Between the Trevi Fountain and piazza Venezia there is a narrow lane, via della Pilotta, spanned by four arches that carry a garden from one side of the road to the other. Thousands of people walk under those arches every day and almost none of them look up.
Above is the garden of the Colonna, and next to it the gilded hall of their Galleria: a private collection the family itself put together and has kept for centuries, in a palace that is still lived in. The reason nobody knows about it is banal and brutal: it opens on Fridays with a guided tour and on Saturday mornings, and on the other days you get in only by private appointment.
The seven things listed below come in the order of the route, and the first one is not a painting.
What is a cannonball doing in the middle of the most sumptuous room in Rome?
Let’s begin!
A family, a pope and a battle
Two names are needed to make sense of this palace. The first is Martin V, born Oddone Colonna, elected pope in 1417 at the council of Constance: his election ended forty years of schism with two and then three popes at the same time, and it took the family to the top of Rome. The second is Marcantonio II Colonna, who in 1571 commanded the papal fleet at the battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman empire.
The Galleria came into being to tell the story of the second of those two. Cardinal Girolamo I Colonna and his nephew Lorenzo Onofrio began it in 1654, entrusting the work to the architect Antonio del Grande. When he died, in 1671, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Johann Paul Schor and Carlo Fontana stepped in too. The man who closed the building site, at the dawn of the eighteenth century, was Girolamo Fontana. Half a century went by between the first stone and the opening.
Keep that in mind as soon as you walk in, because it explains the difference from any museum. This is not a collection of paintings placed inside a container: it is a room built on purpose, in which every painting, every mirror and every piece of marble was chosen for the spot where you see it.
1. The cannonball on the stairs
From the Sala della Colonna Bellica a short flight of steps runs down towards the great hall. A cannonball is still lodged in one of those marble steps.
It got there in 1849, during the months of the Roman Republic, fired from the Janiculum by the French army of general Oudinot, which was besieging the city to bring Pius IX back to it.
The family decided not to take it away and to leave it where it had stopped. Pause on that gesture for a moment, because it is the most eloquent thing in the palace: in a gallery built to celebrate a sixteenth-century naval victory, the only mark of real war was left by a cannon that three centuries later was firing on Rome.
2. The Great Hall and the Lepanto vault
Now go in. The hall runs straight between two rows of windows, with gilded walls, ancient marbles, inlaid furniture, and at the end a perspective that closes on a smaller room.
Look up. The vault carries the stories of the battle of Lepanto, frescoed between 1675 and 1678 by Giovanni Coli and Filippo Gherardi, and the story proceeds in episodes: the Doge in council against the Turks, Pius V handing Marcantonio II Colonna the command of the fleet, the battle at the centre, the triumphal entry into Rome and the unveiling of his statue on the Capitol. Marcantonio had been dead for almost a century: it was his descendants who had him painted above the heads of their guests, in the act of actually commanding that fleet.
And how does a room like this manage not to be famous?
Because in practice almost nobody comes in, and because everybody knows it without knowing they do. In 1953 William Wyler shot the final scene of Roman Holiday here: the press conference in which the princess steps down from the throne, greets the journalists one by one and says goodbye to Gregory Peck with a smile. If you feel you have already seen this room, that is where you saw it.
3. The painted mirrors
Four large mirrors hang on the long walls of the hall, and garlands and vases of flowers are painted on the glass with cupids climbing over them. They were made together, around 1660, by Mario dei Fiori, Giovanni Stanchi and Carlo Maratta.
Step up close to one and try standing to the side. The game is calculated: the mirror reflects the room, the painting floats above the reflection, and for an instant you cannot tell whether those flowers are in front of you or behind. It is pure baroque effect, built on doubt, and it really only works in person: when you move, the reflection changes and the flowers stay put.
They are also the most fragile piece in the palace, and that is why nobody hurries through this room.
4. Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid and Satyr
The Sala della Colonna Bellica opens the route and takes its name from the red marble column at its centre, which is the family emblem. Here hangs the most refined painting in the collection: Venus, Cupid and Satyr by Agnolo Bronzino, a panel more than two metres long, painted between 1550 and 1555 for Alamanno Salviati, an uncle of Cosimo I de’ Medici.
This is Florentine painting of the mid sixteenth century, the exact opposite of the baroque around you: surfaces as smooth as enamel, cold colours, polished bodies that look carved. Venus lies out in the open, on a green cushion and a blue cloth, and she has just disarmed her son: she holds Cupid’s bow up high and keeps an arrow under her hand, while the winged child leans towards her. Behind them a satyr raises one hand and with the other grabs the quiver.
On the walls around hang three large canvases by Michele di Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio with nocturnal mythological scenes, and the vault, frescoed by Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, shows Marcantonio presented in heaven to the Virgin. Here too, as upstairs, we are back at Lepanto.
5. The Beaneater by Annibale Carracci
In the Sala dell’Apoteosi di Martino V there is a small painting with no gold on it that is worth the journey as much as all the rest. Annibale Carracci painted it between 1584 and 1585. It portrays a working man seated at a table in front of a bowl of beans: he lifts his spoon and looks towards you, as if you had interrupted him. In his left hand he grips a piece of bread, and the hand is still dirty with earth.
On the table, next to the bowl, there are the bread, three spring onions, a plate with erbazzone, the Emilian savoury vegetable pie, a knife, a striped jug and a glass of red wine. No allegories, no saints, no mythological frame: a man eating, painted with his mouth already open on the spoon.
What is a peasant eating doing in the middle of all this gold?
Stop and think about where you are. This canvas hangs in a gallery built to celebrate a naval battle, inside the palace of one of the oldest families in Europe, and it shows the thing furthest from all that. It is one of the first European paintings in which an ordinary person occupies the centre of the scene without having to stand for anything other than himself, and from there a line runs all the way to Caravaggio.
6. The landscapes of Gaspard Dughet
A whole room is covered with the landscapes of Gaspard Dughet, brother-in-law of Nicolas Poussin, who painted the countryside around Rome all his life.
They are views of trees, rocks, storms coming in and small figures lost in the greenery, and they should be looked at the way you look at a window, not the way you look at a painting. Dughet invents here the way of painting the Castelli Romani and Tivoli that two centuries later would bring thousands of northern European painters to Rome to do the same thing.
The vault of the room is by Luca Giordano and Sebastiano Ricci, and in one corner there is a cabinet of ebony and ivory with carved biblical scenes: open it with your eyes panel by panel, because it is an object that on its own cost as much as a painting.
7. The Apartment of Princess Isabelle and the garden
The fullest Saturday ticket does not stop at the Galleria: it also covers the Appartamenti Pio, the Apartment of Princess Isabelle and the gardens that cross via della Pilotta on the four arches we started from.
The apartment is named after Isabelle Sursock, a Lebanese woman from a family of Byzantine origin, who married prince Marcantonio and looked after the palace for seventy years. The rooms keep the furnishings of a house lived in during the twentieth century, with the paintings hung among the family photographs, and this is the part that makes the place different from a picture gallery: you go from the hall of celebrations to the rooms where somebody was living.
That wing rests on the foundations of the Roman temple of Serapis, which occupied the flank of the Quirinal, and in the Sala della Fontana a porphyry crocodile from that temple is on show. The garden, which climbs the hill, needs ten minutes and is the right place to grasp how big this block really is.
Practical information
Details checked on 17 September 2026 on the official website, galleriacolonna.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
When it opens. The palace opens to the public two days a week. On Friday morning you get in only on a booked guided tour, from piazza Santi Apostoli 66, with departures between 9:30 and 10:30 in Italian, English and French. On Saturday morning you visit on your own, from via della Pilotta 17, from 9:15 to 13:15, which is the time of the last admission. All the other days, and Saturday afternoon, stay reserved for private visits by appointment. Tickets. The Friday guided tour costs 35 euros, reduced to 30 with a FAI card. On Saturday the short route, which covers the Galleria, the Appartamenti Pio and the gardens, costs 15 euros; the full route, which adds the Apartment of Princess Isabelle, costs 25 euros, reduced to 20 with a FAI card. The audio guide costs 5 euros on top. Free admission. Children up to twelve go in free, as do companions of people with disabilities, the police and, on Saturday morning, licensed tour guides. Booking. It is compulsory for Friday and for private visits, and it is worth doing on Saturday too if you are a group. The number is 06 6784350. Getting there. The entrances are at via della Pilotta 17 and piazza Santi Apostoli 66. The metro does not reach here: the nearest stop is Barberini on line A, some ten minutes away on foot, and it makes more sense to think in buses, because every line that passes through piazza Venezia drops you five minutes away. From the Trevi Fountain it is a five-minute walk. How long to allow. The short route needs an hour. Make it two if you take the full one with the apartment and the gardens, and remember that on Saturday the till closes at 13:15.
Where to go from here
The other great Roman private collection still in the hands of the family that built it is eight minutes away on foot, on the Corso: the works are in Doria Pamphilj Gallery: 6 works to see, and the two visits together tell you how Roman princes lived better than any public museum.
If the Roman seventeenth century interests you, the reference collection is still Palazzo Barberini, a quarter of an hour from here. To find your way among all the collections in the city there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: Great Hall and painted mirror by Sailko (CC BY 3.0); cannonball by Francesco Bini (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid and Satyr and Annibale Carracci’s Beaneater are in the public domain.
