Domus Aurea

Is it worth the trip?

Yes, if you plan for it. Here you stand inside Nero’s palace, under its own vaults, rather than looking at a ruin from outside, and the domed octagonal room is the high point. The caveats are practical. It opens only three days a week, by a timed visit, so it has to be booked into a stay rather than added on the day; it is underground and cold, about 10 °C (the operator); and the painting is fragmentary, so this is a place of spaces and architecture more than of colour. It is a separate ticket from the Colosseum’s and on top of it.

Getting there and what it costs

The entrance is on Viale della Domus Aurea, reached through the Colle Oppio park from the Via Labicana side (the operator), about 280 m from the Colosseum. The operator gives Colosseo metro station (line B) and Colosseo – Fori Imperiali (line C), buses 51, 85 and 87 and tram 3; a bus stop named Labicana/Colosseo is mapped 120 m from the site (OpenStreetMap). The operator lists the site as accessible, with toilets and a bookshop.

It is open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays only, and closed on the first Sunday of every month and on a list of further closing days on the operator’s page. The operator’s ticket page gives visits every 15 minutes from 09.00, with last entry at 15.30, plus two visits without the tour at 12.00 and 17.00; its page on the site gives 09.15 to 17.15. The time slots offered in the ticket shop are the ones that count.

• With the educational tour and virtual reality: €26.
• Without them, at 12.00 or 17.00: €18; €2 for EU citizens aged 18 to 24.

Free entry and the legal reductions apply only to the €18 part of the price. Tickets are booked online at ticketing.colosseo.it, are issued in the visitor’s name, and are checked against an identity document (colosseo.it, read 14 October 2026).

History

The fire of 64 destroyed a large part of the city, and Nero took the cleared ground for a new palace, replacing and extending his first one, the Domus Transitoria (en.wikipedia). It was less a palace than a landscaped estate (de.wikipedia): buildings set among gardens, woods and vineyards around an artificial lake in the valley where the Colosseum now stands, designed by the architects Severus and Celer (the operator). Published estimates of its extent run from about 40 to 260 hectares, since much of it has never been excavated (en.wikipedia; it.wikipedia; de.wikipedia). A colossal bronze statue of Nero, between 30 and 35.5 m high by different accounts, stood outside the main entrance in a porticoed atrium (en.wikipedia). Construction was nearly complete when Nero died in 68, according to en.wikipedia; it.wikipedia thinks it was probably never finished. Suetonius has Nero say, when he dedicated it, that he had at last begun to live like a human being (en.wikipedia).

His successors erased it. The lake was drained for the Flavian Amphitheatre, the Colosseum, and the statue was later moved beside it by Hadrian, possibly giving the amphitheatre its name (en.wikipedia). The Oppian building stayed in use, Vitellius living there in 69, until it burned under Trajan in 104 (en.wikipedia). His architect, Apollodorus of Damascus (Pleiades), then demolished its upper floor and used the rooms below, filled with earth, as the platform for the Baths of Trajan (it.wikipedia). The baths were used until the early 5th century; a cemetery was in use in front of one exedra from the 5th to the 7th century (en.wikipedia, Baths of Trajan).

Buried, the rooms were forgotten until the end of the 15th century, when a young Roman fell through a cleft in the hillside into what looked like a painted grotto (en.wikipedia). Artists including Pinturicchio, Ghirlandaio, Raphael and Giulio Romano had themselves let down to copy the paintings (the operator), and the “grotesques” named after these grottoes spread through Renaissance art, most visibly in Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican (en.wikipedia). Later visitors scratched their names into the frescoes, Casanova and the Marquis de Sade among them (en.wikipedia). Exposure let in the damp: humidity inside can reach 90%. The site closed at the end of 2005, part reopened in 2007 and closed again in 2008, 60 m² of a gallery vault collapsed in 2010, and it reopened in 2014 (en.wikipedia). The surviving part of the Domus Aurea is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List with the historic centre of Rome, since 1980 (it.wikipedia).