National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia

National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia tickets and the audio guide app

You don’t have to book the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia for an individual visit: the ticket office at the door sells tickets for the same day. The ticket we sell, at €20, is entry plus Rome City, a downloadable audio guide app in English, Mandarin, French, German, Italian or Spanish, and you can cancel or change it until 23:59 the day before.

Under-18s go in free, from the EU or anywhere else, which means the child’s €7 on our ticket pays for the app alone. The museum also sells its own audio guide in the bookshop, in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish.

EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay €9 on our ticket, with the app, and need ID that shows their age and citizenship. Visitors with disabilities go in free, and so does one companion.

What’s closed at Villa Giulia this autumn, and what’s back on view

The museum is in the middle of building works, and the route through it changes as they move on. These were the closures when we checked, on 27 October 2026:

The museum’s best-known piece is back, though. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses has been in a showcase again since late July 2026, and the restoration of its lower parts goes on in a laboratory you can watch on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 to 13:00, free with your museum ticket.

The Pyrgi tablets are another matter. They’re sheets of gold inscribed around 500 BC in Etruscan and Phoenician, and with the Cerveteri and Pyrgi rooms closed, we couldn’t confirm that they’re on show.

The works affect getting around too. The lift in room 13 is out of service, so from the first floor you take the emergency stairs in room 20 or the lift in the right wing, and with the toilets by rooms 39 and 40 unavailable, you use the ones in the left-hand garden. For accessibility questions, the museum’s number is 06 3226571.

Villa Giulia opening hours, and the days it’s free for everyone

Villa Giulia opens six days a week, through its central door, and closes on Mondays. The rooms shut at 19:00, half an hour before the building, so if you come in at the 18:30 last entry you get 30 minutes with the collection.

On the free days there’s nothing to book: you queue at the ticket office. The Tomba François is closed on those days, so if the tomb is what you’re coming for, pick another date. The next free day is Sunday 6 December.

Villa Giulia on the Roma Pass, and where the included entry saves you more

Villa Giulia can be one of your Roma Pass included entries (the 48-hour card has one, the 72-hour card two), and once those are used, the card gets you a €2 reduced ticket. As with any ticket here, there’s nothing to book for an individual visit. We couldn’t confirm whether the card also gets you onto the booked Tomba François visit.

Which way to use it depends on the rest of your list. Villa Giulia’s full ticket costs less than those at the Galleria Barberini and Corsini or Ostia Antica, and those two also drop to €2 with the card, so if either is on your list, spend the included entry there and pay the €2 here. On the museum’s free days you don’t need the card here at all.

The 24-hour Omnia Card, the Rome Tourist Card and the Vatican City Pass don’t include the museum. The Omnia Card and Turbopass pages show everything else each one covers, and Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes puts all of them side by side.

The Sarcophagus of the Spouses and the Apollo of Veii at Villa Giulia

The Sarcophagus of the Spouses is a terracotta coffin from the 6th century BC, and on top of it a married couple recline side by side on a banqueting couch. It was found at Cerveteri in 1881, and it’s the piece to look for first, now that its showcase is open again.

The Apollo of Veii is another terracotta, made around 510 to 500 BC and painted in several colours: the god in a pleated robe, with both forearms lost. It belongs with the finds from Veii, and since the Veii rooms are closed for works, ask at the entrance whether it’s on the route the day you go.

The Tomba François, a painted Etruscan tomb at Villa Giulia until 31 December

The Tomba François is new to the museum this year. It’s a tomb from Vulci, painted between 340 and 320 BC and found on 1 May 1857 by Alessandro François, who gave it his name. Its paintings spent the following century and a half in the Torlonia collection at Villa Albani, until the Italian state bought them in 2026, for €15 million according to the Italian press.

Since 1 July 2026 the tomb has been on show in an immersive showcase of 37 panels, alongside Il Ritorno degli Eroi, The Return of the Heroes, an exhibition with pieces lent by the Louvre, the British Museum and museums in Brussels and Lausanne. Both run until 31 December 2026. The tomb visit is included in the museum ticket, but places are limited and you have to book one. Our ticket’s listing doesn’t say whether it covers that booking, so ask at the ticket office as soon as you arrive.

Pope Julius III’s Villa Giulia and Ammannati’s nymphaeum

The building came long before the museum. Pope Julius III had Villa Giulia built between 1551 and 1553 as his villa outside the city walls, to a design by the architect Vignola, with Ammannati making the nymphaeum and the gardens and Giorgio Vasari overseeing the work.

Ammannati’s nymphaeum, now restored, is the sunken court in the second courtyard: a balustraded basin, a staircase leading down to it and loggias all round. Give it and the gardens half an hour on top of the hour and a half or so that the open rooms take this autumn.

The villa belonged to the popes until 1870, when it passed to the Kingdom of Italy, and in 1889 it became the museum for the pre-Roman antiquities of Lazio, southern Etruria and Umbria. Until 29 November 2026 it also hosts L’indovino, an exhibition by Mouna Rebeiz.

Getting to Villa Giulia from Flaminio on foot, or by tram

From the centre, the simplest way is metro line A to Flaminio, then about a kilometre on foot, around 20 minutes, to Piazzale di Villa Giulia 9. Tram 19 stops close to the museum, tram 3 a few hundred metres away at Flaminia/Belle Arti, and bus 982 comes this way too. If you’re pairing it with the National Gallery of Modern Art, the walk between the two takes about 15 minutes.