We have decided to save some money and buy our entrance tickets online from home. Is there an advantage to doing the underground portion before or after the other. Everyone says to go very early, start at the colosseum, then to forum then to Palantine Hill. Does this sound doable? We hope to spend 1/2 a day in all.
Has anyone booked the tours from the official site? What was the quality of the tours?
Thank you for your advise.
Posted by
Minnesota 🎒
15856 posts
Without getting into the quality (which has been reported to be very good) it's really difficult to nail the economical underground tours of the Colosseum through the Coopculture site: they sell out almost immediately upon going on sale, and you need to get up in the middle of the night to try and snag them.
They go on sale at 9:00 AM ROME time on the 3rd Monday of each month for the next month. If you can get them at all, I wouldn't worry about the order for the rest of your sightseeing.
Just noticed that your trip looks to be at the end of this month? I can pretty much promise you that tickets were long gone last month. You do have the option of booking with a (more expensive) private company - such as Walks of Italy - or trying to see if Coopculture have any evening tours of the underground still open.
http://www.coopculture.it/en/events.cfm?id=177
The Coopculture tours do not include the Forum and Palatine so if you wants tours of those sites, take a look at Walks of Italy or similar:
https://www.walksofitaly.com/rome-tours/colosseum-underground-tours
Posted by
lexington, il
4105 posts
Haven't used this tour but someone mentioned it a few weeks ago. Price seems very good.
If you do use them, let us know if they're a good alternative.
Posted by
Denver, CO, United States
49 posts
We just did the underground Colosseum tour with Walks of Italy last week. Included in that tour is the Forum and Palantine Hill. Our family of five adults thought it was great. We definitely avoided crowds by using this tour. We met at the Colosseum at 11:30 for an almost 4 hour tour. We also used Walks of Italy for the Pristine Sistine and Pompeii...thought they were all great. BTW you get a discount on multiple bookings and there is also a Rick Steves discount.
Posted by
Pa and Italy
4152 posts
There is no savings when buying tickets online. The only thing you save is time you would have spent waiting in the long ticket lines. If you are wanting to book the underground tour for May those tickets haven't gone on sale yet. They will go on sale the third Monday of this month. You must be online at 9 am Rome time. Book any time you can get as these tickets sell out quickly. One thing you can do to give you better odds is to buy your entry ticket now and just buy the underground tour when they go on sale. Most people try to buy both at the same time and with the volume of people trying to use the site it causes issues. The entry tickets are valid until the end of the year until first use, then they're valid for two consecutive days with a single entry into each of the three sites.
If you are trying to visit later this month all the official English tours are sold out. You might consider booking an alternate language tour and just read up on the history of the structure.
The underground tour is very good. Private tour companies turn their clients over to the official guides for the tour. I would try booking through the coopculture site first to get the best price (only 9 euros plus 2 euros reservation fee).
Donna
Posted by
San Francisco Bay Area
5697 posts
And the free RS audio tours of Colosseum and Forum are pretty good, and done at your own speed/schedule.