Near piazza di Siena there is a building with battlements and pointed windows that looks like a castle in miniature, and for that reason it is called the Fortezzuola, the little fortress. It is not a castle and nobody ever defended it: it was the Borghese aviary.
Pietro Canonica lived in it for more than thirty years, a sculptor who worked on commission for governments and reigning houses, and when he died, in 1959, he left the city his works, his studio and his house. It is the kind of museum Italy calls an artist’s house: not a selection of masterpieces, but everything that was in the place where the work was done. The museum closes on Mondays and in winter closes at 16:00, so it is a morning visit.
The six things to look for are partly on the ground floor and partly upstairs, where you go in on the same ticket but with an earlier last admission.
What is there to see in a sculpture museum where almost nothing is finished?
Let’s begin!
The Fortezzuola: first an aviary, then a fire
In the seventeenth century the building was called the Gallinaro and served to keep the exotic birds the Borghese used for their hunts. In the eighteenth century Antonio Asprucci, the architect who redesigned the park of the villa, faced it with mock-medieval battlements, and from those it got the name we know it by.
Then came 1919 and a fire reduced it to an abandoned ruin. In 1926 the city handed it over to Canonica, who put it back on its feet at his own expense and turned the stables into exhibition rooms: that is why the ground-floor rooms are so tall and so bare. His widow gave the furnishings of the house in 1987, and the museum in the form you see today opened in 1995.
Before you go in, raise your eyes to the battlements. They are nineteenth-century, decorative, and never had a military function: this building pretended to be something it was not for two centuries, and then became the only thing it really is, a sculptor’s house.
1. The plaster models, which are the real collection
The seven ground-floor rooms are full of plaster casts, and this is what throws anyone who comes in expecting marble.
Why does a museum show the models instead of the statues?
Because for a sculptor the model is the work, and the marble is the copy. The process went like this: the artist modelled in clay, a mould was taken from it and from that a plaster model at final size, and only then did the assistants transfer the measurements onto the block of stone, point by point. The statue that ends up in a square is the last stage of a chain, and the man who commissioned it often never saw the clay.
Here you see the whole chain: sketches, studies, replicas and final models. Stop at a large plaster and look for the pointing marks, the metal references that served to transfer the measurements. They are the sign that the object was not there to be looked at, it was a working tool.
2. The Atatürk monuments, or modern Turkey made in Rome
This is the reversal that keeps the museum from being a provincial cast gallery. Among Canonica’s works are the monuments to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey.
Think about what that means. A new country, born in 1923 on the ruins of the Ottoman empire, had to give itself a public image: statues, squares, monuments to its own founding. That commission went to an Italian sculptor, and the models it was built from passed through this studio inside Villa Borghese.
It is also why you meet Turkish visitors in this museum who know exactly what they are looking at, while the Romans walking past piazza di Siena generally do not come in at all.
3. The equestrian monuments, and the problem of the horse
Canonica was above all a sculptor of public monuments, and the public monument of his time was almost always a man on a horse.
Look at the legs. A bronze horse standing on two legs, with the other two in the air, is a problem of engineering before it is one of style: several tonnes of weight have to come down on two points, and the solution changes the look of the whole statue. You see it better in the models than in the finished monument, because plaster shows where the artist added material to hold it up.
There is something else worth keeping in mind. The monuments Canonica was famous for are scattered across different countries, and really seeing them would take several journeys: this house is the only place in the world where they are all together, even if in plaster.
4. The studio
From the display rooms you pass into the actual studio, and it is the part worth the visit even if nineteenth-century sculpture does not interest you.
It is the space where the work was done: the tools, the easels, the pieces left half finished. The museum keeps it as it was, and the difference between this room and the ones next door is the difference between a workshop and a display case. Go closer and look at the floor and the work surfaces: plaster dust settles everywhere and leaves a white film no fit-out would reproduce.
5. The private apartment: the tapestries and the samurai armour
On the first floor is the house: bedroom, dining room, music room, study, with the original furnishings. It is visited on the same ticket, but the last admission is an hour earlier, so ask at the desk before starting on the ground floor.
Two objects in these rooms nobody expects in the house of an Italian sculptor: Flemish tapestries and a seventeenth-century samurai armour. The label beside the armour is worth reading: it is two metres tall, it carries the inscription of the armourer who made it, Myochin Shikubu no Munesuke, and Canonica gave it to the Sovrintendenza Capitolina in 1959, the year he died.
How does a Japanese armour reach the house of a Piedmontese sculptor?
They are not an exotic whim. An artist of that standing worked for courts and governments across half of Europe and beyond, received official gifts and bought where he worked, and a house like this is the map of his patrons. Look for the armour and then think about where it came from: he did not pick it up in an antique shop on via del Babuino.
6. The Piedmontese paintings: Fontanesi, Quadrone, Gamba, Cavalleri
On the walls of the apartment there are paintings, and almost all come from the same school: the Piedmontese nineteenth century. There are Antonio Fontanesi, the landscape painter, Giovan Battista Quadrone, Enrico Gamba and Vittorio Cavalleri.
This section puts Canonica back in his place. Before he was the sculptor of international monuments he was an artist trained in Turin, and the walls of his house tell the world he came from instead of the one he arrived in. Fontanesi in particular is one of those names you almost never meet in Rome: his painting is in the museums of the north.
Look at the paintings and then think back to the plasters on the ground floor. They are two different trades hanging in the same house, and it is rare to be able to compare them without changing building.
Practical information
Details checked on 18 September 2026 on the official website, museocanonica.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The museum alone costs 7.50 euros full price and 6 reduced. The combined ticket with the Museo Carlo Bilotti, the other small museum in the park, costs 11 euros and 7.50 reduced, and it makes sense if you are staying inside Villa Borghese for the morning. 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. Opening hours. The hours change with the clock. Under winter time, from the last Sunday in October to the last Saturday in March, the museum opens Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-16:00, with last admission at 15:15. Under summer time, from the last Sunday in March to the last Saturday in October, it opens Tuesday to Friday 10:00-16:00 and Saturday and Sunday 10:00-19:00, with last admission forty-five minutes before closing. If you also want to see the apartment on the first floor you have to go in an hour before closing, and that is the detail that wrecks most visits. The museum stays closed on Mondays, on 1 May and on 25 December. Getting there. The museum is at viale Pietro Canonica 2, next to piazza di Siena, inside Villa Borghese. The handiest metro A stops are Flaminio and Spagna, and from both you enter the park and walk. The city call centre answers on 060608 every day from 9:00 to 19:00. How long to allow. The six things in this guide need an hour. Make it an hour and a half if you go up into the apartment at leisure, and a whole morning if you take the combined ticket with the Museo Carlo Bilotti.
Where to go from here
The other museum covered by the combined ticket is ten minutes away on foot in the same park, and it has the opposite kind of collection: the eighteen de Chiricos of the Museo Carlo Bilotti, in the Aranciera.
The great sculpture collection of Villa Borghese is the Galleria Borghese, where booking is compulsory and where Bernini’s marbles make the most instructive comparison with the plasters in this house. To find your way among all the collections in the city there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: the garden and the samurai armour are by Daderot (CC0); the outside of the Fortezzuola is by Chabe01 (CC BY-SA 4.0); the studio is by Dobroš (CC BY-SA 4.0); the drawing room of the apartment is by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
