Your Complete Guide To The Borghese Gallery

The Borghese Gallery offers the best art experience in Rome. Its statues and paintings provide a curated journey through history and creativity.

The Borghese Gallery (Galleria Borghese) is an art gallery in the Villa Borghese Gardens in Rome. The building was built using sketches by Scipione Borghese, who used it as a country villa and who later became a Cardinal and the nephew of Pope Paul V.

Scipione Borghese was an early patron of GianLorenzo Bernini and he was an avid collector of paintings by Caravaggio. The collection of Caravaggio paintings in this museum include: Boy with a Basket of Fruit, St Jerome Writing, Sick Bacchus and a few others. Other well represented artists in this museum include: Titian, Raphael and Rubens.

Who Was The Borghese Family?

The House of Borghese originated in Siena and moved to Rome in 1541, where the powerful family grew in wealth and power to include nobility, Cardinals and Pope Paul V. The Borgheses were one of the driving forces behind The black nobility (a.k.a. black aristocracy) who were aristocratic families who sided with the Pope Pius IX after the House of Savoy led army entered Rome in 1870, overthrew the Pope, and took over the Quirinal Palace, the current residence of the President of Italy.

The Borghese Family continued its expansion and eventually became one of the largest landowners in the area around Rome. In addition to the Pope, the family tree included ties to Spain, France and Fascist Italy leading up to World War II.

One notable family member in particular, Junio Valerio Borghese, nicknamed The Black Prince, was a Navy commander during the reign of Benito Mussolini and the Fascists. He was a prominent hard-line Fascist politician and in 1970 he took part in the planning of an aborted neo-fascist coup and he escaped to Spain where he spent the remaining years of his life.

Which Is The Borghese Gallery Official Website?

This might seem like an odd question, but if you search for Borghese Gallery, you will find a lot of results that all seem to be official sites and sell real tickets to the museum. In reality, this is a bit of a problem in Rome because unscrupulous tour operators like to pretend like theirs are the official tickets and they charge a considerable markup.

How Much To See The Villa Borghese Caravaggio Paintings?

The presale purchase involves the application of a service fee of € 2.00 per ticket, and don’t forget that while the entrance is free on the first Sunday of every month, you will still need to register for tickets because the number of visitors is strictly controlled. 

Are The Bernini Sculptures In Borghese Gallery Worth Seeing?

For me, the answer to this question is a definite “YES”. I prefer sculptures, and Caravaggio is probably my favorite painter, so this museum has everything I’m looking for. The staff is very professional and the tour guides are passionate and knowledgeable. We went on two different occasions and had two different tour guides and our experiences were consistently positive.

Borghese Gallery Tours

I mentioned above that our experiences with the guided tours at the Borghese gallery were very positive on two different occasions. The guides we had weren’t native English speakers but they were clear, understandable and informed. They brought the artwork to life in a way that a self-guided experience or a recorded tour simply can’t match.

The tour lasted around 1.5 hours in the 2 hours that were allotted. The expectation was that once the tour completed, you still had some time to revisit some of the works to which you were most drawn. 

Another unexpected benefit that the guided tour provided to someone like me who is not very well versed in art was a focus on which works were the most important and deserving of attention. There are paintings, sculptures and mosaics from floor to ceiling in every room and it would have been easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to look at. I appreciate it when you can skip by the things that might be less important to the general audience (i.e. not an art major or historian).

How Can I Reach The Borghese Gallery?

While reaching Villa Borghese Gardens is fairly simple, finding the Museum is a little less so given the immense size of the Gardens. On our first visit to the Gardens we walked around for an hour and never saw the museums, so my advice is to do a little planning.
From whatever is your starting point, if you are traveling by bus, make your way to Largo Chigi. This is a main transfer point on the ATAC lines and from there you have a couple options. You can take either the #53, #63 or the #83 bus to the Pinciana/Museo Borghese stop, and you are right at the museum. There are other options, but they depend on from where you are starting.

More Beauty In Rome