Galleria Borghese

What it is

The Galleria Borghese is a state museum of the Italian Ministry of Culture, housed in the villa that Cardinal Scipione Borghese built for himself in the park now called Villa Borghese. The museum draws the distinction itself: the park is public and free to walk into, while the house at its centre is a ticketed museum that has to be booked in advance. Confusing the two is the most common way visitors arrive at the wrong place.

Construction began in 1607 under Flaminio Ponzio and was completed by Giovanni Vasanzio, the Fleming Jan van Santen, on the model of the suburban villa. From 1770 Marcantonio IV Borghese had the interiors rebuilt under the architect Antonio Asprucci, who set the greatest ancient sculptures and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne in the middle of their rooms and tied each ceiling's painted subject to the sculpture below it. Napoleon later forced Camillo Borghese to sell much of the antique collection, and its replacements are nineteenth-century, but Asprucci's arrangement still governs what a visitor walks through.

What is on display is a collection of ancient sculpture, reliefs and mosaics together with painting and sculpture from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, shown across twenty frescoed rooms plus the portico and the entrance hall.

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What's inside

The museum runs over two floors of a building small enough to walk end to end in a few minutes, which is why the two-hour slot works. The ground floor is the sculpture floor. It opens through the portico into the Mariano Rossi entrance hall, then runs through the Paolina Room, the David Room, the Apollo and Daphne Room, the Room of the Emperors, the Hermaphrodite Room, the Aeneas and Anchises Room, the Egyptian Room and the Silenus Room. The room names are the museum's own and they follow the works, so the naming is also the route: the Bernini groups and Canova's reclining Pauline Borghese are what the ground-floor rooms are built around.

The first floor is the picture gallery, twelve rooms numbered nine to twenty — the Dido Room, the Hercules Room, the Room of Ferrarese Painting, the Room of the Bacchantes, the Fame Room, the Lanfranco Loggia, the Aurora Room, the Flora Room, the Count of Angers Room, the Jupiter and Antiope Room, the Helen and Paris Room and the Psyche Room. The museum names Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini among the painters held here. Every ceiling is painted; the rooms are as much of the collection as the walls.

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How long to spend

Two hours, and that is not a suggestion but the length of the ticket. The museum admits visitors in hourly shifts of up to 180 people, and the shift is a fixed window with an entry time and an exit time: 9 to 11, 10 to 12, and so on through 5 to 7. The one exception is the 5.45 p.m. slot, which the museum's own FAQ puts at one hour and fifteen minutes.

Two hours is enough for the building, not generous for it. Twenty rooms plus the portico and the entrance hall over two floors works out at roughly five minutes a room if a visitor stops in all of them, which nobody does; the usual shape is forty minutes on the ground-floor sculpture, an hour upstairs among the paintings, and the remainder spent going back to one or two things. Deciding before entering which floor gets the larger half is the single most useful piece of planning here.

Last-minute tickets sold at the counter are shorter. The museum states they can be bought only from minute twenty of each hour and carry a visit of one hour thirty, and that the final one, at 5.50 p.m., carries one hour.

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Season and crowds

The gallery opens Tuesday to Sunday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., with the last entrance at 5.45 p.m. It is closed on Mondays, and on 25 December and 1 January. There is no midday break: the building stays open straight through, and the ticket office runs from 8.30 a.m. until one hour before closing.

Because entry is by fixed shift, the choice that matters is which shift rather than which day. The 9 a.m. slot puts a visitor in the sculpture rooms before the building has filled and ends at 11, leaving the whole morning; the 5 p.m. and 5.45 p.m. slots are the quietest but the shortest, and the later one loses the light. In a Roman summer the early shift is also the cool one, since the walk in from the Via Pinciana gate is exposed.

Free days are the exception to plan around. Admission is free on the first Sunday of the month and on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November, but those tickets are released only ten days ahead, the booking fee is still due, and the museum states that last-minute tickets are not sold on those dates. A free Sunday is the one day where turning up without a booking will not work.

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Tickets

Full price is €16.00 per person plus a presale fee, and €11.00 for the last slot. The reduced ticket for visitors aged 18 to 25 is €2.00 and is valid until the date of the twenty-fifth birthday. Under-18s go free, as do a list of categories the museum publishes in full: students and teachers in art, architecture, heritage and humanities courses in the EU, Fine Arts Academy students and staff, Ministry of Culture employees, ICOM members, EU school groups with their teachers and Italian school teaching staff with a certificate from their institution. The museum notes that prices may rise while temporary exhibitions are on.

The part that catches people out is the reservation. Booking is compulsory for every ticket type including the free ones, and carries a mandatory €2.00 fee — waived only for disabled visitors and one companion, licensed EU tourist guides at work, subscribed journalists, children up to five and Sotheby's Preferred cardholders, none of whom are exempt from booking itself. A free ticket must be backed by proof of entitlement at the door, or it is cancelled and the visitor pays the full fare subject to availability.

One buyer may take five tickets at a time. Tickets are sold through the museum's official channels and by phone on +39 06 32810, Monday to Friday, 9.30 a.m. to 6 p.m., and the museum disclaims responsibility for tickets resold at a markup elsewhere.

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Getting there

The address is Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, inside the Villa Borghese park, and the park entrance closest to the museum is on Via Pinciana. The bus stop of the same approach, Pinciana/Museo Borghese, sits on that street.

No car is needed and a car is close to useless here: only authorised vehicles may drive into and park inside Villa Borghese, and what is left is paid blue-line street parking on Via Pinciana and the streets around it. The museum publishes an email address at the comune for access requests, which is a sign of how narrow that permission is.

By bus, the museum lists routes 910 and 92 from Termini to the Pinciana/Museo Borghese stop. From Barberini on metro line A, routes 63, 83, 52 and 53 reach Pinciana/Museo Borghese, and 61 and 160 reach the S. Paolo del Brasile stop. From Flaminio on line A, routes 89, 490, 495, 61 and 160 go to S. Paolo del Brasile. From Tiburtina on line B, 490 and 495 do the same. From Spagna, the museum's own advice is to ride line A one stop to Barberini and pick up the buses above.

There are taxi ranks on Via Pinciana and on Via Vittorio Veneto by the park.

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What to watch out for

The bag rule is strict and it is the thing that delays people at the door. Medium and large bags, shoppers, backpacks and luggage may not be carried into the rooms; only a small pouch or handbag no larger than 21 by 15 centimetres is allowed through, and everything else goes to the cloakroom at the entrance. Luggage is accepted there only during the visit and only as an exception.

There is no fast-track ticket. The museum says entry is controlled for security and permitted only at the start of each hour, so a queue at the door is normal and clears quickly — a booked ticket does not mean walking straight in, it means being in the right hour.

Tickets cannot be changed or refunded once bought. Buy only from the official channels; the museum states plainly that it is not responsible for tickets sold at inflated prices by third parties, and that a free ticket without proof of entitlement is cancelled on the spot.

The bookshop and the café can be entered without a ticket, though the cloakroom and the toilets cannot; the café's published hours are 8.30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Short closures for exhibition installation do happen and are announced on the museum's own notices, so it is worth a look at the site the week before.

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Photography

Photographs and video of the works are allowed without asking permission, for study, research, free expression, creative work and spreading knowledge of the heritage. The museum sets three conditions, and they are the ones a visitor has to keep to: nothing done for commercial gain, direct or indirect; no tripods or stands, no flash and no other light source; and no physical contact with the works. Anything beyond that — commercial reproduction of any kind — needs authorisation from the Ufficio Iconografico, free or on payment of a royalty depending on the case. The museum also reserves the right to forbid photography outright in particular circumstances and during temporary exhibitions containing loans that may be in copyright, so a sign in a room overrides the general rule.

In practice the no-flash rule matters more here than in most museums, because the sculpture is the point and it is lit by daylight from the windows. Bernini's marble reads best in the morning, when light rakes across it and the drill work in hair and foliage separates; flat afternoon light flattens the same surface into a white blur. The ceilings are the other subject and the hardest one — they are high, painted and dim, and without a stand the only way to hold them is to brace against a doorframe and accept a slow frame.

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Where it is

Nearby

External links

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