At Palazzo Altemps, ancient statues do not wait in a white gallery. They stand beneath painted ceilings, look onto a courtyard dotted with potted citrus trees and fill the rooms of a palace that was once, quite simply, a home.
That is what makes it different from the other venues of the National Roman Museum: here antiquity still carries the atmosphere of a private collection. You can look at the Ludovisi Gaul, the Bernini-restored Ares or the Ludovisi Juno much as the princes who chose them for their rooms once did.
The answer begins with a pope’s nephew and ends when Rome becomes the capital of Italy, changing the fate of noble villas for good.
Where did those statues come from, and how did one family gather so many of them?
Let’s begin!
The Ludovisi collection, in two paragraphs
The heart of this venue is the collection assembled in the 1620s by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of Pope Gregory XV, for the family villa on the Pincio. It was an age in which the nephews of popes bought ancient statues the way people today buy paintings, and set them out in gardens to be seen while strolling.
That villa no longer exists: it was broken up by the building speculation that followed 1870, when Rome became the capital and the parks of the nobility were carved into new districts. In 1901 the Italian state bought a hundred and four sculptures from the Boncompagni Ludovisi family, and that is the core you see here today. Not all the antiquities in the museum come from there, though: the palace also houses the Altemps, Mattei and Del Drago collections and the Egyptian collection, and further sculptures from Roman aristocratic collections can be seen at the Baths of Diocletian, another venue on the same ticket.
1. The Ludovisi Gaul
The first work is one of the most violent and moving groups in ancient Roman sculpture, standing 211 centimetres tall.
The Ludovisi Gaul is a first-century-BC marble copy of a bronze from around 230-220 BC, attributed to the sculptor Epigonus. It shows a Gallic warrior standing as he kills himself: his right arm is raised above his head and the short sword plunges vertically, entering at the base of his neck, above the collarbone. With his left arm the man holds his wife, who sinks beside him with one knee on the ground, her head tipped onto her chest and her arm stretched outward, her open hand hanging limp. It is her arm, just above the elbow, that the man grips. She is already dead, and he is the one who killed her.
Why is this group a masterpiece, and not just a raw scene?
Because the winners commissioned it. It was part of the Attalid dedication at Pergamon, a monument that celebrated victory over the Gauls, and yet it gives dignity to the enemy: the Gaul is not a ridiculous barbarian, he is a man choosing death rather than be reduced to slavery, and the woman is not a passive victim but part of the same decision. Hellenistic sculpture here invents respect for a defeated enemy as a measure of one’s own greatness.
For centuries the group carried a different name: it was believed to depict the suicide of Paetus and Arria, a Roman couple. That was often the fate of marbles in noble collections, which acquired whichever subject their owners recognised in them.
2. The Ludovisi Great Sarcophagus
In the next room stands a marble sarcophagus resting on two lion-head brackets. Its front, the long side intended to be seen, carries a battle between Romans and barbarians.
The figures number in the dozens, overlapping in three stacked bands with not a centimetre of free background: horsemen, foot soldiers, rearing horses, fallen and trampled barbarians, shields and standards. At the base, two carved lions look out at the viewer from the floor. At the centre, higher up, a bare-headed young commander raises his right hand, holding no weapon.
How do you read a relief like this?
The short side is carved far more roughly, almost sketched, and it is worth walking around to see it: it tells you the chest was meant to stand against a wall, with only one face intended to be seen.
3. The Ludovisi Ares, and Bernini’s hand
The Ludovisi Ares is the god of war seated at rest, a Roman marble copy in Pentelic marble of a Greek original from around 320 BC.
What sets it apart from a hundred other ancient statues in Rome is the restoration. The statue resurfaced in 1622, and Cardinal Ludovisi entrusted it to a young sculptor who was making a name for himself at that very moment: Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini added the missing parts in Carrara marble, remade the right foot entirely, and added at the god’s feet the small cupid that everyone today assumes is ancient.
Look at it knowing this, because it changes what you are looking at. You are not looking at a restored Greek statue: you are looking at ancient marble and Baroque marble in the same block, and part of this work’s fame belongs to the man who finished it fifteen centuries later. That was how the seventeenth century treated antiquity: not as a find to leave mutilated, but as a work to complete. If the hand that did that work interests you, I have followed it across the whole city in the articles on Bernini’s fountains in Rome and on his palaces and other works in the city.
4. The Ludovisi Juno, Goethe’s first love in Rome
The fourth work is a colossal marble head from the first century AD, which fills a room on its own.
The so-called Ludovisi Juno is what remains of an acrolithic statue: the head and bare parts were carved in marble, the rest of the body was wood, dressed in real drapery or painted. That is why the head has survived and not the body, and it is also why the head is so large: it was made to be seen from below, on a body nearly twice its height. The face is an idealised portrait, and in it scholars recognise the features of Antonia Minor in the guise of the goddess.
This head’s fame, though, comes from the story that grew around it. When Goethe saw it at the Villa Ludovisi, in 1787, he called it “my first love in Rome”, and years later had a plaster cast of the head sent to his home, which he kept in his room. For German classicism that face was, for decades, the very image of ancient beauty.
5. Orestes and Electra, the signed group
The group of Orestes and Electra dates from the first half of the first century AD and bears something rare in ancient sculpture: the maker’s signature.
The work is inscribed as made by Menelaus, pupil of Stephanus. This is a valuable piece of information because it links the piece to a specific school, that of Pasiteles, active between the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius: a workshop that worked by reproducing and combining older Greek models.
The two figures are the children of Agamemnon, portrayed at their father’s tomb. The funerary nature is not a textbook guess: it is stated by Electra’s hairstyle, cut short as a sign of mourning. It is the kind of detail worth stepping closer to see: once you know it, these are no longer two figures posing, but two people in a precise place and a precise moment.
6. The Egyptian collection, and Egypt inside Rome
The sixth work is not a single statue but an entire floor of rooms, and it is the part of this museum almost nobody expects.
The Egyptian collection displays mostly material from the Iseum Campense, the sanctuary of Isis and Serapis that stood in the Campus Martius, a few hundred metres from here. In the Room of the Isiac Clergy you can see two portraits of priests of the cult and a small portrait of a child with a shaved head and a long lock of hair left to grow on one side; in the room dedicated to the Iseum Serapeum there is the base of a colossal statue and a headless black granite sphinx from the Ptolemaic period.
Why was there an Egyptian sanctuary in Rome?
The cult of Isis arrived in the city with trade and soldiers, was met with suspicion and repeatedly obstructed, and ended up becoming one of the most followed in the capital. This section serves as a reminder of something the white-marble rooms tend to make you forget: ancient Rome was a city of foreign cults, and it imported them along with its goods.
The courtyard and the painted loggia
It is not a work in the collection, but it is the reason this venue is unlike any other: look at it anyway.
Go up to the piano nobile and step out onto the courtyard. The loggia opens with round arches on pale pilasters, and beneath every arch the vault is painted: leafy scrolls, grotesques, fruit-laden pergolas so dense they look like a roof of vine, and in the lower lunettes pairs of putti holding scrolls and coats of arms. The balustrade with little columns closes the loggia against the open air, and behind it the citrus trees in their pots stand in a row. Lower down runs a Greek-key frieze, and below that again the ground-floor portico repeats the same arches without colour.
The thing I want you to notice is the contrast. Elsewhere in the city, ancient statues live in white rooms, under controlled light, on neutral plinths. Here they live inside a sixteenth-century decorative scheme that was never stripped away to make room for them, and the result is that you can see how the people who owned them looked at them: not as documents, but as luxury furnishings.
The work not here today: the Ludovisi Throne
We come to the piece that is missing, because it is too famous to leave unmentioned.
The Ludovisi Throne is a block of marble carved on three sides, dated to around 460-450 BC. On the front, a female figure rises from the ground between two handmaidens who support her by the arms and hold out before her a cloth rippling with dense folds; on the two short sides there is, on one, a naked young woman playing the double flute, and on the other, a woman wrapped in a cloak pouring incense into a censer. The upper edge of the block is broken, and the marble is chipped all along the border.
It is considered one of the absolute masterpieces of Greek art in Italy. And there are those who argue it is a fake. In the twentieth century Federico Zeri proposed that it was a nineteenth-century work, perhaps by the sculptor Santo Varni: its provenance is poorly documented, a second, very similar piece exists in Boston, and some formal choices are difficult to place in the fifth century BC. The majority position remains that of authenticity, and the question is not settled: I give you both positions, because neither has won.
Warning: since 4 June 2026 the Ludovisi Throne has not been on view at Palazzo Altemps. This is what the museum states, having announced its loan to an exhibition: the stages are known, but the sources do not agree on the dates, and it is not possible to say where the work is today or when it will return. If you are travelling on purpose to see it, call the ticket office first, on 06.684851: a work that has moved once will move again, and no article online will warn you of the next absence.
The photograph above is from November 2024, when the work was still on display: it shows the Throne, not today’s empty room.
The other three venues included in your ticket
The same admission ticket is valid for three other venues, and knowing what they hold helps you see them in the right order.
- Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, next to Termini, is the venue with the strongest collection: two original Greek bronzes, the painted garden from the Villa of Livia, the Lancellotti Discobolus and the Grottarossa mummy.
- Baths of Diocletian, across from Palazzo Massimo, is the largest thermal complex of ancient Rome, with the cloister attributed to Michelangelo and the rooms of Latin inscriptions.
- Museum of Rescued Art, in the Octagonal Hall of the Baths, shows on rotation the works recovered from illicit trafficking and returned to Italy.
The four venues laid out side by side, with travel times and distances, are in the article on the National Roman Museum.
Practical information
Details verified on 13 September 2026 on the official website of the National Roman Museum. Before you travel, check again on museonazionaleromano.it, because the prices and hours in this article carry today’s date and go out of date silently.
The closed venue. The Crypta Balbi, the museum’s fifth venue, is temporarily closed to the public, and the museum states no reopening date. The single ticket still includes it on paper: anyone buying it expecting four venues finds three plus the Octagonal Hall, and it is worth knowing at the ticket desk.
Tickets. There is no admission ticket for Palazzo Altemps alone: you buy the single ticket of the National Roman Museum, which costs 15 euros full price and 2 euros reduced, reserved for European Union citizens aged 18 to 25, and allows one access to each venue within a week of the first entry. Holders of a valid pass from the Musei in rete network pay 10 euros. The MNR Card costs 30 euros full price and 20 euros reduced and gives unlimited access for a year from first use. Tickets are not refundable.
Opening hours. The venue is open Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00-19:00, with last entry at 18:00, and is closed on Mondays.
Contacts. The ticket office answers on 06.684851, the number to use to ask whether a work is on display before crossing town.
Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month. Other free-admission conditions are published on the official website.
Getting there. It is a walk: the entrance is at Piazza Sant’Apollinare 46, behind Piazza Navona, five minutes from the Fountain of the Four Rivers. Central buses stop on Corso del Rinascimento.
How much time to allow. The palace can be seen in an hour and a half, two hours if you also take a leisurely walk through the Egyptian collection rooms. It is the smallest of the four venues, which makes it easy to fit into a longer walk.
Temporary exhibitions. The current programme is in the Rome exhibitions table, which I check again every month.
If you would rather have the ticket ready in advance, you can book entry to the National Roman Museum online and check the available slots: it is the same combined ticket, and it saves you from buying it again at each venue.
What to see nearby
Of the museum’s four open venues, this is the only one not in the Termini area, and its location is its advantage.
Two minutes away is Piazza Navona, with the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and ten minutes away the Pantheon. If after the ancient marble you want painting, the Doria Pamphilj Gallery is on the same walk and is the other Roman case of a noble collection that stayed in the family home.
The pairing I really recommend, though, is with Palazzo Massimo: there ancient sculpture is lined up and explained, here it is set out in a drawing room. They are two opposite ideas of a museum on the same ticket, and seeing them a day apart is worth more than any caption.
Photo credits: courtyard of Palazzo Altemps and the Ludovisi Gaul by Paolo Villa (CC BY-SA 4.0); Ludovisi Great Sarcophagus and Ludovisi Throne by Fabrizio Garrisi (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
