Rome, from the arena floor up.
Which Colosseum ticket actually puts you on the arena floor. When the Sistine Chapel is quiet. Where dinner starts at nine. Every tour in Rome, reviewed.
Not every Colosseum ticket gets you the same Colosseum.
All Colosseum tours →
Standard entry puts you on the tiers looking down at the arena. The arena-floor ticket puts you on it. The underground takes you beneath it, into the corridors that fed the shows. Same building, three completely different mornings.
Colosseum, Forum and Palatine on one ticket
One combined ticket covers the amphitheatre, the Forum and the Palatine above it. Start in the arena, walk down through the Forum, finish on the hill looking back over everything you have just crossed.
Standing where the gate opened
Reconstructed decking at the level the fighters used, entered through the Gladiator’s Gate rather than the tourist stairs. The daily allocation is small and dated, and in summer it is the first Rome ticket to go.
Down into the hypogeum
Two storeys of tunnels, cages and lift shafts run under the arena floor, closed to general admission. Guides take groups small enough to fit the corridors, then bring you up into the daylight of the arena itself.
The Colosseum, the Vatican, and four days of everything else.
Ancient Rome in the morning, the Vatican before the coaches arrive, artichokes in the Ghetto, Pompeii on the long day out. Six bookings carry most first visits.
The Vatican rewards whoever gets there first.
Six million people a year funnel through one entrance on Viale Vaticano and walk the same kilometre and a half of galleries to the same ceiling. Early-entry and before-hours tours exist for exactly that reason: the Sistine Chapel is a different room with two hundred people in it instead of two thousand.
All 223 Vatican tours →
Between the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel, this is what sells.
Every review →The bookings more travellers take than anything else in Rome, and what each one is actually like on the day.
1
Museums & Sistine Chapel Entrance Ticket
Skip-the-ticket-line access to the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel, plus optional audio guide and a self-paced route through key masterpieces.
From · $38
Read our review →
2
Vatican Museums & Sistine Chapel Tour with Optional Basilica
from $79
3
Colosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Guided Tour
from $78
4
Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel & St Peter’s Basilica Guided Tour
from $22
5
Colosseum, Palatine Hill and Roman Forum Guided Tour
from $52
6
Guided Tour of Colosseum, Roman Forum & Palatine Hill
from $55
7
Colosseum & Forum with Audio Guide App -Optional Arena
from $41
8
Colosseum, Roman Forum and Palatine Hill Guided Tour
from $59
A gladiator school, a golf cart and four storeys of graves.
Every city has a walking tour and a food tour. The training ground out on the Appian Way, the electric carts that beat Rome’s cobbles and the Christian tunnels underneath them belong to this one.
Gladiator School
Two hours on a sand floor beyond the walls, in tunic and leather, learning the four basic strokes with a wooden rudis from instructors who reenact for a living. The school sits on the Appian Way, a short walk from where the training grounds of imperial Rome actually stood, and it teaches the thing as a discipline rather than a show.
- 1Colosseum Tour with Access to the Gladiator Arena★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 6,690 reviews
- 2Gladiator’s Gate: Special Access Colosseum Tour with Arena Floor★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 4,037 reviews
- 3Roman Gladiator School: Learn How to Become a Gladiator★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,477 reviews
The Golf Cart Tour
The historic centre is cobbles, gradients and staircases, and most of it sits inside a limited-traffic zone that ordinary cars cannot enter. Small electric carts can. Two hours covers what a walking tour needs most of a day for — the Vittoriano, the Circus Maximus, the keyhole on the Aventine — and nobody has to climb anything.
- 1Rome by Golf Cart Private Tour: Beyond the Landmarks★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 4,361 reviews
- 2Rome on a Golf Cart Semi-Private Tour Max 6 with Private Option★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,502 reviews
- 3Rome Highlights by Golf Cart Private Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,379 reviews
The Catacombs
Roman law forbade burial inside the city walls, so the early Christians dug down instead: tens of kilometres of galleries on four and five levels, cut into tufa soft enough to work with a hand pick. St Callixtus alone holds sixteen popes. It stays around fifteen degrees down there in the middle of August.
- 1Crypts and Catacombs Underground Tour with Transfers★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 5,341 reviews
- 2The Original Roman Crypts and Catacombs Tour with Transfers★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 4,896 reviews
- 3Catacombs of St. Callixtus Entry Ticket & Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 3,037 reviews
Rome is 80 kilometres from the cruise pier, and the ship will not wait.
A Civitavecchia call gives you nine or ten hours and the road takes two of them. The excursions that work are built backwards from the return time: fixed departure, guaranteed transport, and a route that gets the Colosseum and St Peter’s into the same afternoon.
- 1Full-Day Panoramic Bus Tour of Romefrom $64
- 2Private or Shared Guided Tour of Romefrom $134
- 3Civitavecchia Private Transfer: Rome to Civitavecchia Cruise Portfrom $141
Under fifty dollars still buys you the Pantheon.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it costs. The cheap end is not the thin end in Rome — most of the great ruins are an entry ticket and a good guide.
Pantheon entry, catacomb tickets, street-food walks and the audio-guided hour through the Forum.
The full day out: arena-floor Colosseum, the Vatican with a guide, a pasta class, Tivoli and back by dark.
Private guides, a car to Pompeii, and the before-hours small-group access you cannot buy at the door.
Four Rome bookings that will not wait until you land.
Most of Rome can be sorted from a café the night before. These four cannot. They run on timed allocations, a papal calendar and gates that open once a day.
- 01Borghese Gallery and Gardens Guided Small-Group TourEntry is a reserved two-hour slot with a fixed number of people in the building. There is no walk-up window; when the slot is full, it is full.
- 02Colosseum Arena Floor, Roman Forum and Palatine Hill Guided TourThe arena-floor allocation is small and dated. In summer it is the first Colosseum ticket to disappear, weeks before the standard one.
- 03Papal Audience with Pope Leo XIV and Expert Local GuideThe general audience runs on Wednesday mornings, and only when the Pope is in Rome. Places are requested in advance, never bought at the gate.
- 04Early Morning Vatican, Sistine, St. Peter’s Semi or Private TourBefore-opening entry is a small daily allocation released ahead of time. It is the difference between the Sistine Chapel and a crowd.
In August, Rome goes underground and comes back out after dark.
All catacomb tours →July and August sit in the mid-thirties for weeks, and the Forum has no shade in it anywhere. The city’s answer is old: go below the streets, or go late. The catacombs hold about fifteen degrees all year, the Vatican’s early slots start before the heat lands, and nothing in Trastevere really begins until the light goes. Around Ferragosto, the fifteenth, a lot of the small trattorie simply shut.
Crypts and Catacombs Underground Tour with Transfers
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Winner 2025 Rome Twilight Trastevere Food Tour by Eating Europe
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The Original Roman Crypts and Catacombs Tour with Transfers
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In Trastevere, dinner starts at nine and the street is the dining room.
Cobbles, ivy, a basilica with twelfth-century mosaics on the front of it, and the tightest concentration of trattorie in Rome. Food tours here run in the evening for a reason: supplì out of a fryer window, cacio e pepe two doors down, and a trapizzino somewhere on the walk back across the river.
- 1Winner 2025 Rome Twilight Trastevere Food Tour by Eating Europefrom $125
- 2Trastevere or Jewish Quarter Street Food Tourfrom $51
- 3Trastevere Food tour with Free-Flowing Fine Winefrom $102
How far out of Rome you can get and still be back for dinner.
The Appian Way
Ostia Antica
Tivoli
Civitavecchia
PompeiiBy landmark — where you are standing
The Colosseum269 tours
The Vatican223 tours
The Pantheon27 tours
Villa Borghese28 tours
Trastevere39 tours
The Jewish Ghetto18 tours
The Catacombs58 tours- Every Rome category →
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