Two hundred metres from Termini station, where half a million people pass every day, stands the most important museum of ancient sculpture in Italy. Almost no visitor to Rome sees it.
The National Roman Museum is the state archaeological collection, founded in 1889 with the material that came out of the great excavations of newly unified Italy, and it holds some of the most extraordinary objects to survive from antiquity: two original Greek bronzes, an entire room painted as a garden, a mummified little girl with her toys, and a statue Hitler bought and Italy took back.
Why does nobody go? For two very ordinary reasons. The first is that it is not one building but four, scattered across different parts of the city, and that confuses people. The second is that its masterpieces do not have names mass tourism recognises: if you do not already know what the Boxer at Rest is, you have no reason to look for it.
Let’s fix that. I will tell you how the venues work, what to look for in each, and in what order.
Four open venues, one ticket
The first practical fact, and the one that clears up the confusion: there is only one ticket and it is valid for a week. You do not have to decide which venue to see: you see them all, on different days if you like.
Here is what each one holds, with the venue named because that is the information you actually need:
- Palazzo Massimo alle Terme (Largo di Villa Peretti, next to Termini). This is the main venue and the one to see if you are short of time: Greek bronzes, imperial portraits, the frescoes floor with paintings detached from Roman villas, the coin cabinet, and in the basement the Grottarossa mummy. If you have two hours in total, spend them here.
- Palazzo Altemps (Piazza Sant’Apollinare, behind Piazza Navona). The Renaissance palace that houses the great antiquities collections of the Roman nobility, above all the Ludovisi. It is the finest of the venues as a building, and the only one where the statues stand in frescoed rooms instead of museum galleries.
- Baths of Diocletian (Viale Enrico De Nicola, opposite Termini). The largest bath complex of ancient Rome, with the cloister attributed to Michelangelo and the epigraphic sections. Careful: the Natatio, Hall VIII and the Museum of Protohistory are closed.
- Museo dell’Arte Salvata, in the Aula Ottagona of the Baths: it displays works recovered from illegal trafficking and returned to Italy, on rotation. It is a piece of museum that exists nowhere else and takes half an hour.
⚠️ The Crypta Balbi is temporarily closed. It was the fifth venue, and the most original of the five, because it told the story of a single city block layer by layer from antiquity to the Middle Ages. If you read articles recommending it, they are old: check the official site before going.
1 – The Boxer at Rest
Let’s begin with the piece worth the journey, which is in Palazzo Massimo.
The Boxer at Rest is an original Greek bronze of the second half of the fourth century BC, 128 centimetres tall. Not a Roman copy: the original, cast by the indirect lost-wax method, in eight sections later assembled.
A man sitting on a rock, naked, hands still bound in boxing thongs, his body enormous and his head turned up and to the right, as if somebody had called him. The face is destroyed: broken nose, cauliflower ears, split lip, scars on the cheekbones.
And here is the technical detail that is also the most striking. The drops of blood on the wounds are neither painted nor incised: they are copper inlays, a different-coloured metal set into the bronze. You will find them on the right shoulder, the forearm, the thongs and the thigh, and they show best from the right, the side the head is turned towards. The lips and the facial scars were also cast separately and applied.
This is not generic realism: it is an artist who decided to render blood in another material, because bronze alone would not do. And the result is not a winner: it is a man who has just finished, swollen, looking up at whoever is speaking to him without answering.
How did it reach us? It was found in March 1885 on the Quirinal, near the convent of San Silvestro, at six metres depth and laid on a Doric capital. It had not been thrown away or hurriedly buried: it had been hidden with the greatest care, probably to save it from the furnaces at a moment of crisis. The same excavation brought up the museum’s other bronze, the so-called Hellenistic Prince: two Greek originals, together, under a hill in Rome.
2 – Livia’s painted garden
On the frescoes floor of Palazzo Massimo there is a room that is not a room: it is a garden.
The frescoes from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta come from an underground space in the villa that belonged to the wife of Augustus, and they date from the first century AD. The walls are painted with a hedge in the foreground, then a second enclosure, and behind it a dense wood of fruit trees, laurels and palms, with birds of different species among the branches.
What was it for? This: the room was below ground level, so dark and cool, a refuge from the Roman summer. Painting it as a garden meant giving whoever sat in it exactly what the room denied them, light and greenery. It is a trompe l’oeil, but not a decorative one: it is climatic.
Look at the depth. The painter rendered the more distant planes hazier and cooler in colour, something usually credited to much later landscape painting. And look at the birds: they can be identified by species, some caged and others free.
The frescoes were detached in 1951 and moved here; at the villa today there are faithful reproductions, so the archaeological context stays legible and the originals stay safe.
On the same floor there are also the frescoes from the Roman villa of the Farnesina, found at the Lungara beneath the sixteenth-century villa. ⚠️ Careful with the name: this is an ancient Roman villa, and it has nothing to do with the Farnesina Collection of the Italian Foreign Ministry, which is a contemporary art collection I have written about in the article on the Farnesina Collection. Two different things with the same name, in the same city.
3 – The Discobolus Hitler bought
This is the most incredible story in the museum, and it sits in a room in Palazzo Massimo with hardly anyone telling it in full.
The Discobolus Lancellotti is a Roman marble copy of the famous Discobolus of Myron, the lost Greek bronze of about 455 BC. It is the best copy in existence, the only one that preserves the head in its original position.
In June 1938 it was sold to Nazi Germany for five million lire. Formally it was a private sale between Hermann Göring and Prince Lancellotti; the export was authorised under pressure from Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, and against the opposition of the Superior Council of Sciences and the Arts, which objected. The statue left for the Glyptothek in Munich.
And then? When the war ended, one man set about recovering what Italy had lost: Rodolfo Siviero, agent and art historian, convinced the Allied military authorities that the work had been illegally acquired, exploiting the alliance between two regimes. The Discobolus returned to Italy on 16 November 1948, together with 38 other illegally exported masterpieces.
Stop in front of this statue and hold on to two dates: 1938 and 1948. Ten years, and a world war in between. It is the one work in the museum whose recent history is more dramatic than its ancient one, and it is also the best possible introduction to the Museo dell’Arte Salvata in the Baths: the restitution of stolen heritage is not a new theme, it is work Italy has been doing for eighty years.
4 – The Ludovisi Gaul
Now let’s move to Palazzo Altemps, behind Piazza Navona, for the most violent and most moving group in ancient sculpture in Rome.
The Ludovisi Gaul, the suicidal Galatian, is 211 centimetres tall and is a first-century BC marble copy of a bronze of about 230-220 BC, attributed to the sculptor Epigonus.
What it shows: a Gallic warrior killing himself, driving a short sword between his collarbones, while with his left arm he holds up the wife he has just killed. She has short hair, a long garment and a mantle with woollen fringes, and she is already dead or dying, slumped against his body.
And here is the reading that makes the group enormous. This is a sculpture made by the victors to celebrate victory over the Galatians, it was part of the Attalid donation at Pergamon, and it nevertheless grants the enemy dignity. The Gaul is not a ridiculous barbarian: he is a man who chooses death rather than slavery, and his wife is not a passive victim but part of the same decision. Hellenistic sculpture invents something new here: respect for the defeated, used as the measure of one’s own greatness.
For centuries, incidentally, the group was misread: it was thought to represent a Roman subject, and only later was it recognised for what it is.
5 – The Ludovisi Throne, genuine or not
In the same venue there is the piece Italian art history has argued about longest.
The Ludovisi Throne is a block of marble carved on three sides, dated to around 460-450 BC. On the front, a clothed female figure lifted by two Horai, the goddesses of the seasons, behind a stretched veil; on the left side a naked young woman playing the double pipe; on the right side a woman wrapped in a mantle placing incense in a censer.
It is considered one of the absolute masterpieces of Greek art in Italy. And it might be a fake.
In the twentieth century Federico Zeri argued that it was a nineteenth-century work, possibly by the sculptor Santo Varni. The argument was not baseless: the provenance is poorly documented, there is a second very similar piece, the so-called Boston Throne, with related features that could point to the same workshop, and some formal choices are hard to place in the fifth century BC.
And how did it end? It has not ended. The question remains open, and the museum displays the Throne as an ancient work, which is the majority position.
What I would suggest is looking at it knowing the controversy, because it changes the experience: you look for the details that seem too modern, and then for the ones that seem impossible to invent. It is the only room in Rome where a visitor can do, in miniature, the work of a scholar.
6 – The Grottarossa mummy
The last work is in the basement of Palazzo Massimo, and it is the one you will remember for years.
On 5 February 1964, at kilometre 13.6 of the Via Cassia, near Grottarossa, in a landfill where it had been dumped along with the sarcophagus, the mummified body of an eight-year-old girl was found. It is the best-preserved Roman mummy we have, dated to the middle of the second century AD.
Inside the sarcophagus, white marble with masks at the corners and a deer-hunting scene inspired by the Aeneas and Dido episode in the fourth book of the Aeneid, were her grave goods. And the grave goods are the part that breaks you:
- a Chinese silk tunic, which tells you how rich the family was and how long the empire’s trade routes ran;
- a gold necklace with sapphires, gold earrings, a gold ring engraved with a winged Victory;
- an articulated ivory doll, 16.5 centimetres tall, with jointed arms and legs;
- little amber vessels, amulets, an amber bust.
Her parents had her mummified, which was not done in Rome: it was an Egyptian practice, hugely expensive and outside tradition. Then they put the doll beside her.
Why does it matter, beyond the emotion? Because it is a document. From this body scholars have drawn information about the health, diet and illnesses of a Roman child of the second century, that is, about a real person, whose name we do not know. The mummy is displayed in a temperature- and humidity-controlled case, with filtered light: those are the conditions that keep it alive, and they are also why the room is dark and silent.
Practical information
Details verified on 30 July 2026 on the official site of the National Roman Museum. Before you travel, check again on museonazionaleromano.it. A useful note: the old address museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it now redirects to the new domain.
Ticket. Combined 15 euros, reduced 2 euros. Valid for one week from first stamping, with one entry per venue. There is also the MNR Card at 30 euros (reduced 20), valid for a year with unlimited entries: if you are staying in Rome for more than a few days, or think you will be back, the sums do themselves. Entry to the Aula Ottagona alone costs 5 euros. Tickets are non-refundable.
Opening hours. All venues Tuesday to Sunday, 9 am to 7 pm, last entry at 6 pm. Closed Monday. Free admission on the first Sunday of the month.
Open and closed venues. Open: Palazzo Massimo, Palazzo Altemps, the Baths of Diocletian and the Museo dell’Arte Salvata in the Aula Ottagona. Closed: the Crypta Balbi. At the Baths, the Natatio, Hall VIII and the Museum of Protohistory are also closed.
How to organise the visit. The geography helps more than you would think:
- Palazzo Massimo and the Baths of Diocletian are opposite each other, at Termini: do them in the same morning, and the ticket is already paid for;
- Palazzo Altemps is in the centre, behind Piazza Navona, so it slots into a walk with the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain;
- if you have two hours in total, do Palazzo Massimo only: Boxer, Livia’s garden, Discobolus, mummy. Those are the four pieces in this article that are in the same building.
Getting there. Metro A and B, Termini stop, and you are a short walk from Palazzo Massimo and the Baths. For Palazzo Altemps the easiest way is to walk over from Piazza Navona.
What to allow for. Palazzo Massimo is large and on four levels: allow two hours to do it properly, three if you stop at the coin cabinet. The bronze rooms and the mummy room are kept dim, for conservation.
If you want the ticket ready in advance, you can book entry to the National Roman Museum online and check availability. The queue is not the problem here: the advantage is having the combined ticket in hand and not having to buy it at each venue.
What to see nearby
This museum is the natural complement to almost all the rest of ancient Rome, because it holds the things that were taken away from the places.
The strongest link is with the Roman Forum and the Palatine: there you see the emptied contexts, here you see what was inside them. The same goes for Ostia Antica, the source of part of the material on display. And the Capitoline Museums are the other half of the story: the oldest public collection in the world, born of papal donations, against the national collection born of the excavations of the unified state. Two different ways of assembling antiquity.
If instead you come out of the Baths of Diocletian, in front of you is Piazza della Repubblica with the fountain whose scandal I told in the article on the Fountain of the Naiads: the square follows exactly the curve of the exedra of the ancient baths, and you only grasp that after seeing the complex from inside.
One last thing, which is also why I would recommend starting here. In the rooms of Palazzo Massimo there are dozens of imperial portraits, in a row, one beside another. Walk them slowly and look at the faces: they are real people, with crooked noses, receding chins and baldness, carved without mercy. After seeing those faces, the names you read on the labels at the Forum and the Colosseum stop being names.
