TesseraJust the essentials
1 h 7 min2.4 km · 12 stops
What people come here for: the Forum, the House of the Faun, the Lupanar, the Great Theatre. Take this one if time is short.
How to do a self-guided tour of Pompeii
Pompeii is one of the best sites in Europe to see on your own, and one of the easiest to get wrong. The city is big, the streets look alike, and there is no signal to look anything up. A self-guided visit works when you decide three things before arriving: what you carry, where you enter and which route you walk.
Before you go
- Your ticket, bought in advance on the park’s official site. In season, timed entry sells out.
- A guide downloaded at the hotel — whichever one you choose — and tested once in airplane mode.
- A map that works offline. Screenshots are better than nothing; a map that shows where you are is far better.
- Water, a hat and shoes with grip: the basalt paving is uneven and polished smooth by two thousand years.
- A charged phone and a power bank. A self-guided visit runs on the battery.
Which entrance
Porta Marina, next to the Pompei Scavi – Villa dei Misteri station, puts you straight onto the road up to the Forum, and the routes below start from this western side of the city. Piazza Anfiteatro, at the eastern end, is quieter in the morning: start there if you arrive by Trenitalia and walk the city in reverse.
Pick one route and keep to it
The commonest mistake is trying to see everything and seeing the first third of the city twice. Choose by the time you really have, not the time you hope for. The routes below are measured over the real street network and include ninety seconds of looking at each stop.
Houses and new digs
1 h 49 min3.9 km · 20 stops
Frescoes, mosaics and what came out of the ground in the last few years: the Black Room, the hall of Dionysian mysteries, the bakery-prison. Guidebooks do not have these yet.
The whole city
3 h 25 min7.7 km · 35 stops
From the Marina Gate to the Amphitheatre by way of the Forum, the residential quarters and Via dell'Abbondanza. Half a day, and nothing left out.
Keeping the pace
- Do the Forum first, while you are fresh: it gives you the layout of everything else.
- Sit down every hour, in the shade of the theatres or a garden, not when you are exhausted.
- Expect some houses to be closed. Pompeii rotates its openings; skip and carry on rather than searching for a way in.
- Use one earbud in a group, so you can talk without stopping the story.
Where to finish
The Amphitheatre end has its own exit at Piazza Anfiteatro, close to the Pompei and Pompei Santuario stations. If you walked the whole city from Porta Marina, leave from there rather than retracing three kilometres to the entrance.
Updated 2026-10-28