Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, first version
1632 · Carrara marble
Galleria Borghese, Rome
Galleria Borghese
Museum · Founded 1613
Open, admission and hours confirmed 24 August 2026 · 25 sources
On this page 17 sections
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Not encyclopaedic, and not trying to be: this is one cardinal's cabinet, assembled in a single generation partly by purchase and commission and partly, on the record, by confiscation, then stripped of 344 ancient sculptures in 1807 and quietly refilled within a generation. What it holds now is small enough to walk in an afternoon and dense enough that the walk does not feel small: both of Bernini's busts of the man who built the house, his Apollo and Daphne and his Rape of Proserpina, six Caravaggios from the collector's own lifetime, three early Raphaels including one taken from a church by night, and four Titians including Sacred and Profane Love. Twenty rooms hold all of it, with more than 260 further paintings held above the picture gallery and shown only by separate arrangement.
| Kind | Museum |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1613 (villa completed for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, construction begun 1607); sold to the Italian state in 1902 and opened as a public museum in 1903 |
| City and country |  Rome, Italy |
| Address | Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, 00197 Rome, Italy |
| Website | galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it |
| Status | Open, confirmed 24 August 2026 |
| Record last verified | 7 August 2026 |
Visiting
What it costs and when it is openConfirmed 24 August 2026
- Hours
- Tuesday to Sunday09:00 to 19:00Last entry 17:45, for a shortened final slot. The ticket office opens at 08:30 and closes one hour before the museum
- Closed
- Monday. 25 December. 1 January.
- Admission
- Adult (Intero)EUR 16EUR 11.00 for the last entry slot at 17:45. A EUR 2.00 booking fee is mandatory on every ticket type, this one included, and is charged on top of the price shown
- Reduced, EU citizens 18-25EUR 2Valid up to the 25th birthday. Plus the EUR 2.00 booking fee
- Free, under 18FreeEU citizens, and non-EU citizens whose country grants reciprocal free entry to Italian visitors. Booking stays compulsory and the EUR 2.00 booking fee still applies. Other free-with-booking categories include qualifying art-history, conservation and architecture students and faculty, ICOM members and MIC staff; disabled visitors and one companion, licensed EU tour guides and press-card journalists are additionally exempt from the EUR 2.00 fee itself
Free entry: First Sunday of every month. 25 April. 2 June. 4 November. On these days entry itself is free, but the EUR 2.00 booking fee is still charged, tickets open 10 days ahead, and no last-minute tickets are sold- Tickets
- galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/visita/info-b... The museum's own ticket page.
- Do I need to book?
- Yes, compulsory. Entry is sold only in timed two-hour slots (one hour for the last slot of the day) and there is no walk-in entry; book online or by phone on +39 06 32810, Monday to Friday 09:30-18:00
- Address
- Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, 00197 Rome, Italy MapBus 910 or 92 from Termini station to the Pinciana/Museo Borghese stop; 89, 490 or 495 from the Flaminio Metro stop (Line A) to San Paolo del Brasile; 63, 83, 61, 160, 52 or 53 from the Barberini Metro stop (Line A); 490 or 495 from Tiburtina station (Line B) to San Paolo del Brasile
Metro No station at the villa itself. The nearest are Flaminio and Barberini, both on Line A, each requiring a bus onward
Taxi Ranks on Via Pinciana and on Via Vittorio Veneto, at the height of Villa Borghese - Website
- galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it
- Telephone
- +39 06 8413979
- [email protected]
Before you go how long, access, photography, bags, eating, shop
- How long to allow
- The visit is built around the fixed two-hour slot, with a mandatory exit at the end of it. The public rooms are 20 frescoed rooms plus the entrance hall and the portico. Over 260 further paintings are held in the Depositi above the picture-gallery floor, arranged as a further quadreria and visitable only by a separate reservation
- Access
- A stair lift on the left of the external staircase gives access to the ground floor, which is also reachable step-free through the rear entrance at Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5. The lift to the upper floor has reduced capacity for the building's historic structure and cannot take a standard wheelchair, so the museum keeps small-sized wheelchairs for the climb and larger, more comfortable ones on the upper floor. It offers LIS, IS and ASL sign-language guided tours, a video relay service for deaf visitors on request, and free guided tours by VAMI volunteers for visitors with a range of disabilities. Disabled visitors and one companion enter free and are also exempt from the EUR 2.00 booking fee. Tactile maps with Braille descriptions stand outside the entrance for visually impaired visitors
- Photography
- Personal photography and filming without a tripod, stand or flash is free and needs no permission, on condition it is not for profit and the images are not reproduced further. The museum can suspend this in whole or in part during special circumstances or exhibitions of loaned works. Any professional or commercial photography, filming, or image request needs written clearance from the museum's own Iconographic Office
- Bags
- Bags of medium or large size, shopping bags, backpacks and luggage cannot come inside; only a small pouch or pochette up to 21 by 15cm is allowed in. Everything else goes into the free cloakroom at the entrance. Strollers are allowed for children up to two years old. Food, drink, including water, and animals other than guide dogs are not permitted inside
- Eating
- ViVi Bistrot, fifty seats, open 08:30 to 19:00, serving breakfast, brunch, light lunch, pizza and aperitivo, with a takeaway option
- Shop
- Bookshop run by Artem Srl, open the same hours, 08:30 to 19:00. Audioguides cost EUR 5.00 at a dedicated counter behind the ticket desk, in English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Ukrainian, and cover the permanent collection and the current temporary exhibition
Prices and hours change. We take them from the institution's own pages and print the day we read them, and you can check the current position at the source we used. Confirm before you travel.
What is inside
Photograph by Fabrizio Garrisi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Room 1, the Paolina Room
Canova's marble of Paolina Borghese Bonaparte as Venus Victrix, shown here since 1889, is the room's centre. The ceiling carries five paintings by Domenico de Angelis of 1779 on the story of Venus and Aeneas, with the Judgement of Paris at the middle, inside Giovanni Battista Marchetti's trompe l'oeil framing. Originally the Vase Room in Antonio Asprucci's eighteenth-century scheme, it lost its ancient sculpture in the Napoleonic sale of 1807 and was redesigned by the architect Luigi Canina in the 1820s to make room for the Canova
Photograph by Fabrizio Garrisi · CC BY-SA 4.0 Room 3, the Apollo and Daphne Room
Bernini's Apollo and Daphne, 1622-1625, stands at the centre of a room decorated for it between 1780 and 1785 under Asprucci: Pietro Angeletti's central ceiling painting shows Cupid's arrow striking Apollo with desire and Daphne with its opposite, the exact instant the sculpture below freezes into marble. Angeletti also painted the Four Seasons in monochrome within trompe l'oeil niches, and Dosso Dossi's own paintings of the same Ovid myth hang on the walls
Public domain Room 4, the Room of the Emperors
Named for the 18 porphyry and alabaster busts of the Twelve Caesars set into the walls in the early 1800s. Bernini's Rape of Proserpina, 1621-1622, his first fully autograph work, completed inside a year, stands at the centre. Until an inventory of 1762 moved it elsewhere, this room also held the cracked first bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, which the cardinal displayed here among the busts of the Caesars rather than upstairs with its unflawed replacement
Photograph by Sailko · CC BY 3.0 Room 8, the Silenus Room
The last room on the ground floor, named for a Silenus sculpture group sold to Napoleon in 1807 and now in the Louvre; its centre today is a Dancing Satyr restored by Bertel Thorvaldsen. The walls hold six Caravaggio paintings from the cardinal's own seventeenth-century holdings. The two earliest, the Sick Bacchus self-portrait and Boy with a Basket of Fruit, came directly from the 1607 confiscation of Cavalier d'Arpino's studio; the other four, St Jerome, Madonna and Child with St Anne, St John the Baptist and David with the Head of Goliath, are from Caravaggio's mature period
Photograph by Architas · CC BY-SA 4.0 Room 9, the Dido Room
Formerly called the Room of the Three Graces, its ceiling by the Austrian painter Anton von Maron tells the story of Aeneas and Dido. The walls hold Umbrian and Tuscan Renaissance painting, Perugino, Botticelli and Andrea del Sarto among them, and three early works by Raphael: the Lady with a Unicorn, a Portrait of a Man, and the Deposition, taken by night from a chapel in Perugia on Scipione's order in 1608. We could not verify a free-licence photograph of the room itself, only of its ceiling; the walls and the Raphaels render as text
Photograph by MrPanyGoff · CC BY-SA 4.0 Room 14, the Lanfranco Loggia
An open loggia over the villa's secret gardens until it was enclosed in the late eighteenth century to protect its ceiling, Giovanni Lanfranco's Council of the Gods of 1624-1625, one of only two surviving pieces of seventeenth-century decoration in the whole building. It now holds both of Bernini's busts of Cardinal Scipione Borghese side by side, along with his bust of Pope Paul V, his youthful Capra Amaltea, a late terracotta model for an equestrian statue of Louis XIV, and three Bernini self-portraits, hung against paintings in both the Carracci classicist and the Caravaggesque naturalist strains, including Albani, Guercino and van Honthorst
Photograph by Sonse · CC BY 2.0 Room 20, the Psyche Room
Also called the Orizzonte Room, it closes the picture gallery with Venetian Renaissance painting, including Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini. Pietro Antonio Novelli's ceiling tells the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius. Four Titians hang here, among them Sacred and Profane Love, which the museum's own catalogue says was apparently sold to Scipione Borghese by Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati on 20 July 1608, though the picture is not actually documented in the collection until 1648
What to see first
Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, first version
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1632The version with the flaw. Late in finishing it Bernini found a hairline crack, called a hair, running across the cardinal's forehead, and carved a whole second bust from fresh marble in as little as three days by his son Domenico's account, or fifteen nights by Filippo Baldinucci's. Scipione kept both. He hung this cracked one in the Room of the Emperors among his busts of the Caesars and put the flawless replacement upstairs in the gallery, a placement the museum's own catalogue reads as his real judgement of the two. Both are shown together today in Room 14, the Lanfranco Loggia. This archive holds the record for this specific bust, inventory CCLXV.16
Full record in this archiveBust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, second version
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1632The replacement, carved at speed once the first bust's flaw was found, and itself not entirely without incident: the museum's catalogue notes a slight crack of its own, running from the lower right of the mozzetta to the upper left, that Bernini judged acceptable enough to present to the cardinal. Scipione placed this one in the villa's gallery rather than downstairs with the Caesars, the higher honour of the two.17
Apollo and Daphne
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622-1625Carved in Bernini's early twenties, the moment Daphne's fingers become laurel leaves as Apollo's hand closes on her waist. The room around it was rebuilt in the 1780s specifically to stage it, with a ceiling painting of the same instant directly overhead.9
Rape of Proserpina
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1621-1622His first fully autograph work, finished within a year, and the piece the Room of the Emperors is built around: Pluto's fingers visibly indenting Proserpina's marble thigh.10
Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus
Caravaggio, circa 1593-1594The two earliest Caravaggios in the room did not come to Scipione by purchase. In 1607 the painter Cavalier d'Arpino, accused by Pope Paul V's tax authorities of illegally possessing firearms, was forced to surrender his studio's paintings, about a hundred pictures, to the Apostolic Chamber, which the pope then gave to his nephew. These two pictures, made when the young Caravaggio was working in d'Arpino's workshop, were inside that seizure.22
David with the Head of Goliath
Caravaggio, 1609-1610From Caravaggio's last years, the head Goliath holds up is read as a self-portrait; it hangs in the same room as the two early works the artist never chose to sell to the man who ended up owning them.11
Deposition (the Baglioni altarpiece)
Raphael, 1507Commissioned by Atalanta Baglioni for her family chapel in San Francesco al Prato, Perugia, and taken from it on the night of 18-19 March 1608, with the help of local friars, on Scipione's order; it reached Rome about two days later. In part-compensation the cardinal sent the Perugia church a copy of the picture and five silver lamps. The panel is signed and dated in the bottom left corner.18
Archery Contest of Diana and Her Nymphs (The Hunting of Diana)
Domenichino, 1616-1617Painted for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini's villa at Frascati. When Scipione asked to buy it and Domenichino told him it was already spoken for, Scipione had the painter arrested and held for several days until he agreed to give it up. The sum he was paid is disputed even in the museum's own account: 150 scudi for two pictures together by one record, 40 scudi for this one alone according to the early biographer Passeri.19
Sacred and Profane Love
Titian, 1514-1516Commissioned around 1515 by the Venetian official Niccolo Aurelio for his marriage to Laura Bagarotto, whose coats of arms appear on the fountain in the picture. Its route into the Borghese collection is less certain than its fame suggests: the museum's own catalogue calls the 1608 sale from Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrati to Scipione only an apparent one, since the picture is not actually recorded in the collection until 1648.20
Artworks recorded here
Exhibitions on now
- On now15 Sep to 25 Oct 2026Confirmed 1 Sep 2026, 2 weeks ago
Past exhibitions here
- Closed23 Jun to 20 Sep 2026Confirmed 1 Sep 2026 · check before you travel
A cardinal builds himself a showcase
Scipione Caffarelli Borghese was the son of Pope Paul V's sister and was adopted by his uncle within two months of the papal election, which is the whole explanation for how a private secretary rose to head the Consulta, the Secretariat of Briefs and the office of Grand Penitentiary in the same decade. He used the income and the immunity that came with those offices to build, on a site outside the Porta Pinciana, a suburban villa meant from the start to hold a collection rather than merely display his rank. Construction ran from 1607, substantially complete by 1613, under the architect Flaminio Ponzio, and was finished after Ponzio's death by Giovanni Vasanzio, the Flemish-born Jan van Santen, following the layout of the traditional suburban villa. What survives of the seventeenth-century fabric is mostly the shell: the villa's decorative programme visible today is largely an eighteenth-century remaking, described below, and later additions were made at the end of that century by Carlo Rainaldi.
Collecting by confiscation
Scipione did buy and commission in the ordinary way, but three of the objects a visitor comes to see arrived by force, and the museum's own scholarly catalogue does not soften this. In 1607 the painter Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavalier d'Arpino, was accused by Pope Paul V's tax authorities of illegally possessing firearms. To free himself he was made to surrender his studio's paintings, about a hundred pictures, to the Apostolic Chamber, which the pope then handed to his nephew. Among them were two pictures the young Caravaggio had painted while working in d'Arpino's workshop, the Sick Bacchus self-portrait and Boy with a Basket of Fruit, both still in the Silenus Room today.
The following year the cardinal wanted Raphael's Deposition, painted a century earlier for Atalanta Baglioni's chapel in the church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia. On the night of 18-19 March 1608 the panel was removed with the help of friars at the church and taken to Rome, arriving within a couple of days, under cover of a papal motu proprio. Scipione's own conscience, or his sense of how the removal would read, shows in what he sent back: a copy of the picture and five silver lamps, as partial compensation to the church he had emptied.
The clearest case is Domenichino's Archery Contest of Diana and Her Nymphs, painted for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini's villa at Frascati. When Scipione asked to buy it, Domenichino answered honestly that it was already committed to Aldobrandini. Scipione had him arrested and held for several days until he agreed to hand it over at a price the cardinal set. Even the amount he received is disputed in the sources: one account gives 150 scudi for two paintings together, the early biographer Passeri gives 40 scudi for this one alone. Both figures are far under what an autograph Domenichino was worth, which was rather the point.
The Bernini busts, and the crack that made two
In 1632, a decade after his uncle's death, Scipione finally added his own portrait to the collection, commissioned from Bernini through Pope Urban VIII, for whom Bernini was then working full time at Saint Peter's. Contemporary accounts of the payment do not fully agree, one puts it at 500 zecchini and a diamond worth 150 scudi, a Vatican archive register puts a payment of 500 scudi to Bernini in December 1632, but they agree the sculptor delivered something new: a portrait that catches the sitter mid-conversation, mouth slightly open, which historians of the period call Bernini's first talking portrait.
As the bust was being finished, a hairline crack, called a hair in the period sources, opened across the cardinal's forehead. Bernini did not attempt a repair. He is recorded as carving an entire second bust from a fresh block in an extraordinary span of time, fifteen nights according to the biographer Filippo Baldinucci, three days according to Bernini's own son Domenico. Even the replacement carries a small flaw of its own, a fine crack from the lower right of the mozzetta to the upper left, which Bernini judged acceptable to present.
Scipione kept both, and where he hung each one says what he thought of them. The seventeenth-century guidebook writer Manilli records the cracked original displayed in the Room of the Emperors, among the busts of the Twelve Caesars on the ground floor; the flawless replacement went upstairs into the gallery. The museum's own catalogue calls this a conspicuous discrepancy that reveals Scipione's real estimate of the two works: the visible flaw in the first bust did not, in his eyes, compromise it. An inventory of 1762 records the cracked bust moved to the Room of the Moor, today's Room 7; at some point in the nineteenth century it moved again, to Room 9. Both busts were sold to the Italian state together in 1892, in the first sale of Borghese works outside the family trust, then spent years at the Accademia in Venice before returning to the villa in 1908. Today they are shown side by side in Room 14, the Lanfranco Loggia. This archive's record is for the first, cracked bust, inventory CCLXV.
1807: what left for Paris
Camillo Borghese married Napoleon's sister Pauline in 1803, and it was that connection his brother-in-law used four years later. In 1807, under financial pressure and with Napoleon pressing him directly, Camillo sold 344 ancient sculptures from the family collection to the French state, 154 statues, 160 busts, 170 bas-reliefs, 30 columns and assorted vases, at well under market value. The decree completing the sale was signed at Fontainebleau on 27 September 1807, and the objects, including the Borghese Gladiator, the Borghese Hermaphroditus, the Borghese Vase, the Antinous Mondragone and finds from the family's own excavations at Gabii, left for the Louvre over the following year. They form the core of the Louvre's Roman antiquities collection today, and the museum's own history page names the sale plainly as one imposed by Napoleon on Camillo Borghese. The Silenus Room on the ground floor is named for a sculpture group this sale took away, and still holds nothing of the kind it is named for.
Camillo did not leave the gaps empty. He refilled the rooms with pieces excavated on Borghese property and paintings pulled from storage in his own residences, so that by the 1830s the losses were largely disguised, and in 1827 he bought Correggio's Danae in Paris, of all places, to add to what remained.
Neoclassical remaking, and becoming a museum
What a visitor sees today owes more to Camillo's father than to Scipione. From 1770 Marcantonio IV Borghese put the villa's interior through a radical redecoration under the architect Antonio Asprucci, with a roster of painters, Mariano Rossi, Domenico Corvi, Christoph Unterberger, Anton von Maron, Giuseppe Cades and Tommaso Maria Conca among them, working room by room. Asprucci reorganised the display of the ancient sculpture around the era's rising Neoclassical taste, setting Bernini's Apollo and Daphne at the centre of a room built specifically to stage it. The decorative scheme this produced, ceilings, marble revetment, purpose-built niches for specific statues, is what still governs the room-by-room presentation today, decades after the 1807 sale it partly had to absorb.
The villa stayed a Borghese family property until 1902, when the Italian state bought it along with the entire estate, gardens and parkland included, in a purchase later called the deal of the century for the price at which Italy secured the collection intact. It opened to the public as a state museum the following year, 1903.
The building today: twenty rooms, a two-hour ticket, and a fight over expansion
The museum's own description of itself is 20 frescoed rooms plus the entrance hall and the portico, open to the public; more than 260 further paintings are kept in the Depositi above the picture-gallery floor and shown only by separate reservation. Every visit runs on the same structure: entry every hour, a two-hour slot except for the last one of the day, with a mandatory exit when the slot ends. What the museum's own pages do not agree on is how many people that slot holds. Its general Il Museo page states a maximum of 360 people per two-hour turn, a figure The Art Newspaper repeated in 2026 citing the museum directly; its own ticketing page, Info Biglietti, separately states that 180 people can enter per turn. We fetched both pages directly and could not reconcile the two; both remain live on the museum's own site as of the date checked.
The building recorded 630,759 visitors in 2025, its highest figure ever, against roughly 506,000 a decade before, and the museum cites that growth as the reason it is now examining an expansion. In May 2026 The Art Newspaper reported a EUR 900,000 feasibility study, funded by the engineering firm Proger, for an international architecture competition on whether to add exhibition and visitor space within the surrounding Villa Borghese Pinciana grounds, addressing what the museum calls longstanding constraints: the historic capacity limit, weeks-long booking waits in season, most of the collection sitting unshown in storage, and difficult step-free access in a seventeenth-century building. The heritage organisations Italia Nostra Roma and Amici di Villa Borghese have objected to any new construction in what they describe as one of Rome's most historically sensitive landscapes. The museum's director, Francesca Cappelletti, has called that opposition premature, saying no actual project or competition brief exists yet. A competition winner could be chosen by the end of 2026.
What visitors say
This museum runs on a fixed quota, and that shapes what a visitor experiences before anything about the art does: every visit is a booked two-hour slot inside a building the museum's own 2026 expansion proposal says was never designed for the 630,759 people who came through it in 2025. Visitors who love it tend to love it for the reason Scipione built it this way: a dense, domestic-scaled collection where Bernini's two most famous sculptures, both busts of the man who commissioned the building, and six Caravaggios sit a few rooms apart rather than spread across galleries. Visitors who are frustrated by it are frustrated by the clock, which the museum enforces with a mandatory exit at the end of the two-hour slot.
What is praised, what is criticised
- Praised: the density of the collection inside twenty rooms: the two Bernini sculptures, both busts of Scipione Borghese, and six Caravaggios within a short walk of each other
- Praised: the intimacy the timed-entry cap produces, a fixed number of people in a building designed as a private house rather than a public hall
- Praised: the eighteenth-century decorative scheme itself, which survives largely as Asprucci left it and is treated as part of the exhibit rather than a backdrop to it
- Criticised: the two-hour limit, strictly enforced with a mandatory exit at the end of the slot regardless of how much of the museum has been seen
- Criticised: the need to book well ahead in season, since the timed-slot system leaves no realistic way to see the collection without a reservation
- Criticised: a mandatory EUR 2.00 booking fee added to every ticket, including the free ones for under-18s and on the free days, which some visitors read as a fee dressed up as a formality
Reported a EUR 900,000 Proger-funded feasibility study for an international competition on adding exhibition and visitor space around the museum, justified by 630,759 visitors in 2025 against rooms the museum's own page caps at 360 per two-hour slot, long booking waits, and storage-bound paintings. Heritage bodies Italia Nostra Roma and Amici di Villa Borghese oppose new building in the sensitive landscape. Director Francesca Cappelletti called the criticism premature, since no project yet exists.The Art Newspaper, 20 May 2026 [21]
Questions about Galleria Borghese
Where is Galleria Borghese?
Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, 00197 Rome, Italy.
How much does it cost to visit?
Adult (Intero): EUR 16; Reduced, EU citizens 18-25: EUR 2; Free, under 18: free. As confirmed 24 August 2026.
When is it open?
Tuesday to Sunday 09:00-19:00. Closed: Monday. 25 December. As confirmed 24 August 2026.
How do you get there?
Bus: 910 or 92 from Termini station to the Pinciana/Museo Borghese stop; 89, 490 or 495 from the Flaminio Metro stop (Line A) to San Paolo del Brasile; 63, 83, 61, 160, 52 or 53 from the Barberini Metro stop (Line A); 490 or 495 from Tiburtina station (Line B) to San Paolo del Brasile; Metro: No station at the villa itself. The nearest are Flaminio and Barberini, both on Line A, each requiring a bus onward; Taxi: Ranks on Via Pinciana and on Via Vittorio Veneto, at the height of Villa Borghese.
What should you see first?
Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, first version (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1632); Bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, second version (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1632); Apollo and Daphne (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1622-1625); Rape of Proserpina (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 1621-1622); Boy with a Basket of Fruit and Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus (Caravaggio, circa 1593-1594); David with the Head of Goliath (Caravaggio, 1609-1610).
What we could not confirm
- The museum's own site gives two different capacity figures for the same two-hour visiting slot: 360 people on its general Il Museo page (repeated by The Art Newspaper in May 2026, citing the museum), and 180 people on its own Info Biglietti ticketing page. Both were live and both were fetched directly on 7 August 2026; we could not resolve which is current.
- What Domenichino was actually paid to surrender the Archery Contest of Diana and Her Nymphs is disputed even within the museum's own published account: 150 scudi for two paintings together by one record, 40 scudi for this picture alone according to the early biographer Passeri.
- Whether the EUR 900,000 architecture-competition study announced in May 2026 produces an actual expansion project. As of the article's date the museum's own director said no project or competition brief yet existed.
Images
Sources
- 1Galleria Borghese, official ticket information page: prices in EUR, the mandatory EUR 2.00 booking fee, free and reduced categories, free days, and the two-hour timed-slot system with its stated 180-person capacity per turn. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/visita/info-biglietti/
- 2Galleria Borghese, official Visit page: bus and taxi directions, opening hours, last entry, bag and cloakroom rules. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/visita/
- 3Galleria Borghese, official Accessibility page: stair lift, wheelchair provision, sign-language and volunteer-guided tours, free companion entry, tactile Braille maps. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/visita/accessibilita/
- 4Galleria Borghese, official Services page: the ViVi Bistrot cafe, the Artem Srl bookshop, audioguide pricing and languages, cloakroom rules. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/info/servizi/
- 5Galleria Borghese, official Photo and Video page: rules for free personal photography versus professional or commercial use. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/info/foto-e-video/
- 6Galleria Borghese, official The Museum page: room count (20 frescoed rooms plus entrance hall and portico), the Depositi, and a stated capacity of 360 people per two-hour visiting slot. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/il-museo/
- 7Galleria Borghese, official The Villa page: construction 1607-1613 under Ponzio and Vasanzio, the 1807 sale described as imposed by Napoleon on Camillo Borghese, the 1770s Asprucci redecoration under Marcantonio IV Borghese. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/il-museo/la-villa/
- 8Galleria Borghese, Room 1, the Paolina Room: Canova's Paolina Borghese, the ceiling by Domenico de Angelis, the room's origin as the Vase Room and its 1820s redesign by Luigi Canina. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-1-sala-della-paolina/
- 9Galleria Borghese, Room 3, the Apollo and Daphne Room: Bernini's sculpture, the 1780-1785 decoration under Asprucci, Pietro Angeletti's ceiling. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-3-sala-di-apollo-e-dafne/
- 10Galleria Borghese, Room 4, the Room of the Emperors: the 18 busts of the Caesars, Bernini's Rape of Proserpina as his first autograph work. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-4-sala-degli-imperatori/
- 11Galleria Borghese, Room 8, the Silenus Room: the six Caravaggio paintings, the Dancing Satyr restored by Thorvaldsen, the room's name from a sculpture sold to Napoleon in 1807. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-8-sala-del-sileno/
- 12Galleria Borghese, Room 9, the Dido Room: Anton von Maron's ceiling, the Umbrian and Tuscan Renaissance paintings, the three early Raphaels. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-9-sala-di-didone/
- 13Galleria Borghese, Room 14, the Lanfranco Loggia: Giovanni Lanfranco's ceiling, both Bernini busts of Scipione Borghese shown together, the other Bernini works in the room. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-14-loggia-di-lanfranco/
- 14Galleria Borghese, Room 20, the Psyche Room: Pietro Antonio Novelli's ceiling, the Venetian Renaissance paintings, the four Titians. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/il-museo/la-villa/sala-20-sala-di-psiche/
- 15Galleria Borghese, The 2026 Programme: states 630,759 visitors recorded in 2025. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. galleriaborghese.cultura.gov.it/en/the-2026-programme/
- 16Collezione Galleria Borghese, catalogue entry for the Bust of Scipione Borghese, inventory CCLXV (first, cracked version): the 1632 commission, the crack, the fifteen-night or three-day replacement, its historic display in the Room of the Emperors, its 1762 and 19th-century room moves, the 1892 state purchase and 1908 return from Venice, current display in Room 14. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026, author Sonja Felici, January 2024. collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/bustof-scipione-borghese-2
- 17Collezione Galleria Borghese, catalogue entry for the Bust of Scipione Borghese, inventory CCLXVI (second, replacement version): its own small marble flaw, current display in Room 14. collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/bust-of-scipione-borghese
- 18Collezione Galleria Borghese, catalogue entry for Raphael's Deposition: commission by Atalanta Baglioni for Perugia, removal on the night of 18-19 March 1608 with the complicity of friars, the copy and five silver lamps sent to Perugia in partial compensation, display in Room 9. collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/deposition-the-carrying-of-the-dead-christ-to-the-sepulchre
- 19Collezione Galleria Borghese, catalogue entry for Domenichino's Archery Contest of Diana and Her Nymphs (The Hunting of Diana): commission by Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, the artist's arrest and imprisonment, the disputed payment of 150 or 40 scudi. collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/the-hunting-of-diana
- 20Collezione Galleria Borghese, catalogue entry for Titian's Sacred and Profane Love: commission for Niccolo Aurelio's 1514 marriage, the uncertain 1608 Sfondrati sale, the picture's first documented appearance in the collection only in 1648, display in Room 20. collezionegalleriaborghese.it/en/opere/sacred-and-profane-love
- 21The Art Newspaper, 'Expansion plans for Rome's Galleria Borghese draw fierce response', 20 May 2026: the EUR 900,000 Proger-funded feasibility study, the stated 360-person slot capacity, 2025 visitor figures, opposition from Italia Nostra Roma and Amici di Villa Borghese, director Francesca Cappelletti's response. theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/20/expansion-plans-for-romes-galleria-borghese-draw-fierce-response
- 22Wikipedia, Borghese Collection (tertiary): the 1607 confiscation of about 107 paintings from Cavalier d'Arpino's studio including early Caravaggios, and the 1807 sale of 344 antiquities to the French state and its later partial replacement. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borghese_Collection
- 23Wikipedia, Galleria Borghese (tertiary): the 1902 sale of the villa and estate to the Italian government and the museum's establishment in 1903. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Borghese
- 24Wikidata, Galleria Borghese (Q841506): label, description as an art museum, instance-of art museum/museum/art gallery, country Italy, coordinates, and the official website, used to confirm this is the museum and not the separate Wikidata item for the gallery's library. Fetched and raw-verified 7 August 2026. wikidata.org/wiki/Q841506
- 25Wikimedia Commons, Category:Galleria Borghese (Rome) - Interior and its per-room subcategories: source of the plates used on this page, licence of each verified per file from extmetadata.LicenseShortName at fetch time. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Galleria_Borghese_(Rome)_-_Interior