Rome Guide
Rome
Galleria Doria Pamphilj
Opening time: Daily 10am–5pm
Price: €9, including audioguide in English
Website: www.doriapamphilj.it
Housed in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, one of the city's finest Rococo palaces, the Galleria Doria Pamphilj is one of Rome's best private late-Renaissance art collections. The Doria Pamphilj family still lives in part of the building, and you're guided through the gallery and the state apartments beyond by way of a free audio tour narrated by the urbane Jonathan Pamphilj. The picture gallery extends around the main courtyard, the paintings displayed in old-fashioned style, crammed in frame-to-frame, floor-to-ceiling. It has perhaps Rome's best concentration of Dutch and Flemish paintings, with a rare Italian work by Brueghel the Elder showing a naval battle being fought outside Naples, a highly realistic portrait of two old men, by Quentin Metsys, and a Hans Memling Deposition, in the furthest rooms. But there is plenty of interest besides these – Caravaggio's wonderful Rest on the Flight into Egypt, next to his painting of Penitent Magdelen, Salome with the head of St John by Titian in the next room, and on the other side of the courtyard a series of bucolic paintings by Annibale Carracci that used to hang in the Pamphilj chapel. The gallery's most prized treasures, however, are in a small room on their own – a Bernini bust of the Pamphilj pope Innocent X and Velázquez's famous, penetrating painting of the same man. All in all it's a marvellous collection of work, displayed in a wonderfully appropriate setting.