in. The Forum Pass SUPER is a separate entry on the Roma Pass, with no Colosseum time to book, and it opens the SUPER sites; it takes one of your included entries or costs the reduced €11.50. With the 72-hour card you could spend both entries here, and see the Colosseum and the SUPER sites on the same card.

The other cards on our Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes page that have the Colosseum include the Forum through the same ticket. The 72-hour Omnia Card has a Roma Pass inside it, the Turbopass books your Colosseum time for you, and the Rome Tourist Card has the Colosseum and Forum as one of its three picks. Go City’s Explorer Pass counts them as one choice, and it also lists a Forum and Palatine visit with a multimedia video as a choice of its own.

Closed or uncertain at the Roman Forum and Palatine in 2026

Whichever card or ticket you go in with, a few things are off the route this year. The House of Livia on the Palatine, one of the SUPER sites, has been closed for restoration since 24 August 2026, and the park hasn’t given a date for it to reopen.

Santa Maria Antiqua is uncertain. A video work by Bill Viola opened there on 11 October for SUPER ticket holders and was suspended for maintenance eight days later, and the park hasn’t said whether the church itself is open.

The Imperial Fora, the ruins along Via dei Fori Imperiali next to the Roman Forum, are the other part nobody can promise you. The Forum Pass SUPER includes them, but on 6 February 2026 the city closed the link from the Roman Forum to check the pine trees along Via dei Fori Imperiali, and the park hasn’t announced a reopening. The city’s heritage office lists them as open every day, with the way in at Trajan’s Column, while the park says that entrance is no longer in use, so plan your visit without them.

From the Arch of Titus to the Curia: the Roman Forum’s monuments

The Forum fills the valley between the Palatine and the Capitoline hills. It was drained from the end of the 7th century BC and became the city’s religious, civic and commercial centre, with the Via Sacra, the Sacred Way, running through it.

At the Colosseum end stands the Arch of Titus, named for the emperor who opened the amphitheatre. Its inscription calls him divine, which means it went up after he died in 81, and its reliefs show his triumphal procession carrying the menorah.

Along the Via Sacra stand the Temple of Vesta and the House of the Vestals. Six Vestals, priestesses from Rome’s patrician families, served the goddess for 30 years, and breaking their vow was punished with death. The temple you see dates from the end of the 2nd century AD, and the statues in the house are copies.

At the far end, the Curia Iulia was the Senate house. Julius Caesar began rebuilding it after a fire in 52 BC and Augustus finished it in 29 BC, and much later it became the church of Sant’Adriano; its bronze doors are a copy of the originals, now at St John Lateran. With a SUPER ticket you go inside, to the cut-marble floor and the niches from the emperor Diocletian’s rebuilding.

Close by stand the arch of the emperor Septimius Severus, from AD 203, and the Column of Phocas, put up in 608 as the last monument in the Forum. The standard ticket also includes the Museum of the Roman Forum, in the cloister of Santa Maria Nova, which shows what Giacomo Boni dug up in the Forum between 1902 and 1905, including tombs from the 10th century BC.

The other SUPER site to plan for, if it’s open, is Santa Maria Antiqua, a church with wall paintings from the 6th to the 9th century, in places six layers deep. It was abandoned after an earthquake in 847 and found again in 1900, and when it reopened in 2016, after being closed since 1980, it was nicknamed the medieval Sistine Chapel.

The Palatine Hill: imperial palaces and the Farnese Gardens

The Palatine rises right above the Forum, and people were living on it as early as the Iron Age. It became the quarter of Rome’s aristocracy and then the site of the emperors’ palaces, whose brick walls still cover the top of the hill.

The two big palaces are the Domus Flavia, the public one, and the Domus Augustana, the private one. Alongside them lies the Stadium, 161 by 48 metres, built under the emperor Domitian between 81 and 92. In spite of the name it was probably a garden for strolling, not a sports ground.

The Farnese Gardens, on the Forum side of the hill, are much later. They were laid out from 1537 for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and took their final shape after a Farnese wedding in 1628, with the Nymphaeum of the Rain, by Girolamo Rainaldi, as a place for summer banquets. The viewpoint at their north end looks down over the Forum.

The SUPER sites up here run on small groups. The House of Augustus takes 23 people at a time and closes on Mondays, and the lower floor of the Palatine Museum lets in 20 every 20 minutes.

In summer 2026, when temperatures approached 40°C, the park put up medical posts and misting fans, among other places at Largo della Salara Vecchia and on the Palatine. Whatever the season, wear closed shoes: the park’s rules ask for them, and you walk on the original stone paving, which is often uneven. Small dogs up to 10 kg can come into the open areas in a carrier.

Roman Forum entrances, ticket offices and the metro

Metro lines B and C both stop by the Colosseum, line B at Colosseo and line C at Colosseo/Fori Imperiali, open since December 2025. From there you walk to the gate you’ve picked: Via di San Gregorio for the Palatine, the Arch of Titus along the Via Sacra, or Largo della Salara Vecchia on Via dei Fori Imperiali, and there are two more gates, on Via del Foro Romano and Via del Tulliano. Buses 51, 75, 81, 85, 87 and 118 stop nearby too.

If you’re buying on the day, the gate matters. Since 4 May 2026 the 24-hour ticket with the Colosseum is sold only at the ticket office in Piazza del Colosseo, and the Forum Pass SUPER only at Largo della Salara Vecchia and at Foro Romano 1, the gate on Via del Foro Romano known as “la Piccola”.

For wheelchair users, the Arch of Titus, Largo della Salara Vecchia and Via di San Gregorio gates are accessible, and the Via di San Gregorio gate also has a baby-changing room. A step-free route of about 1.5 km runs through the site, with a path that avoids the Via Sacra as far as the Curia, lifts at Largo della Salara Vecchia and the Curia, and five wheelchairs at the entrances. The climb to the top of the Palatine has steep stretches.