Inside Villa Borghese, on the avenue that runs down towards piazza di Siena, there is a low, pale building that looks like a greenhouse and in fact was one: it is the Aranciera, where the citrus trees were sheltered in winter. Today there are eighteen works by Giorgio de Chirico inside, and out on the grass in front, a bronze warrior with no face.
The collection was given to the city by Carlo Bilotti, an Italian-American businessman and collector: twenty-two works in all, paintings, sculptures and drawings, and the museum opened on 10 May 2006. It is ten minutes from the Galleria Borghese and practically none of that museum’s visitors get here, which is why it is a pleasant place to be: few rooms, the light of a greenhouse, and the museum closes at 16:00 from Tuesday to Friday, so it has to be fitted into the morning.
Six things are enough to cross it, and the first one is outdoors.
Why do almost all the works in this museum come after the moment their makers are famous for?
Let’s begin!
The Aranciera, destroyed in 1849
The building already existed before the seventeenth century as a shelter for potted citrus, which went under cover in winter and came back out into the garden in summer. Then history got inside it.
In 1849 the Aranciera was wrecked in the fighting that led to the fall of the Roman Republic: it is the same siege that left a cannonball lodged in the staircase of the Galleria Colonna, on the other side of the centre. The building was rebuilt, passed to religious institutions and then to municipal offices, and only the restoration of the early 2000s turned it back into an exhibition space. Of what was there before, three things survive and you can still pick them out: an eighteenth-century portal, a scenic nymphaeum and the sixteenth-century kitchens. Look for them, because they are the only parts 1849 did not erase.
Notice the walls as you go in. They are smooth, tall and undecorated, and this is not a fashionable minimalist fit-out: it is what is left of a store for plants, and it is why metaphysical painting sits so well in here.
1. The Mysterious Archaeologists
This is the work that sets the tone of the whole room. De Chirico called it Archeologi misteriosi, and the painting also goes by Manichini, the mannequins, and Il giorno e la notte, day and night: those are the three titles it circulates under, and finding all three on the same label confuses anyone who does not know.
The «archaeologists» are one of de Chirico’s recurring themes: seated figures without faces, their bodies filled with ruins and fragments of architecture. He returned to the theme for decades, and the key is in the name: an archaeologist is someone who carries inside himself the past he digs up, and de Chirico takes that literally.
Before you move on, bear in mind that these are not works of the 1910s, the famous metaphysical season. The eighteen works of the Bilotti donation run from 1926 to 1973, which is to say they cover almost fifty years of later work, when de Chirico was remaking his own themes. For twentieth-century critics that was long the embarrassing part of his career; today it is the part most studied.
2. Horses by the Sea
Horses on a beach, among broken columns and a low horizon, and one of the subjects de Chirico painted most often.
What is the point of painting the same subject for forty years?
Because for de Chirico that was not repetition, it was the opposite of a signature: he held that you only possess a theme once you have remade it, and he went as far as repainting and backdating his own works, which earned him accusations of forging himself. The horses by the sea are where the idea shows best, because the scene tells no story: it is a visual formula the painter stages again.
Look at the proportions between the animals and the architecture behind them. They never add up, and that is not a mistake.
3. The Self-portrait with the Head of Minerva
De Chirico portrayed himself a great many times, often in costume and almost always beside an object that declares who he believes he is. Here the object is a bust of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts.
What this room offers you is a comparison. In front of you is a painter placing himself beside an ancient sculpture, inside a museum that sits inside a villa built to display ancient sculpture, ten minutes from the Galleria Borghese, where that sculpture actually is. De Chirico spent the second half of his career claiming the craft of the old masters against the avant-garde, and a self-portrait like this is a declaration of allegiance, not a whim.
4. Hector and Andromache, the sculpture outside
Of the eighteen de Chirico works, seventeen are inside and one is outside: it is Ettore e Andromaca, the sculpture set in the garden in front of the museum.
It is the bronze version of one of the painter’s best-known subjects: the two Trojan spouses embracing before the battle, reduced to two mannequins of wood and plaster, with oval heads and no features. In front of you is the most affecting scene in the Iliad, Hector’s farewell to his wife, told by two figures that have no eyes to look at each other with.
Look for it before you go in, and look again on your way out. It stands in the open, so you see it in daylight with the park around it: it is the only work in the museum you can see without a ticket, and that is worth saying, because many people walk past without knowing what it is.
5. Mother and Daughter: Tina and Lisa Bilotti, by Andy Warhol
In 1981 Andy Warhol portrayed the collector’s wife and daughter, Tina and Lisa Bilotti, and that double portrait is in this museum today.
How did an American family portrait end up inside a Roman civic museum?
Here the reward is not the work, it is what it tells you about the place you are in. Warhol made commissioned portraits and it was his most profitable work: anyone who could afford it entered the same formal series as his celebrities. This museum is not a collection built by a state, it is the home of a private collection that mirrors a biography, and the family portrait is the point where the biography becomes explicit.
Carry it with you into the other rooms, because it explains the selection: there is no attempt to tell the whole twentieth century, there are the artists Bilotti knew and bought.
6. Rivers, Manzù and Severini, and the other side of the collection
Three works close the route, and each pulls the collection in a different direction.
Larry Rivers painted Carlo con Dubuffet sullo sfondo, Carlo with a Dubuffet behind him, in 1994: a portrait of the collector with another artist’s painting at his back, a portrait that is also a statement of what was in the collection. Giacomo Manzù is here with the bronze Grande cardinale, one of his seated cardinals, the series he worked on all his life. And Gino Severini, the futurist, is here with L’estate of 1951, once again a late work rather than the period he is famous for.
There is a thread, and it is worth knowing before you leave: this museum shows almost only second seasons. De Chirico after metaphysics, Severini after futurism, Manzù in the series he repeated for decades. If the great museums show you the moment an artist changed history, here you see what he was doing afterwards, and it is a question almost no museum lets you ask.
A note about the photographs, because it explains something you will notice searching for this museum online. De Chirico died in 1978, Severini in 1966, Manzù in 1991, Warhol in 1987 and Larry Rivers in 2002: every work in this collection is still in copyright, so there are no free images of them, and there are none here either. Of the building itself, not one recent free photograph is in circulation: the image at the top is a calotype by Stefano Lecchi of 1849, and it shows the Aranciera reduced to a ruin by the siege, not as it is today. I chose it because it is a real photograph of this building and because it tells the section above, but it is as well to know what you are looking at. The date, for that matter, is written inside the image: at the bottom you can read the photographer’s signature and the year.
Practical information
Details checked on 18 September 2026 on the official website, museocarlobilotti.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The museum alone costs 7.50 euros full price and 6 reduced. There is a combined ticket with the Museo Pietro Canonica, the other small museum in Villa Borghese, at 11 euros full and 7.50 reduced: if you have a whole morning in the park, that is the one worth taking. 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. Warning: several guides online give this museum as free for everybody, and it is not any more: if you are coming from outside Rome, you pay. Opening hours. Tuesday to Friday 10:00-16:00, Saturday and Sunday 10:00-19:00, with last admission forty-five minutes before closing. The museum stays closed on Mondays, on 1 May and on 25 December. On 24 and 31 December it opens 10:00-14:00. Getting there. The museum is at viale dell’Aranciera 4, inside Villa Borghese, with a second entrance at via Fiorello La Guardia 6. The handiest metro A stops are Flaminio and Spagna, and from both you walk in through the park. From the Galleria Borghese it is about ten minutes on foot. How long to allow. The six works in this guide need forty-five minutes. Allow an hour and a half if there is a temporary exhibition, and as much again if you take the combined ticket with the Museo Pietro Canonica.
Where to go from here
The other small museum inside Villa Borghese, covered by the same combined ticket, is the Museo Pietro Canonica: there a sculptor left his house, his studio and the plaster models of an entire career.
In the same park is the collection everybody knows, and for that one booking is compulsory: the works are in Galleria Borghese: 10 works you must see. If the twentieth century interests you more than the baroque, a quarter of an hour away is the National Gallery of Modern Art, and the full map of the city’s collections is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: the Aranciera photographed by Stefano Lecchi in 1849, in the public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.
