Private Colosseum Underground Tour with Arena Floor & Ancient Rome: VIP Experience

Follow the various phases of entertainment: the processions and the salutes, the battles between ferocious beasts and gladiators kept on a knife-edge by the surprise entrance of animals into the arena through secret trap-doors; the fights to the death between gladiators amidst the cheers of a delirious crowd; the capricious decisions of the audience or of the emperor to save or condemn a defeated gladiator according to their whim.

Our guides are experts in their fields (most of them are archaeologists), and on this private tour they will take you into the world of the gladiators, evoking the modes of combat, the weapons and the origins of these men coming from the most remote provinces of the empire. The success of the games that ensured by the the multi-ethnic society of the time. On this Colosseum tour you will learn of their daily training, which took place in the barracks where the gladiators lived: each of these was equipped with a small arena such as the Ludus Magnus near the Colosseum.

This great valley was the political heart of ancient Rome. Here we will retrace the daily life and politics of the Romans in the most important sites of the age, beginning at the Senate, where the most memorable debates of the Roman republic took place. Then our private tour will enter into the rooms and the stunningly beautiful garden of the House of the Vestal Virgins; discover who they were, gaze upon their marble portraits that still survive today, and learn of the cruel destiny that sometimes awaited them. The Basilicas of Julia and Maxentius, seats of the courthouses where jurisprudence was born, will bring our tour into the spaces of the great public trials during the time of Cicero and Caesar. In the temples of Saturn, Castor and Pollux, and Antoninus and Faustina, we will meet the gods of the Romans together with the enigma of a Christian church built into the structure of a pagan temple.

The innovations of Roman engineers will amaze you on the Via Sacra, still marked today with the wheel-ruts of carriages that passed over it for centuries. The film-strips of antiquity carved into the marble of the Arch of Titus and Arch of Septimus Severus, meanwhile, tell of the great conquests of Imperial Rome. Finally, right in the places where they happened, we will relive timeless events such as the funeral of Julius Caesar near the Temple of Caesar, the decapitation of Cicero in the central square and the political rise of Augustus, who with his innocent face (or at least so he appears in countless statues) finished off the Roman republic and founded an empire.