Collosal opportunity

Grab that chance. Visit the Colosseum now, and you almost will have one of the most famous monuments in the world to yourself. It is absolutely necessary to purchase advance tickets (here). If you manage to book the coming months, you can expect the following:

Small groups of about 14 people are given access every 15 minutes. When I went last Sunday (June 7), we were with 16 people (two couples, a group of four and a group of eight people). Your temperature is measured first. Be careful not to have been out in the sun, because then the temperature will rise to Covid-19 level, and you will have to wait for the ‘mercury’ to drop.

Minimal info snippet

Wearing a face mask during the entire visit is mandatory. You will be accompanied by a guide, who makes a short round and points out the moments when you can listen to a snippet of minimal information about the monuments via a free app (bring your own phone of course).

The visit is quite short. It takes less than three quarters. But you are almost alone. Every 15 minutes a new group of about 14 people comes in. There are two routes, so if there are 80 people in total in the Coloseum at every moment (plus some security people) it will be a lot.

80 versus 3000

That is something different than when you ‘d have visited the Colosseum before March 9, 2020, before the corona crisis shutdown. In normal circumstances, the Colosseum allows that 3000 visitors are inside the monument at any time of the day. This way 7.5 million persons brought a visit in the year 2019.

As usual, you can also visit the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill with the same ticket. Both venues you can visit on your own and you have all the time you’ll need. Due to the access restriction in the Colosseum, also in the Forum and oin the Palatine Hill there are few visitors.

I had not been in the Forum in a while, but I saw that they built a nice path near the temple of the Vestal Virgins, with a kind of arbor with beautiful flowers. The Orti Farnesiani on the Palatine is very nice when there are hardly any visitors and Ancient Rome is at your feet.

And the Vatican?

Find out how to order tickets for the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel here, and how the visit there looks like in corona times.