Ten minutes on foot from piazza del Popolo, just inside Villa Borghese, there is a white building with a flight of steps and columns that looks like a courthouse. Inside there are a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Klimt, two Duchamp readymades and a Pollock, and in the central hall a marble group more than three metres high in which Hercules hurls a man away.
The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea has one oddity: almost nobody goes. Romans still call it GNAM, and know it as the museum on viale delle Belle Arti. It holds nearly twenty thousand works and covers two whole centuries of Italian and foreign art, and yet it is the one great collection in Rome that never appears in the lists of ten places to see.
What follows is eight works in order of date, from neoclassical marble to burnt jute sacking, beginning in the hall you see as soon as you walk in.
Why is the museum with Rome’s Van Goghs also its emptiest?
Let’s begin!
The building, and why the name changes depending on who says it
The gallery was founded in 1883, opened to the public on 5 March 1885 and was housed in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, on via Nazionale. Its present home is younger: the Palazzo delle Belle Arti, designed by the Roman architect and engineer Cesare Bazzani for the international exhibition of 1911, the one marking fifty years of Italian unification.
Bazzani himself doubled it in 1933, and a further wing, designed by Luigi Cosenza and funded in 1973, was inaugurated only in 1988. They are three buildings stitched together, and you notice it as you walk: the rooms change proportion and height without warning.
The official name is still Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, the historic acronym is GNAM, and for some years now the museum has presented itself simply as La Galleria Nazionale. If you are looking for information online, keep that in mind: the three names lead to three different websites, and they do not always quote the same price.
1. Canova’s Hercules and Lichas
The museum uses it as its own image, and it fills the central hall. Antonio Canova worked on it between 1795 and 1815, twenty years, and it is the first colossal statue of his career. The commission came from Onorato Gaetani of the princes of Aragon, who then withdrew: the group was bought in 1800 by the banker Giovanni Raimondo Torlonia, for eighteen thousand scudi.
The group is over three metres tall. Hercules, poisoned by the tunic his servant Lichas has handed him without knowing, grabs the young man by one leg and by the hair and hurls him into the sea. Look at where the body of Lichas ends up: the head is thrown back, the arms fall towards the altar draped with the lion skin, and the whole weight is already past the point of balance.
Where does all this violence come from, in the sculptor who passes for the calmest of them all?
Canova’s neoclassicism was never only calm. Here the body of Hercules is twisted on itself, the muscles are pulled tight, and the group forces you to walk around it to work out where the throw will end: it is a sculpture built on movement, not on the pose. The hall that houses it was rethought by the artist Alfredo Pirri, and that too is a deliberate choice, the museum handing its rooms to people who make art today.
2. Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman
A whole room is given to Gustav Klimt and to his painting of 1905, The Three Ages of Woman, a square of one hundred and eighty centimetres a side that sets a sleeping child, the mother holding her and an old woman covering her face next to one another.
Beside the painting the museum shows three pencil drawings on the same theme. They are the part almost everyone skips and they are the reason to stop: in the drawings you see the same figure searched for and redone, with no gold and no ornament, and the body that disappears under the coloured patterns in the painting stays bare here, built out of lines.
The picture reached Italy after the international exhibition held in Rome in 1911, at which Klimt showed in the Austrian pavilion and won first prize: the Italian state bought it on that occasion. It is the only Klimt of this importance in an Italian museum, and it hangs in a room where most of the time there is nobody at all.
3. The two Van Goghs
There is not one, there are two, and that is what surprises anyone who arrives expecting a single painting: the museum owns The Gardener, of 1889, and L’Arlésienne, of 1890.
What difference does it make to see them side by side?
It means you can compare them, and the comparison is almost a lesson. The Gardener is a man caught outdoors, with a ground of green and yellow brushstrokes turning around the figure. L’Arlésienne is a posed portrait: seated at a table with two books in front of her, against a ground of pink hatching, her face built out of contours. Two different ways of solving the same problem, hanging a metre apart.
4. Monet’s Pink Water Lilies
Claude Monet painted the Pink Water Lilies between 1897 and 1899, at the beginning of the series he would carry on for the rest of his life.
It is worth looking at after the Van Goghs and before the twentieth-century rooms, because it is the moment when the subject starts to disappear: no horizon, no bank, only the surface of the water with the flowers and the reflections. Thirty years later, in the rooms further on, the absence of a subject will be the starting point rather than the destination.
5. Courbet’s Poachers in the Snow
Gustave Courbet painted it in 1867, and the museum also holds The Wave, of 1871.
Look for the white of the snow. It is not white: it is blue, grey, dirty white, and Courbet’s realism consists exactly in that, in refusing to paint things the colour they are supposed to be. It is a painting you understand from close up, by looking at how the material is made.
6. Duchamp’s readymades
The museum shows two of the objects that broke the history of twentieth-century art in half: the Bicycle Wheel and the Bottle Rack by Marcel Duchamp, that is, a wheel mounted on a stool and a piece of cellar equipment bought in a department store.
One clarification that changes what you are looking at: these are not the objects of 1913 and 1914. Nothing is left of those, because Duchamp lost them or threw them away. These are the authorised replicas he himself had remade in 1964 with the gallerist Arturo Schwarz, and which Schwarz donated to the museum in 1998. For a work that begins as an object bought in a shop the difference between original and replica matters less than it would elsewhere, and it is a question Duchamp had allowed for.
A word of warning is needed here, and it concerns the display. The rehang signed by the director Renata Cristina Mazzantini has been publicly contested. In December 2025, in Artribune, the art historian Alberto Dambruoso criticised the placing of the Duchamps under a staircase, the lighting of several works left in shadow, and sculptures put together by genre rather than for historical reasons. This is not gossip among insiders: if you feel you have to go looking for the important pieces, it is not your fault.
7. Pollock’s Watery Paths
Jackson Pollock painted Watery Paths in 1947, the year he began working with the canvas laid on the floor and the paint poured.
Go up to within half a metre and then step five paces back. From close up you see the threads of colour laid over one another, the thicknesses, the points where the pigment has pooled; from a distance you see a continuous surface that seems to vibrate. This painting exists in two versions depending on where you put your feet, and that is not a figure of speech.
8. Burri’s Grande Sacco and Fontana’s Concetto spaziale
The rooms of the later twentieth century close the route with two Italian works that hold each other up: the Grande Sacco by Alberto Burri, of 1952, and a Concetto spaziale by Lucio Fontana of 1949.
Burri stitches, burns and patches the jute of military sacks: the canvas stops being the support and becomes the substance of the picture. Fontana pierces the canvas, and with that gesture declares that behind the surface there is a real space. They are two opposite answers to the same question about what a painting is, and seventy years on both of them still work.
Practical information
Details checked on 16 September 2026 on the official Galleria Nazionale website. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 15 euros and covers both the collection and the temporary exhibitions on show. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is for citizens of the European Union between 18 and 25. Careful with the price. The museum’s own site says 15 euros, the Ministry of Culture portal says 17: two official pages that do not agree, so check at the desk and do not trust the figure you read here or anywhere else three months ago. A ticket almost nobody knows about. If on the same day you also visit the Galleria Borghese, a quarter of an hour away on foot inside the same park, admission to the Galleria Nazionale costs 10 euros. The ticket is valid for three hours and lets you go out and come back in, for a coffee for instance. Free admission. Under-18s go in free, as do people with disabilities with a companion, tour guides and ICOM members, and teachers and students of architecture, heritage conservation, literature and archaeology. Admission is free for everybody on the first Sunday of the month, on 25 April, 2 June and 4 November, with booking required. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 9:00-19:00. Closed on Mondays. Last admission is forty-five minutes before closing. One closed sector. Since 1 April, sector 0.1 of the museum has been closed for rehanging: ask at the desk what it covers, before you go looking for a work that may not be on view. Getting there. The museum is at viale delle Belle Arti 131. Metro line A stops at Flaminio, about six hundred metres away; trams 3 and 19 and buses 61, 89, 160, 490 and 495 pass nearby. The accessible entrance is at via Gramsci 71. How long to allow. The eight works in this guide need an hour and a half. Allow two and a half hours if you also walk through the rooms of the Italian nineteenth century, which are the largest part of the collection.
Where to go from here
Inside Villa Borghese, a quarter of an hour away on foot, is the museum everybody books: the works to see are in Galleria Borghese: 10 artworks not to miss, and with the combined ticket you save five euros.
If you are after the city’s other great painting collection, the old master one, it is at Palazzo Barberini. For the full picture, with the closing days, there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: facade of the Galleria Nazionale by Chabe01 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Hercules and Lichas by manuel pagani (CC BY-SA 4.0); The Gardener and Poachers in the Snow by Sailko (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman is in the public domain.
