Civic Zoology Museum

Civic Zoology Museum tickets, prices and the free first Sunday

The Civic Zoology Museum belongs to the city of Rome, and since February 2026 it’s free only for people who live in Rome and its Metropolitan City. Visitors from anywhere else pay €10.50 for a full ticket and €5.50 for a reduced one. Some listings still show the old, lower prices, so don’t be caught out at the desk.

You don’t have to book, and the cheapest way in is the ticket office at the museum, which sells for the same day by cash or card.

Tickets for a later day, whether online on the city museums’ Vivaticket site, by phone on 060608 (every day, 9:00 to 19:00) or at the desk, carry a €1 advance-sale fee and need a credit card. Once bought online or through 060608 they can’t be refunded or changed, and at the entrance you just show the receipt, printed or on your phone. We don’t sell a ticket for this museum.

A few more people go in free: EU tour guides and interpreters, ICOM and ICOMOS members, journalists and, because this is a science museum, EU teachers and students of biology and natural sciences who bring a certificate. Groups of 11 to 25, plus their guide, book by phone on 060608 and buy at least five tickets in advance.

The Roma Pass at the Civic Zoology Museum: an included entry or €5.50

The museum is on the Roma Pass, and the card gives you two ways in. You can spend one of its included entries, of which the 48-hour card has one and the 72-hour card two, or keep them and buy the €5.50 reduced ticket by showing the card, online or at the ticket office. You decide at the museum, and there’s nothing to book.

An included entry is worth €10.50 here, while the reduced ticket saves you €5. The Colosseum and Castel Sant’Angelo have dearer tickets, so if either is in your plans, the included entry goes further there and the reduced price is the smarter use of the card in this museum.

The 72-hour Omnia Card works exactly like the Roma Pass here, because the museum comes through the Roma Pass it contains. For the sums across your whole trip, our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes puts the cards side by side.

From molluscs to a 16-metre whale: what you see in the Civic Zoology Museum

Only a selection of those five million specimens is in the galleries, because most of the collection stays in storage for researchers. The museum opened in 1932 with collections it inherited from the Royal University of Rome and the Pontifical Archiginnasio, the university of papal Rome.

Rather than walking you through the animals one family at a time, the route follows a single question, how animal life became so diverse. One room looks at sexual reproduction as the engine of that variety, another at animals adapted to extreme environments, and others at coral reefs, at how scientists classify species and at the conservation of endangered ones.

The section on skeletons shows how animals move, and along the way there are interactive displays and reconstructed habitats like the savannah above. The museum says the route suits visitors of every age, and there’s a children’s bookshop at the ticket desk and an education room, the Zoolab.

Then you go down a floor to the Sala della Balena, the Whale Hall, where the 16-metre whale is kept and where the museum also puts on exhibitions and events. Guided tours of the route or the exhibition run in several languages, for a fee and booked in advance.

The Civic Zoology Museum’s butterfly exhibition, until 15 November

Until 15 November 2026 the museum is showing Biodiversità Ritratta (“Biodiversity Portrayed”), an exhibition curated by Francesco Sacco on butterflies and on Vladimir Nabokov as a scientist. From 1942 to 1948, as the museum’s text points out, Nabokov was curator of lepidoptera, the butterflies and moths, at Harvard. The full title goes on, Tipi da cartellino rosso: l’immortalità secondo Vladimir Nabokov, “red-label types: immortality according to Vladimir Nabokov”, and photos aren’t allowed in its rooms.

Civic Zoology Museum opening hours and the lift at the entrance

The museum keeps the same hours all year, with Monday as its closing day.

The entrance is on Via Ulisse Aldrovandi 18, up a short flight of steps with a lift beside them for wheelchair users. On 1 July 2026 the museum posted that the lift was out of service, so call reception on 06 67109270 before you go to check, and to let them know you’re coming if you aren’t with a group.

Getting to the Civic Zoology Museum in Villa Borghese

The museum is right next to the Bioparco, Rome’s zoo, inside Villa Borghese, the same park as the Borghese Gallery. If you’re already in the park, it’s an easy add to the day.

On public transport, tram 19 stops at Bioparco, the stop for both the zoo and the museum.