Leave piazza Navona on the Pasquino side, past the talking statue Romans have been sticking their insults on for five centuries, and you notice that it leans against the corner of an ochre palace the size of a city block. Inside that palace hangs a canvas three metres high showing piazza Navona in 1634, and at the centre of the square Bernini’s fountain is missing: it had not been built yet.
This is the home of the Museo di Roma, the museum of Rome, and its subject is the city you are standing in while you visit it. Not the art of ancient Rome, which is in the other museums, but paintings, drawings, photographs, furniture and carriages: they tell you how Rome changed between the sixteenth and the twentieth century, and how much of what you have just walked through is recent.
We start with the staircase, the first thing you meet, and end with the photographic archive that almost every image of «Rome as it was» you have ever seen comes from.
What was a pope doing building a palace like this for his nephew?
Let’s begin!
The palace, and the last nephew of a pope
The palace was built by Pope Pius VI for his nephew Luigi Braschi Onesti, in the last years of the eighteenth century, to a design by the architect Cosimo Morelli of Imola (1732-1812). The money was the Holy See’s, and the destination was the pope’s family.
It is one of the last instances of papal nepotism, and the date is no accident: a few years later the French Revolution and its consequences would arrive, and in Europe a practice of this kind would become indefensible. Pius VI died a prisoner of the French in 1799.
The Museo di Roma was not born here. It was inaugurated on 21 April 1930 in the former Pantanella pasta factory, in piazza della Bocca della Verità, under the direction of Antonio Muñoz, and it only reached Palazzo Braschi in 1952. The present display dates from 29 March 2017, and it is organised by theme rather than by date: fifteen rooms on the second floor, five on the third.
1. The grand staircase
You go up by a staircase that is the most impressive piece of the building, and it is worth climbing slowly.
There are eighteen columns of red granite, and they were not cut for the occasion: they come from a portico of the age of Caligula, which means they are Roman, reused seventeen centuries later. The stuccoes, medallions and reliefs on the vaults are by Luigi Acquisti and tell the Iliad; ancient statues stand in the niches, and on the first floor the place of honour goes to an Achilles.
Why such a large staircase in a private house?
Because it was not a passage, it was the message. Whoever climbed it had to understand, before being received, who the family receiving them was: the imperial columns spoke of antiquity, the statues of learning, the staircase of means. It is considered the last great baroque staircase in Rome, built when the baroque had been over for a long time.
2. The mosaics of old St Peter’s
Among the medieval pieces the museum keeps some fragments of mosaic from the vault of the ancient Constantinian basilica of St Peter’s, the one demolished in the sixteenth century on the orders of Julius II to make way for the basilica we know.
Look at them carefully, because they are one of the very few ways we have of knowing what that church looked like. Of a building that stood for more than a thousand years what remains is the memory of a few drawings, a handful of descriptions and these pieces of surface. This is the right museum for understanding that: what is kept here is above all what was demolished.
3. The Chigi state carriage
In the entrance hall stands an eighteenth-century state carriage, commissioned by Sigismondo Chigi for his own wedding in 1776.
Stop at the size of the wheels and the height of the body off the ground. A carriage like this was not for travelling comfortably: it was for being seen while crossing the city at walking pace, and the gold, the carving and the colours were a public announcement. In the Rome of the popes the families’ carriages were a permanent contest, and the museum keeps several of them.
4. The Saracen joust in piazza Navona, 1634
This is the painting that justifies the visit on its own, it measures three hundred centimetres by two hundred and twenty and it was painted in the years after the event, between 1634 and 1644. The full title is Giostra del Saracino a Piazza Navona nel Carnevale del 25 febbraio 1634, and it was painted by three painters together: Filippo Gagliardi did the architecture, Andrea Sacchi the figures, Vincent Leckerbetien known as Manciola the horses.
The festivity was organised by Cardinal Antonio Barberini for the arrival of Prince Alexander Charles of Poland, who was recalled home a few days earlier and never saw it.
Now look at the painted square and compare it with the one you crossed to get here. At the centre there is no Fountain of the Four Rivers: Bernini would begin building it in 1648, fourteen years later. It is the only way you have of seeing piazza Navona without the thing that defines it today, and it is two hundred metres from the square itself.
5. The frescoes rescued from a demolished palace
The museum keeps the frescoes by Francesco Podesti that decorated Palazzo Bolognetti-Torlonia, a building that no longer exists.
This section explains the very reason why the Museo di Roma exists. When Rome became the capital, and then during the clearances of the twentieth century, whole palaces were knocked down to open streets: whatever could be detached from the walls ended up in the municipal stores, and from there here. Every time you see a fresco in this museum, you are looking at a wall that outlived its building.
6. The paintings and sculptures of papal Rome
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century core includes works by Andrea Sacchi, Pierre Subleyras and Pompeo Batoni, and a group of paintings documenting civil and religious ceremonies: processions, papal possessi, festivities, fireworks over Castel Sant’Angelo.
For sculpture there are works and terracotta models by Francesco Mochi and Alessandro Algardi. The models are the part to look for. They are the preparatory study, the one in which you see the hand trying out a pose before taking it into marble, and they turn up in a museum of city history rather than in a gallery of masterpieces precisely because they were working objects.
The route is divided in two, and the division is the house’s own: rooms 1-9 on the second floor were the public part of the Braschi apartment, rooms 10-15 the private one. On the third floor, from 16 to 20, you reach the transformations of the modern city.
7. The Print Room and the Photographic Archive
On the third floor is the part the public hardly counts as a work, and which is the real treasure: the Gabinetto Comunale delle Stampe, the municipal print room, and the Archivio Fotografico Comunale, both part of the museum since 1930.
Drawings, watercolours and prints from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, plus photographs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth. If you have ever seen an image of the Tiber before the embankments, or of a district that no longer exists, in all likelihood it came from here. Altogether the museum holds around a hundred and twenty thousand works, and what you see on display is a minimal selection.
Practical information
Details checked on 16 September 2026 on the official Museo di Roma website. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 11 euros and covers the permanent collection; the reduced ticket costs 6.50 euros and is for non-residents between 6 and 25. Temporary exhibitions on the first floor may have their own ticket. Free admission. Since February 2026 admission is free for anyone resident in Rome and the Metropolitan City, on showing an identity card: the free entry, however, does not cover the new exhibition space on the first floor. Children under six, people with disabilities with a companion and MIC card holders also go in free. The first Sunday of the month is free for everybody. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-19:00. Closed on Mondays, on 1 May and on 25 December. Last admission is one hour before closing. Getting there. The entrance is at piazza San Pantaleo 10, on the corso Vittorio Emanuele II side, and there is a second one at piazza Navona 2. There is no metro nearby: the buses along corso Vittorio stop in front of the door. How long to allow. The seven works in this guide and the second-floor rooms need an hour and a half. Allow two hours if you also go up to the third floor.
Where to go from here
The museum is two hundred metres from Palazzo Altemps, the site of the Museo Nazionale Romano devoted to the antiquities collections of the princely families: the two palaces tell the same Rome, one from the side of those who collected and the other from the side of those who commissioned.
The fireworks painted in the pictures in this museum went off above Castel Sant’Angelo. To choose among all the museums in the city, with the closing days, there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: grand staircase by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0); vault of the staircase by Francesco Bini (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons. The facade of Palazzo Braschi and the Saracen joust are in the public domain.
