On via della Lungara, fifty metres beyond the gate of Villa Farnesina and on the same pavement, a very long facade hides a courtyard and a grand staircase. On the piano nobile, in the rooms of the gallery, the paintings hang in several rows one above the other, the frames almost touching, right up to the vault.
This is not a temporary hang and it is not the laziness of a museum with no funds: it is how cardinal Neri Maria Corsini hung them in the 1730s, and nobody has taken them down since. The Galleria Corsini is the only Roman collection of that century to have reached us almost as it was, paintings, marbles and furniture together.
The route is short, a few rooms on the piano nobile, and these six are the things to look for. The last one is not a painting, it is a room.
How did a private collection of this quality avoid being sold off piece by piece?
Let’s begin!
A queen, a pope and a sale that went well
The palace was built in 1511 for cardinal Raffaele Riario, and it was already a century and a half old when the collection began. Between 1659 and 1689 Christina of Sweden lived here, the queen who had abdicated the throne, converted to Catholicism and moved to Rome in 1655. She had the interiors altered to house her collections, the statues on the ground floor and the paintings on the piano nobile, and she made it the seat of the circle of scholars she kept around her. She died in this palace.
The Corsini bought it in 1736, when the Florentine Lorenzo Corsini was pope under the name of Clement XII. His cardinal nephew Neri Maria entrusted the transformation to Ferdinando Fuga, who doubled the facade and added the monumental staircase; it was then Neri Maria who filled the piano nobile with the picture gallery you see.
Now the answer to the question at the top. In 1883 prince Tommaso Corsini handed the palace over to the Kingdom of Italy and, along with the building, gave the state the whole collection, on condition that it stayed there. It became the first nucleus of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, which today also takes in Palazzo Barberini. The other great Roman picture galleries of the eighteenth century were broken up, scattered or sold abroad: this one was not, because somebody gave it away instead of putting it up for auction.
The rest of the palace houses the Accademia dei Lincei, which owns the Farnesina across the road, and at the back the Orto Botanico of Rome, which was the garden of the house.
1. The hang, which is the first work
Before you go looking for individual paintings, look at one whole wall and nothing else.
In a modern museum the paintings are spaced out, at the height of your eyes, with a label beside them and a neutral wall behind. Not here: they are slotted in like the pieces of a puzzle, the large ones high and the small ones low, the gilded frames forming a continuous grid, and an important painting can turn out to be up near the vault, tilted forward so as to be seen from the floor.
Why hang a Caravaggio where you struggle to look at it?
Because the criterion was not the legibility of the single work, it was the symmetry of the wall. An eighteenth-century collector wanted a wall that worked as a composition, and he looked for pairs: two canvases of the same size to the right and left of a fireplace, one oval answering another oval. Quality counted, but inside that grid.
Walk slowly along a wall and you will notice the correspondences by yourself. It is something no photograph gives back and that you cannot see in any other museum in Rome.
2. Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist
Here it is, and it is the reason many people come this far. Caravaggio painted this Saint John the Baptist in the early years of the seventeenth century, and in 2025 the canvas was lent to the Caravaggio 2025 exhibition at Palazzo Barberini before coming back here.
The saint is a seated boy, bare-chested, wrapped in a red cloak, his hand resting on the cross-shaped reed. The camel skin is missing, which in the other versions says at once who he is; any scene is missing; the desert is a dark background of trunks and branches, with a bowl on the ground. He is not preaching and he is not baptising anybody: he is resting, and he looks down and to one side.
Get close to the shoulder and the arm. Caravaggio builds the body with a single passage from light to dark, with no drawn outline, and it is the way of painting that half of Europe tried to copy over the following ten years.
Bear in mind that the attribution and the date of this canvas were debated for a long time, because Caravaggio painted the same subject more than once and the versions resemble each other. The one in front of you is accepted by scholars and has been in Rome for centuries.
3. The Fra Angelico triptych
A little further on there is a small gilded panel that looks out of place among the great baroque canvases, and it is a hundred and fifty years older than all of them. It is a triptych by Fra Angelico, with the Last Judgement at the centre, the Ascension and Pentecost at the sides.
It is a late work, datable to around 1448-1449, and the central panel measures barely fifty-five centimetres by thirty-eight. The Judgement reads on three superimposed registers: at the top Christ as judge among the angels, the apostles and the founders of the monastic orders, Augustine, Benedict, Dominic and Francis; at the centre three angelic figures; at the bottom the blessed on the left and the damned on the right.
Look at what divides the two groups. It is a row of tombs open in the ground, set out in perspective towards the back, which cuts the panel in two along with the figure of Christ. Angelico uses perspective, the most modern instrument painting had in his time, to organise the oldest scene there is: a fifteenth-century man measuring the valley of Jehoshaphat with a ruler.
4. Rubens’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Angels
Peter Paul Rubens spent eight years in Italy, between 1600 and 1608, and learned his trade there by looking at the Venetians and at Caravaggio. This canvas is of 1601-1602, and cardinal Neri Maria Corsini bought it in Brussels in 1750.
Sebastian is still tied to the tree, his head fallen onto his shoulder: a cupid draws an arrow out of his chest, a kneeling angel unties the rope at his ankle, and on the ground, to the left, his soldier’s armour has been left behind. Choosing the rescue instead of the martyrdom made it possible to paint a body abandoned rather than tensed.
Compare the colour of the flesh with that of the Caravaggio two rooms earlier. Rubens builds skin with pinks, whites and blues laid side by side and left visible, Caravaggio builds it with light. They are two opposite ways of getting the same result, and having them in the same palace, a few metres apart, is the advantage of small collections.
5. Guido Reni’s Salome
Guido Reni painted Salome with the Head of the Baptist more than once, and this is one of the versions that built his European fame.
How do you make a beheading elegant?
There is no blood, there is no horror and there is not even a stated moral judgement: there is a girl with porcelain skin, painted with the same smoothness Reni kept for his Madonnas, and beside her a severed head on a dish. Reni was the most imitated painter in Europe for a century precisely for this, for his ability to make a hideous scene elegant, and in the nineteenth century he was loathed for the same reason.
Around the Salome hang works by Guercino, Van Dyck and Murillo: the Corsini collection is not only Italian, and it is one of the few places in Rome where the Spanish and the Flemish seventeenth century can be seen next to the Roman one.
6. The alcove of Christina of Sweden
Here there is no frame to look for. At the end of the route the room in which Christina of Sweden died, on 19 April 1689, is preserved with its decoration still in place.
Think about who slept here. A woman who at twenty-eight had abdicated the throne of Sweden, converted to Catholicism giving up the crown of a Lutheran country, moved to Rome, gathered musicians, scientists and poets in this palace and quarrelled with four popes in a row. The circle she kept inside these rooms became, after her death, the Accademia dell’Arcadia.
Look for the two columns that still divide the room at the point of the alcove, where the bed was: they are of wood painted to imitate yellow marble, and they were added in the queen’s years in place of a partition. Then raise your eyes to the two vaults, frescoed with grotesques at the end of the sixteenth century by the school of Federico Zuccari: this room is the only surviving part of the sixteenth-century palace. Today the room is hung with paintings like the other rooms, and those two columns are the sign that in here nothing was put on show: people slept.
Practical information
Details checked on 17 September 2026 on the official website barberinicorsini.org and on the CoopCulture ticket office. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 15 euros and the reduced one 2 euros, for European Union citizens between 18 and 25. The thing worth knowing is that the ticket is a combined one: it covers one admission to the Galleria Corsini at the time you booked and one free admission to Palazzo Barberini, and it is valid for twenty days from the date it is stamped. You do not have to do the two sites on the same day. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-19:00, with the ticket office closing at 18:00. The museum stays closed on Mondays. Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month. Admission is also free for European Union under-18s, for people with disabilities with a companion and for ICOM members and licensed tour guides. Getting there. The gallery is at via della Lungara 10. Buses 23 and 280 stop on the lungotevere two hundred metres away, and from piazza Trilussa you walk here in ten minutes. The entrance of Villa Farnesina is fifty metres back, on the same side. How long to allow. The six works in this guide need an hour. Make it an hour and a half if you read wall by wall, and add an hour if you carry on into the Orto Botanico, which has a ticket of its own and is entered from largo Cristina di Svezia. The exhibitions on show are listed in the line for this venue in Exhibitions in Rome, updated every month.
Where to go from here
The right way to use this part of the city is to do the two visits one after the other in the same morning: across the street is Villa Farnesina: 6 works to see, with Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea, and it closes at 14:00.
With the same ticket, within twenty days, you get into Palazzo Barberini, where there are two more Caravaggios and Raphael’s Fornarina. To find your way among all the collections in the city there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: wall of the picture gallery by Miguel Hermoso Cuesta (CC BY-SA 4.0); room of Christina of Sweden by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0), from Wikimedia Commons. Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist, the Fra Angelico triptych and Rubens’s Saint Sebastian are in the public domain.
