On corso Vittorio Emanuele, between Campo de’ Fiori and piazza Navona, thousands of people walk past a small, intact Renaissance facade every day without looking up. Inside there is an Assyrian winged genius, a Cypriot chariot, Egyptian pieces going back to the third millennium BC and a copy of one of the most imitated statues in history.
The Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco is the collection a Calabrian baron with no direct heirs gave to Rome, and which the city still displays on the principle of the man who put it together. It is small, it takes an hour and it costs less than eight euros, but what makes it different from the city’s other archaeological museums is the way it is ordered: not by period and not by excavation site, but by comparison between civilisations.
There are six things to find. The first is the palace, and it starts from a misunderstanding five centuries old.
Why would a nineteenth-century collector want to put an Egyptian next to a Greek?
Let’s begin!
The palace, and the lily read wrong
The building is called the Piccola Farnesina or Farnesina ai Baullari, and it has nothing to do with the Farnese. It was built in 1523 for a Breton prelate, Thomas Le Roy, and the facade is attributed to Antonio da Sangallo the Younger.
The misunderstanding is in the decoration, and you see it as soon as you look up at the front. Along the stringcourses run the lilies of France and the ermines of Brittany, the emblems of the country and the region Le Roy came from. In Rome, though, the lily is also the emblem of the Farnese, and anyone looking at the facade took it for granted that this was a family house: hence the name, which stuck even after the error was cleared up. The second half of the name is literal instead: the main entrance gave onto via dei Baullari. A whole palace carries the wrong surname because somebody read a coat of arms without checking it.
Do not confuse it: in Rome there are three other things called Farnesina, and all of them are different from this one. The most famous is Villa Farnesina in Trastevere, Agostino Chigi’s villa with the Raphael frescoes.
Look at the friezes running between one floor and the next as you arrive in front of the facade: the lilies are there, in a row, and they are the visible proof of the misunderstanding. The city bought the palace in 1885, during the demolitions that opened the corso, and completed its restoration in 1901.
1. The kneeling winged genius
In the Mesopotamian section is the piece visitors remember longest: a kneeling winged genius, carved in relief.
These winged beings, which you find in the first part of the route, lined the walls of Assyrian palaces, at the sides of doorways and along corridors, and they were not decoration. They had a precise function: to protect the passage and purify whoever crossed it, and for that reason they repeated along the whole wall, identical, in an endless procession. Anyone entering an Assyrian throne room walked down a corridor of stone guardians.
Dwell on the wings and on the musculature of the arms. Assyrian sculpture works by clean incision and full surfaces, without chiaroscuro: the relief is low, but the anatomical detail is marked to the point of looking metallic, and it is the opposite of the Greek way of rendering a body. In the same visit, a few rooms further on, you have the term of comparison.
2. The Cypriot parade chariot
The Cypriot section is the most unexpected part of the museum, because Cyprus is the place where the civilisations of the Mediterranean physically meet, and its sculpture shows it better than any text.
Look for the parade chariot with two figures, a stone sculpture with the vehicle and the people in it.
What makes a Cypriot object Cypriot?
The fact that you cannot assign it. The figures of Cyprus have the hairstyle and the pose of the East, the smile and the treatment of drapery that come from archaic Greece, and details that arrive from Egypt. It is not a botched copy of any of the three: it is what an island trading with all of them produces. It is exactly why Barracco bought it.
3. The head of the Doryphoros
Here you enter the Greek section, and this head is the piece that connects the museum to the art history taught at school.
The Doryphoros, the «spear bearer», is the statue Polykleitos carved in the 5th century BC to demonstrate a theory: that there is an exact numerical relation between the parts of the human body, and that a statue built on that relation is beautiful by necessity and not by taste. Polykleitos also wrote a treatise, the Canon, and the statue was its practical demonstration.
The bronze original no longer exists. What we have are the Roman copies in marble, dozens of them, and this head is one. Stop at the paradox: the most theorised sculpture of antiquity is known to us only through reproductions made by other people, four centuries later, to furnish the houses of rich Romans.
4. The Westmacott type ephebe
Not far off there is a statue of an ephebe of the type called Westmacott, which takes its name from the example in the British Museum that belonged to the English sculptor Richard Westmacott.
It is worth understanding how this naming works, because it is the key to reading the labels of half of archaeology. When many copies of an ancient statue exist and no original, scholars group the copies into «types» and christen each type with the name of the best-known piece or of its first owner. So a marble boy carved in Greece twenty-five centuries ago ends up carrying the surname of a nineteenth-century English collector.
Look at him next to the head of the Doryphoros. They are two close ways of building a young male body, and it is the kind of comparison a large museum does not let you make in two minutes, because the two works would be in different wings.
5. The Egyptian section, from the earliest dynasties to Rome
Barracco’s Egypt covers a very long span, from 3000 BC to the Roman period, and it is worth walking through it in order.
Walking it in order you see a continuity that does not exist elsewhere. An Egyptian head of the third millennium BC and one of the Roman period, three thousand years later, resemble each other more than two Greek sculptures three centuries apart: Egyptian sculpture worked on fixed models, handed down from workshop to workshop, and changing the proportions of a royal figure was not a stylistic choice, it was a religious matter.
Then look for the late pieces, the ones in which Egypt is already a Roman province. There the two systems coexist in the same object, and you can see the exact point at which a thousand-year tradition begins to give way.
6. The museum that is no longer there
The last thing to know is not something you see, and it is the reason this collection sits in a sixteenth-century palace instead of a building of its own.
How did a collection given to the city change address three times in forty years?
In 1904 Barracco gave the collection to Rome, and the first Museo di Scultura Antica was built for it on corso Vittorio Emanuele II by Gaetano Koch. It was a modern building designed for sculpture: it had large windows for natural light, revolving bases so the statues could be seen from all sides, and a heating system, which in an Italian museum was the first.
In 1938 that building was demolished for a new road layout. The collection went first to the Osteria dell’Orso and then into the storerooms of the Musei Capitolini, and became visible again only in 1948, in here: the plaque in the courtyard, under the bust of Barracco, carries the exact date of the reopening, 13 November 1948. A purpose-built museum lasted thirty-four years; the stopgap palace has housed it for nearly eighty.
Practical information
Details checked on 18 September 2026 on the official website, museobarracco.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 7.50 euros and the reduced one 6. The audio guide costs 4 euros on top and is available in Italian, English and French. Free admission. Since February 2026 residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City go in free on showing an identity card at the desk, and so do MIC card holders. Admission is also free for primary and middle school groups with their teachers, on presenting a list of the pupils on school headed paper. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-18:00. The museum stays closed on Mondays. On 24 and 31 December it opens 9:00-14:00, and on 1 January 11:00-16:00. Getting there. The museum is at corso Vittorio Emanuele II 166/A. The metro does not reach here: every bus on the corso passes by, and from Campo de’ Fiori, from piazza Navona and from largo Argentina it is less than a ten-minute walk. How long to allow. The six things in this guide need an hour. Make it an hour and a half with the audio guide, and remember the museum is small and on several floors, so it also works well as a break in the day.
Where to go from here
Two hundred metres away, on the other side of piazza Navona, is the museum that tells the city instead of antiquity: the works are in Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi: 7 works to see.
If ancient sculpture interests you and you want the comparison with the great state collections, the route continues at Palazzo Altemps and Palazzo Massimo, the two branches of the National Roman Museum where the same civilisations are seen in hundreds of pieces rather than dozens. The full map of the city’s collections is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: the museum rooms are by Fabrizio Garrisi (CC0); the facade is by Krzysztof Golik (CC BY-SA 4.0); the courtyard is by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
