Fifty metres from piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, where the café tables end and a quiet little square begins, there is a door almost nobody opens. Inside, in a room on the first floor, a hundred and twenty watercolours show a Rome that no longer exists: the river ports, the houses standing in the water, the demolished alleys.
Ettore Roesler Franz painted them while that city was being torn down, and they are the reason this museum is worth a morning. The place is called the Museo di Roma in Trastevere, and the name is the first thing to sort out, because the Museo di Roma proper is another museum, at Palazzo Braschi, and it tells a different story: there you get the popes, the carriages and the great festivals, here you get the city from below.
The six things listed here are all on the first floor, except the first one, which is the building. The museum closes on Mondays and has two different prices depending on whether an exhibition is on, and I come back to that at the end.
Why would a painter set about painting a city precisely while it is being demolished?
Let’s begin!
The building: from convent to children’s sanatorium
The museum occupies part of the complex that was the convent of the Discalced Carmelites of Sant’Egidio. The nuns stayed until Italian unification, then the state expropriated the building and the strange part of its history began.
Above the entrance door there is still the frescoed lunette the nuns had in front of their eyes: a young woman kneeling in white before the Virgin, two veiled Carmelites beside her, and at the bottom a scroll with the words VENI ELECTA MEA, the antiphon sung when a novice took the veil. Then the building became a municipal barracks. Then, in 1921, it was turned into a children’s anti-malarial sanatorium, named after the physician Ettore Marchiafava: malaria in the Roman countryside was still a mass disease, and Marchiafava was one of the scholars who had identified its parasite. The museum opened here in 1977, after the restoration.
Remember it as you climb the stairs, because this is the museum of working-class Rome inside a building that treated and housed that Rome. Look at the windows onto the cloister: the scale of the rooms is a convent’s, not a palace’s, and that is why the rooms are small and are visited one after the other.
1. The 120 watercolours by Ettore Roesler Franz
Here is the answer to the question at the top, and it is a practical answer before it is a poetic one. Between 1878 and 1896 Rome was changing its face: the embankment walls of the Tiber were going up to stop the floods, and to build them the river ports, the floating mills, the houses that ran down to the water and whole stretches of city on both banks were pulled down.
Roesler Franz painted them in watercolour as they disappeared, one after another, in three series of forty. We all know them as Roma sparita, the vanished Rome, but that is not the title he chose: the series is called Roma pittoresca. Memorie di un’era che passa, picturesque Rome, memories of an age that is passing, and the name shows the painter knew exactly what he was doing. The city bought the hundred and twenty views between 1883 and 1908, and they are all here.
Do not look at them as postcards. Look at them the way you look at documentation: watercolour was the fastest technique available, and in many sheets you can see the painter working quickly, in front of a building site. The paradox is that the image of Rome we now find most romantic, the one with the washing hung over the river and the boats tied to the houses, is known to us because somebody was destroying it.
2. The six life-size Roman Scenes
On the first floor there are six reconstructed settings with life-size figures, staging Roman life in the nineteenth century: the workshop, the tavern, the street.
What separates these settings from any other diorama?
The figures are there to put the objects back into the position in which somebody used them. A ladle inside a case is an object; the same ladle in a hand is a gesture.
Beside the scenes there is a nativity crib, and it fits the rest: in Rome the crib was a form of domestic theatre, which is to say another way of staging the city with puppets.
3. Trilussa’s room
A whole room keeps the personal belongings of Trilussa, Carlo Alberto Salustri, the poet who wrote in Roman dialect for forty years and who was this city’s chronicler in verse.
What is a poet’s study doing inside an ethnographic museum?
Because his work is exactly the material of this museum, written instead of collected. Trilussa did not write dialect poetry in the nostalgic sense: he used Romanesco to talk about politics, war and power, and his fables in verse got past the censors precisely because they looked harmless. The room holds the desk, the photographs and the objects he had around him.
Look for the dedications and the photographs with the figures of his time. They say better than any label how much of a celebrity he was, and not a minor poet for school anthologies.
4. The seventy-six paintings by Diego Angeli of the Caffè Greco
This is the group almost nobody expects to find here. Diego Angeli, writer, critic and painter, devoted seventy-six oils to the Caffè Greco on via Condotti, the café opened in the eighteenth century and frequented by two centuries of foreign artists and writers in Rome.
It is a series and should be looked at as one. A single room, painted dozens of times: the little tables, the inner rooms, the people sitting. Angeli was doing for an interior what Roesler Franz had done for the city, fixing a place he considered threatened by time.
Look at the light in the inner rooms. The Caffè Greco is a long, narrow space, and the problem for anyone painting it is always the same: how to render a place that has no windows.
5. The three early canvases by Gino Severini
Among the Roman collections there are three early paintings by Gino Severini, a name that sounds out of place here: Severini is one of the signatories of the futurist painting manifesto, and his fame comes from Paris and from breaking movement into pieces.
That is exactly the reason to look at them. They are works from before, from when Severini was a young painter in Rome and had not yet met futurism. Seeing the starting point of an artist who then did something entirely different is something the great single-artist museums rarely grant you, because they show the masterpieces.
6. The photographs of a changing Trastevere
The last section is photographic, and it carries three names: Mario Carbone, Emilio Gentilini and Gianni Turillazzi. Their photographs document Trastevere and Roman daily life in the twentieth century, the district as it becomes what you see when you walk back out of the door.
It is the section that makes this museum different from a collection of antiquities, and it is worth keeping for last. After the watercolours of a city demolished in the nineteenth century, the photographs show the same mechanism a century later, with another technique and another quarter: working-class houses becoming restaurants, washing lines disappearing, workshops closing.
Go out and look at the square. It is the comparison the museum hands you without saying so.
Practical information
Details checked on 18 September 2026 on the official website, museodiromaintrastevere.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. There are two prices and the difference depends on the exhibitions. With an exhibition on, full price is 13 euros and the reduced one 8.50, and the ticket covers the museum and the temporary shows. When there is no exhibition, the museum alone costs 9.50 euros and the reduced ticket 5. Ask at the desk which of the two you are paying, because here an exhibition is nearly always on. Free admission. Since February 2026 residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City go in free on showing an identity card at the desk. Admission is also free for MIC card holders, for people with disabilities with a companion and for school groups, with one teacher for every ten students. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-20:00, with last admission an hour 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 piazza Sant’Egidio 1/b, a step away from piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. Buses 23 and 280 stop on the lungotevere, tram 8 and the buses that reach piazza Sonnino drop you on the other side of the district, and from either stop 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 if you stop at the watercolours one by one, and two if there is an exhibition that interests you.
Where to go from here
The twin museum, the one that tells the Rome of the popes and the great families instead of the Rome of the districts, is Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi: 7 works to see, across the river at piazza Navona. The two together make the history of the city seen from both sides.
If you stay in Trastevere, ten minutes away on foot along via della Lungara are Villa Farnesina, with Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea, and the Galleria Corsini: both close early, so it makes sense to do them in the morning and keep this museum for the afternoon. The full map of the city’s collections is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: the Ettore Roesler Franz watercolours are photographed by Francesco Bini (CC BY-SA 4.0); the cloister lunette is by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 4.0); the outside of the museum is by Roundtheworld (CC0), all from Wikimedia Commons. The watercolours themselves are in the public domain.
