At the end of via di Porta San Sebastiano, where the traffic stops and the Appian Way begins, two round towers close in on a tall archway. This is Porta San Sebastiano, the largest and best preserved gate of the Aurelian Walls, and inside its towers there is a museum you enter without paying.
The museum tells you the story of Rome’s defensive circuit with models, panels and reconstructions, and it occupies rooms that have been, in order, a military post, a private apartment and an exhibition space. The best part, though, is not in the rooms: it is the walkway on the walls, four hundred metres of patrol passage along the top of the circuit. And here is the problem, because since 15 June 2026 the walkway has been closed for electrical and plumbing work, and the museum has not yet announced when it reopens.
Six things make the detour worthwhile all the same, and the first is the gate.
What was the secretary of the National Fascist Party doing inside a gate in the walls?
Let’s begin!
The gate: five phases in seven hundred years
The Aurelian Walls were built between 271 and 275 AD by the emperor Aurelian, when Rome realised it was no longer safe. The Appian Way passed here, and the gate was called Porta Appia: its present name comes from the basilica of San Sebastiano, further along the same road.
The gate you see is not the one of the 3rd century. The museum distinguishes five building phases: every time the threat changed, the gate was raised, reinforced, narrowed. The semicircular towers, the marble facing of the archway, the inner courtyard between the two curtains are later additions, and set in a row they tell seven hundred years of fear.
Look at the height of the towers from outside before you go in, then count them again from inside the courtyard. The jump in scale between the Roman structure and the medieval raisings is visible with the naked eye, and it is the lesson the museum gives you free before the ticket desk.
1. The graffito of Saint Michael, and the night of 1327
On the inner jamb of the gate there is a scratched image: the archangel Michael killing the dragon, with a Latin inscription beside it.
Read the inscription next to it, because it carries a date: the year 1327, indiction XI, the penultimate day of September, which is the eve of the feast of Saint Michael. On that day, at the gate, the Romans of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions clashed with the troops of Robert of Anjou, king of Naples, who was trying to occupy the city. Somebody carved the archangel in thanks for the fact that the attack did not get through.
Look for it calmly, because it is small and has no light of its own. Then stop a second on what you have in front of you: it is not a commissioned monument, it is a mark left by hand by somebody who was there, at the exact spot where it happened, seven centuries ago. In Rome this kind of testimony can be counted on your fingers.
2. Ettore Muti’s home
And this is where the gate stops being a monument. Between 1940 and 1943 the gate was granted to Ettore Muti, secretary of the National Fascist Party, «for use as a study and a dwelling».
It was not a symbolic use: real work was done inside. The collapsed floors were rebuilt, both in the attic above the entrance archway and in the towers, recreating the division into two storeys; the barrel vault covering the first floor of the central block was restored; and rebuilding the floors meant blocking up some of the windows.
Why does this change the way you look at the rooms?
Because the rooms you walk through do not have the shape Aurelian’s soldiers knew: they have the shape somebody gave them in the 1940s in order to live in them. The floors you walk on, the division into storeys, the windows missing where you would expect an arrow slit are all decisions of that building site. An ancient monument that keeps the alterations made to turn it into a flat is a rare thing, and this museum does not hide them.
3. The models of the defensive circuit
In the third room are the reconstruction models of the walls and the map of Rome’s whole defensive circuit, and they are why this museum is worth it even with the walkway closed.
What is a model for, when the city is there to be seen every day?
The reward is scale. The Aurelian Walls are nineteen kilometres long and run right around the city: anyone living in Rome sees pieces of them every day, at Porta Pinciana, at San Giovanni, below Testaccio, without ever seeing them as one thing. The model puts them back together, and there you grasp that those scattered fragments are a single artefact, the largest Rome has.
Find the point where you are standing on the map and then follow the line with your finger down to the Tiber. It is the quickest way to understand why certain districts have the shape they have.
4. The model of Sangallo’s Bastione Ardeatino
Among the models on show there is one that jumps a thousand years: the Bastione Ardeatino, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.
It is the sixteenth-century fortification built to adapt the ancient walls to firearms, and the comparison with the rest of the museum is instructive. A high wall works against ladders and siege towers; against artillery it is a target, because the higher it is the more surface it offers the cannonball. The modern bastion does the opposite: it is low, thick, sloped, and it hides the guns.
You meet Sangallo twice in the same day if you move around the centre: the facade of the palace that houses the Museo Barracco is attributed to him. The same architect designed the front of a private palace and the defensive system of a capital.
5. The room in the western tower
The first room of the route is set up inside the western tower, and it is the space where you best grasp what it means to be inside a defensive structure rather than looking at one from outside.
On the floor there is a three-colour mosaic with a tiger biting a deer. The museum shows it without stating its date on its own pages, and this is worth knowing before you hear it described as ancient: in a gate lived in during the 1940s, a mosaic «in the ancient style» is not a far-fetched idea, and several sources assign it to the works of that period. If the point interests you, ask the staff, which is the shortest route.
Look instead at the masonry around you, which is beyond dispute. The thickness of the walls, the curve of the tower and the size of the openings tell you the function of the building with no need for labels.
6. The walkway, which cannot be walked at the moment
This is the thing people normally come for, and it has to be said plainly that right now you cannot do it.
From the highest room you step out onto the patrol walkway, four hundred metres of passage along the Aurelian Walls, from the Bastione Ardeatino to Porta San Sebastiano. You walk it inside a covered gallery punctuated by towers, with stretches of original paving under your feet and, at one point, a medieval fresco with a Virgin and Child: a devotional image painted on a military wall, because the guards passed up there and those were their days.
The walkway has been closed since 15 June 2026 for electrical and plumbing work, and as I write the museum has not published a reopening date. The tower terrace is not accessible either. Before you travel, open the notices page on the museum site or call 060608: if the walkway has reopened, this visit changes weight entirely.
Practical information
Details checked on 18 September 2026 on the official website, museodellemuraroma.it. Hours and conditions change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Admission is free for everyone, and there is no need to book if you come alone or as a couple. Guided tours in several languages are bought separately, by booking. How the visit works. The museum admits twenty visitors at a time and five per room, and the visit lasts a maximum of fifty minutes. These are not rules on paper: the spaces are narrow, and at busy weekend hours you may have to wait your turn. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-16:00, with last admission an hour before closing. The museum stays closed on Mondays, on 1 May and on 25 December. On 1 January it opens 11:00-16:00. Access. The entrance is only partly accessible and there is no lift: the route climbs into the towers by ancient stairs. There are toilets for people with disabilities, and there are services for blind and partially sighted visitors. Beware of old pages. A page from 2006 is still online on the museum site announcing the reopening of the walkway and giving the prices of the day, 3 euros full and 1.50 reduced, with hours of 9:00-14:00. Those figures are twenty years old: today admission is free and the hours are the ones above. Getting there. The museum is at via di Porta San Sebastiano 18. The nearest metro B stop is Circo Massimo, about twenty minutes away on foot along viale delle Terme di Caracalla; buses 118 and 218 pass closer. From the Baths of Caracalla it is a quarter of an hour’s walk. How long to allow. The rooms need forty minutes, which is close to the permitted limit. With the walkway open, allow an hour and a half.
Where to go from here
The gate opens onto the road that is the real sequel to this visit: the guide is Appian Way: 5 things to discover, and the museum is the right place to begin it, because it explains what people were walking out of.
If you are interested in how Rome defended itself in later centuries, the fortress of the popes is Castel Sant’Angelo, and you meet the architect of this museum’s models again on the facade of the Museo Barracco. The full map of the city’s collections is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: the front of the gate is by Falk2 (CC BY-SA 4.0); the gallery of the walkway is by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0); the graffito, the open stretch of the walkway and the view of the Appian Way are by Lalupa and in the public domain, all from Wikimedia Commons.
