Ninety seconds on the Colosseum
One ticket puts you on the Colosseum's arena floor and, where places remain, beneath it, where you see how the games were run: book that one.
Two tickets cover most visits, and they put you in different places. The standard 24-hour ticket gives you the first and second levels, including the panoramic terraces. The Full Experience lists the reconstructed arena floor and, where places remain, the hypogeum, with a longer stay inside. The hypogeum can only be visited on a guided tour: the group follows the central corridor, past animal cages that keep their original iron fittings, under vaults low enough to duck for. Both tickets also carry a single entry to the Roman Forum and the Palatine, usable on either side of your Colosseum slot, and the Full Experience stretches that over two consecutive days. Tickets go on sale thirty days ahead and the underground places are the first to sell out, so book on the day the window opens. A missed slot cannot be moved to a later one.
Rome, and further afield
The capital, and a city where the layers sit in plain view: republican paving in the Forum, imperial brick above it, baroque squares built…
An Umbrian industrial town at the mouth of the Valnerina, best known for the Roman-made waterfall above it. The Nera below the falls is…
A medieval brick city on three ridges, arranged around a sloping shell-shaped square where the Palio is run twice each summer. It stayed…