Rome Guide
Rome
Galleria Borghese
Opening time: Tues– Sun 9am–7pm; pre-booked visits obligatory
Price: €8.50
Telephone: 06.32.810
Website: www.ticketeria.it
On the far eastern edge of the Villa Borghese park is the wonderful Galleria Borghese. Built in the early seventeenth century by Cardinal Scipione Borghese and turned over to the state when the gardens became city property in 1902, it's one of Rome's great treasure houses and should not be missed.
The ground floor contains mainly sculpture: a mixture of ancient Roman items and seventeenth-century works. Highlights include Canova's famously erotic statue Paolina Borghese – sister of Napoleon and married (reluctantly) to the reigning Prince Borghese – posed as Venus. There's also a marvellous statue of David by Bernini, the face of which is a self-portrait of the sculptor, and, further on, a dramatic, poised statue of Apollo and Daphne that captures the split second when Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree. The Room of the Emperors has another Bernini sculpture, The Rape of Persephone, dating from 1622, a coolly virtuosic work that shows in melodramatic form the story of the abduction to the underworld of the beautiful nymph Persephone. Finally, the so-called Room of Silenus contains a variety of paintings by Cardinal Scipione's protege Caravaggio, notably the Madonna of the Grooms from 1605, a painting that at the time was considered to have depicted Christ far too realistically to hang in a central Rome church. Look also at St Jerome, captured writing at a table lit only by a source of light that streams in from the upper left of the picture, and his David holding the head of Goliath, sent by Caravaggio to Cardinal Scipione from exile in Malta, where he had fled to escape capital punishment for various crimes, and perhaps the last painting he ever did.
The upstairs gallery is one of the richest small collections of paintings in the world, with several important paintings by Raphael, including his Deposition, painted in 1507 for a noble of Perugia in memory of her son. Look out also for Lady with a Unicorn and Portrait of a Man by Perugino, and a copy of the artist's tired-out Julius II, painted in the last year of the pope's life, 1513.