Trajan's Markets and Museum of the Imperial Fora

Trajan’s Markets and Museum of the Imperial Fora tickets: buy at the door

Trajan’s Markets and Museum of the Imperial Fora is the museum inside the brick complex built under Emperor Trajan, and getting in is about as easy as it gets in Rome. You don’t need to book: individual visitors buy a ticket at the museum’s ticket office on the day, by cash or card, and pay no fee. We don’t sell a ticket for it, so the prices here are the museum’s own.

If you’d rather have the ticket on your phone, the museum’s online presale adds €1 per ticket, and so does booking through its call centre on 060608. Those tickets can’t be refunded or moved to another day. The ticket office also sells tickets for future days, by card only.

Since February 2026, free entry on ordinary days is for residents of Rome and its Metropolitan City, who show ID for it. Older pages and ticket sites may still promise free entry to everyone, but as a visitor you pay, except on the first Sunday. The MIC Card you may read about is for people who live or study in Rome, not for tourists.

Free and reduced entries both take a special ticket from the ticket office, and you need ID to show you qualify. Besides the audio and video guides sold there, the museum has its own app for iOS and Android.

Trajan’s Markets with the Roma Pass or the 72-hour Omnia Card

The Roma Pass gets you into Trajan’s Markets in one of two ways: as one of its included entries, one on the 48-hour card and two on the 72-hour card, or at the €9.50 reduced ticket. Booking a time costs nothing and the Roma Pass strongly recommends it, by phone on 060608 or online, but you can also just turn up.

The 72-hour Omnia Card works through its Roma Pass, which is for adults only. The 24-hour Omnia Card, the Rome Tourist Card and the Vatican City Pass don’t include Trajan’s Markets.

There’s one thing to check at the desk. The museum’s page says the Roma Pass reduced ticket applies from the second site on the 48-hour card and from the third on the 72-hour card, which reads as “once your included entries are used”. If you want to pay the reduced price here and keep an included entry for later, ask at the ticket office before they scan the card.

Our advice is to keep the included entries for dearer tickets, like the Colosseum or Castel Sant’Angelo, and spend one here only on a 72-hour card with few expensive sites on your list. And if you’re in Rome on the first Sunday of the month, come that day and spend nothing, since entry is free for everyone. Our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes does the sums with your own list.

Trajan’s Markets opening hours, the Wednesday discount and the entrance

Trajan’s Markets open every day of the week with the same hours all year, so there’s no Monday closing and no winter timetable to plan around.

On Wednesdays, visitors who don’t live in Rome pay half price in the last two hours before closing. With the 19:30 closing that should mean from 17:30, which leaves an hour before the 18:30 last entry, but the museum doesn’t give the exact time, so confirm it at the ticket office.

If you use a wheelchair, ask the museum about the route before you go: it says the historic building means some barriers can’t be fully removed.

Inside Trajan’s Markets: the Great Hall and the Museum of the Imperial Fora

You go in through the Great Hall, a brick vault set on piers, with small rooms opening off both sides. Today it’s the museum’s exhibition space, and the side rooms hold the displays.

The museum itself is about the buildings of the Imperial Fora, the squares the emperors added beside the Roman Forum. It puts back together pieces of their architectural and sculptural decoration, using original fragments, casts and new stone to fill the gaps, and it calls itself the first museum of ancient architecture.

From there the route takes you outside, onto the upper levels of the complex and along an ancient paved street, with the medieval Torre delle Milizie rising above you. The street is Via Biberatica, from the Latin bibere, “to drink”. The name dates from the Middle Ages, though, so it tells you about later Rome rather than what the Romans sold here.

At the end comes the terrace, with the excavated Forum of Trajan spread out below you and the Vittoriano monument in the distance. It’s the best place to see how the brick complex wraps around the edge of the emperor’s Forum.

Who built Trajan’s Markets, and were they ever markets?

The complex was probably built between AD 100 and 110, in the reign of Trajan, the emperor who conquered Dacia, in today’s Romania. It’s traditionally attributed to Apollodorus of Damascus, the architect of Trajan’s Forum, but the museum points out that no firm ancient evidence names him, or who paid for it.

The name “markets” is a tradition too. The rows of small rooms look like shops, yet the museum says they don’t necessarily mean trade. It reads the complex as a centre with several uses, including offices tied to the Forum, perhaps for the Procurator Fori Divi Traiani, the official who ran Trajan’s Forum.

In the Middle Ages the Torre delle Milizie went up over the complex, and later part of it became a convent, before it was recovered as a monument in the 20th century. That’s the mix you walk through today: Roman brick, a medieval tower and a modern museum in the old vaults.