Colosseum guided tour

Here is the thing that decides whether your Colosseum visit is the one you imagined: the arena floor and the underground are separate add-ons. A standard ticket — including the one the monument sells itself — admits you to the tiers. You look down at the arena from above, which is genuinely impressive, and you do not set foot on it. Every tour on this page says clearly which of the two it opens, and it is the first thing to check anywhere else.

The hypogeum, the underground, is the stranger of the two. It is the two-storey warren of brick corridors beneath the arena floor where the animals were caged, the scenery was stored and thirty-odd hand-operated lifts raised things into the middle of the show. It cannot be visited without a guide at all: there is no unguided ticket to that part of the building, and there never has been since it opened to visitors.

What almost nobody realises before they arrive is that one ticket covers three sites. The Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill are a single archaeological park with a single admission. People regularly do the Colosseum, leave, and discover later that they had already paid for the two things across the road.

And the Forum is the part that needs a guide most, which is the opposite of what people expect. The Colosseum explains itself: it is a stadium and you can see that it is a stadium. The Forum is a hundred and fifty years of overlapping ruins with almost no signage, where a row of three columns is the Temple of Vespasian and a brick box is the Senate house in which the Roman state was argued into and out of existence. Without somebody to tell you, it is a field of rubble with tourists on it.

On timed entry: your Colosseum slot is fixed and printed on the ticket, and the arena and underground slots are the scarce ones. In April, May, September and October they go two to three weeks ahead. The Forum and Palatine have no timed entry at all, which is why every tour does the Colosseum first and the rest afterwards.

A word about group size. Above ground it matters less than at most monuments, because the Colosseum is enormous and everybody wears a radio headset. Below ground it matters a great deal: the hypogeum corridors are narrow, a group of thirty strings out over fifty metres, and the person at the back sees a wall. If you are paying extra for the underground, it is worth paying attention to how many people are going down there with you.

And the top of this page, which exists so you can see the ceiling. A private guide for three hours, a private day covering the whole of Rome, and one listing at over a thousand dollars. None of them shows you a room the forty-three-dollar ticket does not, and for a party of four the private tours are less absurd than they look. Most people should book the two-and-a-half-hour tour with ninety thousand reviews behind it and spend the difference on lunch.