Forum & Palatine — 26 August 2026

The hard deadline

5:00 PM Colosseum entry slot.
4:45 PM be standing at the Sperone Valadier gate, Piazza del Colosseo. Entry windows are enforced.
Photo ID for both of you. Tickets are issued in your names and the name is checked at the gate.
75 minutes max inside the Colosseum on a standard ticket, and the route is one-way — you cannot double back for a shot you missed.
Be out of the park by 4:35 PM, through the Via di San Gregorio gate. It is about 8 minutes on the street from there to the Colosseum.

Working backwards

2:15–2:30 PM enter the Forum at Largo della Salara Vecchia, Via dei Fori Imperiali.
About 2 hours for all 15 stops: roughly 45 min of actual walking inside the park, plus time standing and looking.
Leave by the Via di San Gregorio gate at the end, not back through the Forum. It is the closest park exit to the Colosseum.
If you are running late, the stops to drop are 5, 13 and 15. Do not drop 1, 4 or 9.

Bathrooms & water

Facilities are thin inside the archaeological park. Plan on the ones at the start of the Colosseum route, after you go through the Valadier gate.
Go before you leave the Forum area, not after you are up on the Palatine.
Public drinking fountains (nasoni) run cold and free. Bring a bottle each and refill.

August heat

Afternoon on the Palatine is exposed white gravel with almost no cover. Expect mid-30s °C.
The only real shade on the route is the Farnese Gardens, stop 14. Treat it as a scheduled sit-down, not a bonus.
Hats, and put sunscreen on before you go in — there is nowhere sensible to stop and do it.

Bags & security

No large bags or suitcases. There is no cloakroom you can count on — bring a small daypack only.
Everything goes through a security check at the gate. Build that into the 4:45 arrival.

How the route works

The order is solved for shortest walking, so just follow the numbers. Nothing is walked twice.

In the Forum you run west along the north side to the Temple of Saturn (stop 5), turn around at the Capitoline, and come back east down the Sacra Via to the Arch of Titus. On the Palatine you come up the ramp into the gardens (stop 10) and work south, leaving by the far gate.

It also happens to run in rough chronological order once you are on the hill: huts, then Augustus, then Domitian's palace.

Offline

Map tiles, photos, text and code are all bundled in this page. Once it has loaded on wi-fi it works with no signal at all — put the phone in airplane mode and it still draws.

"Where am I" still works offline. GPS is a separate radio from cell data.