Colosseum, Lazio, Italy

4Gemma Spalding 5:00 PM Aug 20, 2022

Beautiful!
***It is free to enter on the first Sunday of every month. We had a lovely couple of days at the Colosseum. The only downside was the amount of people trying to sell us tour guides. We went to see it, one day, but were told the tickets had sold out for the day (apart from ones with a tour guide), so we just explored the outside & came back another day, to see the inside. We initially visited late in the afternoon. There are a LOT of people trying to sell you thinks in & around this area, it gets extremely annoying. A random man, dressed in jeans & a Tshirt, told us all Colosseum tickets were sold out for the day, apart from one he could sell us that would get us a tour guide. The Colosseum was only a 10 minute walk from our hotel so we decided we’d enjoy the view from the outside & come back another day. Whether or not he was telling us the truth about the tickets being sold out, I do not know. He definitely didn’t work there & had just prebought tickets to sell, with himself being the tour guide. When we came back, we were pleasantly surprised to find out our entry was free. We still had to queue for a free ticket, though. Please do not be put off by this queue, it looks huge but really isn’t (about 20 minutes). We still had people trying to sell us tour guides – one man actually got annoyed at us when we said we didn’t want one. He said “the queue is really long for the free ticket. I can get you a tour guide for €25 each & you only have to queue for 15 minutes”. We politely declined this offer & he became visibly annoyed & said “€25 is cheap!”. We do not care how much it costs, we prefer to find the history out for ourselves, we did not want a tour guide. I would suggest you do not ‘just get a tour guide’ to skip the queue because it doesn’t work. The tour guide just queues with you. We actually had a group with a guide behind us in the queue so we got the whole thing for free anyway! If it’s hot, take lots of water with you. There are no water fountains nearby & I think the closest toilets were in the Roman Forum, next door (you get free Roman Forum entry with your Colosseum ticket). There are lots of restaurants & convenient stores, nearby, but they get very busy. We queued for some water in one shop for about 15 minutes.

4Robert V 5:00 PM Jul 8, 2022

Must See
incredible structure. This is an attraction we spent the extra money on for a guided tour and I highly recommend this option. Very crowded place and without the guide and skip the line passes you would be wasting valuable time navigating people/crowds and wasting time trying to figure out where to go. So spend the extra money.