Roman Forum and Palatine Hill tickets: on the same admission as the Colosseum

The Forum is the flat ground between the Capitoline and the Palatine, and for centuries it was where Rome did everything that mattered: law, religion, politics, commerce, triumphs. Almost nothing that happened in the Roman Republic happened somewhere else.

What survives is uneven. Some things are nearly whole and some are foundations, which is exactly why the site defeats visitors who walk in without help. The pieces worth finding:

The Via Sacra — the road running through the middle, and the route a triumphal procession took. You walk on it, which is a stranger sensation than it sounds.

The Temple of Saturn — eight columns standing on a high podium at the western end, the most photographed thing in the Forum and the one people cannot name.

The Curia — the senate house, and one of the few buildings here with a roof and a floor, because it spent centuries as a church. You can walk into it.

The Arch of Septimius Severus at one end and the Arch of Titus at the other, the second carrying the relief of the spoils from Jerusalem.

The House of the Vestals — a courtyard with statue bases down both sides, and the quietest corner of the whole site.

The Palatine rises straight out of the Forum and it is where Roman tradition put the founding of the city. Later it became the address: the imperial palaces spread across the whole top of the hill, which is where the word palace comes from.

The scale is difficult to take in because you are walking through the ground floor of something enormous. The Domus Augustana, the private wing, and the vast sunken stadium beside it are the two structures that make it obvious. And from the southern edge you look straight down over the Circus Maximus, which from ground level is a long grass field and from up here is unmistakably a racetrack.

The Palatine is also where most guided tours end, and where most visitors leave too early. Your admission is still valid; the crowd is thinning; the light is getting good. Staying an extra half-hour after the guide says goodbye is the cheapest upgrade available in Rome.

The Forum and the Palatine are almost entirely open ground. There is no roof over the Forum and very little shade on the hill, which makes the time of day the single biggest variable in how much you enjoy them.

Early. The first slots of the morning are cooler and the Forum is at its emptiest. The light is flat, which is good for walking and less good for photographs.

Middle of the day, June to September. The one to avoid if you have a choice. The stone holds heat, the paths are exposed, and the walk up the Palatine at two in the afternoon is the part of a Rome itinerary people remember for the wrong reason.

Late afternoon. The best of the three. Long light across the columns, the tour groups thinning out, and the Palatine viewpoint over the Circus Maximus doing what it is supposed to do. If your Colosseum slot is in the early afternoon, this is where the rest of your day should go.

Rome’s public drinking fountains — the nasoni — run inside the park and the water is drinkable, so a refillable bottle solves most of the heat problem for nothing.