Underground Rome Self Guided: Two of the Three Sites by the Pantheon Are Shut, and One Is Still on Sale

Three doors, three different reasons for being below the street, and they are walkable in one go. The classic surface triangle of Pantheon, Trevi and Navona is about 2.3 km, and all three excavations sit on or just off it.

Here is where each one stood when we read its own page, rather than a marketplace listing, on 28 October 2026.

The fourth row is there because it changes the plan more than anything else in the table. The two squares you would be walking between are free, or nearly free, and they are open. What is underneath two of them is not.

Piazza Navona has the shape it has because a stadium is holding it. The arena was built for Greek-style athletic contests, the city grew over it, and the oval of the square is the track. A stretch of the original seating survives below the north end, reached from Via di Tor Sanguigna, and for years you could walk down and look at it.

The page for that area on Rome's own tourism site is one line long, in English and in Italian:

No reopening date. No phased schedule, no partial access, nothing about guided slots. The Italian page says the same thing in the same number of words, and it too stops there.

There is a second oddity, and it is on the custodian's side rather than the seller's. The Sovrintendenza Capitolina, which looks after the site, has its own page for the stadium, and that page carries no closure notice at all. The only closure it was advertising when we read it concerned a different monument entirely, over at the Capitoline Museums. A visitor who starts from the custodian rather than the tourist board would come away thinking the place is open.

While we were on those two pages we also collected the thing nobody reconciles. The Sovrintendenza gives the stadium as 265 by 106 metres. Turismo Roma gives it as about 275 by 106 metres, with room for roughly 30,000 spectators. Both are official, both are current, and the ten-metre gap sits between two arms of the same city administration. We publish both numbers rather than pick the rounder one. Picking quietly is how a ten-metre gap disappears from the record.

We looked at what the ticketing side is doing, on the same day, and reported only pages we could actually open.

Tiqets still has a product page for the stadium. It says, where the calendar would be, "We don't have these tickets right now" — so nothing can be bought through it, which is the correct outcome. The same page, a little further down, still publishes the visiting hours: "Open today: 10:00 - 19:00", seven days a week, and a price of about $11. The inventory knows. The content does not.

Then there is a domain that exists only for this monument. It is an affiliate site, which it discloses, and it sends its buyers on to Headout, GetYourGuide and Tiqets. It publishes "Most visits run between 10:00 and 19:00, with last entry around 18:20" and sells entry with an audioguide "From €8". Nowhere on the page, when we read it, was there a word about restoration works or a closure.

Product pages for the same site also remain indexed on Viator, Musement and Tripadvisor. We are not going to tell you what those three show today, because their pages refuse automated requests and we could not open them; an unopened page is not a source. What we can say is that the listings have not been taken down.

One of those products is in our own catalogue, and we would rather say so than have you find it. It is a stadium entry ticket carrying 331 genuine reviews, nearly all of them left when the place was open. We have not hidden it and we have not quietly deleted it. What we did was write the closure into the first two sentences of its own listing, where a buyer reads it before the price. A review left while the door was open is no evidence that it opens now, and a catalogue that trades on the confusion is doing the thing we are complaining about.

This is the same shape as the ticket problem at the monument up the road, where ten of twelve sites sell a priority lane the Ministry says in writing does not exist. We took that one apart in an earlier piece on skip-the-line at the Pantheon. The mechanism is boring and it is always the same: a product page is written once and then earns money without being read again.

The one site that is open is also the one with the most misreported price in the quarter, so this is worth getting exactly right.

In 1999 a cinema basement near the Trevi Fountain was being cleared for renovation and the work stopped. Nine metres down there was an imperial Roman house, a stretch of street, and a tank belonging to the Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct that still fills the fountain overhead. The site opened as Vicus Caprarius, the City of Water. The water has never been switched off, which is the thing that makes it worth the stairs: you are standing next to working plumbing from the first century.

Its own ticket page, read on 28 October 2026:

So the number to hold on to is €4.00. The €8.00 that turns up all over the internet as "the Vicus Caprarius ticket" is the guided visit, which is a different product and an optional one. If you walk in and pay, you pay four euros.

Two more things that catch people out. There is no online booking: the site takes phone calls and WhatsApp messages on a single number, and its phone line is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 to 16:00, which is a narrower window than its own opening hours. Rome's tourism site adds that booking is required at weekends and on public holidays and strongly advised on weekdays. Anyone hunting for a booking engine will not find one, and that is the most common way a visit here fails before it starts.

And one small pleasure for anyone keeping score on city passes. A Roma Pass gets you a discount here, down to €2.50. The same card is worth nothing at the Pantheon, which is not in the Roma Pass or Omnia circuit at all. Two ticket desks a few streets apart, and the card is worth something at one of them.

The Aqua Virgo has a second place where you can get at it: a stretch of the aqueduct's channel at Via del Nazareno, looked after by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina and visited by appointment rather than by turning up.

Its page says "Temporaneamente chiuso per lavori" — temporarily closed for works. We have not found anybody writing about this one, which is probably because almost nobody was selling it in the first place. It was never a walk-in.

The page is worth a look anyway, as an illustration of how these notices decay. Underneath the closure it still carries the full admission scale, €4.00 full and €3.00 reduced, free for residents of Rome and the metropolitan area and for MIC card holders. It still explains that entry is for accompanied groups only, at a maximum of twenty people, bookable on 060608 between 9:00 and 19:00. And in the field for days the site is closed, it lists all seven days of the week, which is either a very precise statement of the current position or a form that nobody has filled in. We read it as the second one.

If this one matters to your plan, the number on the page is the only way to find out when it comes back. There is no email, no newsletter, and no published schedule of works.

One open site does not make an itinerary, so here is the honest version of the morning. It is shorter than the one you were promised and it costs about six euros.

Two practical notes that have nothing to do with tickets. There is a drinking fountain in Piazza della Rotonda, about 87 metres from the Pantheon, and it is one of the rare nasoni with three dragon-head spouts; the big fountain in the middle of the square, on the other hand, is not drinkable and you can be fined for trying. And almost everything within five minutes of the Pantheon portico is free to go into, which is the fact that makes this quarter worth walking rather than booking. The squares and fountains of the centre cost nothing except the Trevi basin.

We sell guided visits, so treat what follows with the suspicion it deserves, and then check the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the point.

At the door, Vicus Caprarius is €4.00, or €12.00 with the site's own guided visit added. The guided products in our catalogue for the same site run from about €34 to €46. That is a real difference and it is not explained by the entrance fee, so it has to be explained by something else or it is not worth paying.

Three cases where it genuinely is. If you cannot ring an Italian number and the WhatsApp thread stalls, a booked product solves a problem four euros does not. If you want the aqueduct explained rather than looked at, a licensed guide in a small group is a different thing from reading the panels. And if the site is one stop on a walk somebody else has planned, you are buying the walk rather than the ticket.

The case against is just as plain. If you only want to see a Roman house and a working aqueduct tank, and you will send a WhatsApp message two days earlier, the door is four euros and the site is small enough to read by yourself in three quarters of an hour. Nobody selling a tour has any reason to tell you that. Hence this paragraph.

One filter we apply before showing you anything: no product in the grid below includes the closed stadium, and none of them promises priority entry at the Pantheon, because there is no such thing to promise.

A fair number of people searching for underground Rome want none of the above. They mean the Colosseum's hypogeum, the catacombs on the Appia, or the Scavi under St Peter's. Those are real and worth doing, they are all outside this quarter, and they all need booking well ahead.

It is worth untangling one more pairing, because the names invite it. Vicus Caprarius is not under the Pantheon. It is in the Trevi quarter, several streets away, and the thing that connects the two is the aqueduct rather than the ground. There is no excavated level under the Pantheon open to visitors. What there is, is the history of the building itself, which has been standing and in use since 609 and has never needed digging up.