Two hundred metres from Termini, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme has the air of a nineteenth-century ministry. Inside, though, it holds a wounded Greek boxer, a garden painted for an underground room and a Roman girl buried with her ivory doll.
This is the museum where ancient Rome stops being a collection of walls and names from the signs around the Forum. Here you can look emperors in the eye, enter the rooms that once decorated their houses and find the objects left beside a child in the second century.
The eight works in this guide follow that journey, from ancient Greece to private life in imperial Rome. The first encounter is with an athlete who does not celebrate victory, but the moment just after the fight has ended.
Which of the two Greek bronzes in this venue is the one almost nobody looks for?
Let’s begin!
1. The Boxer at Rest
We start on the ground floor, with the piece that would be worth the trip even if the rest of the museum were closed.
The Boxer at Rest is an original Greek bronze from the second half of the fourth century BC, 128 centimetres tall: not a Roman marble copy, but the statue cast by its own maker, lost-wax, in eight sections later assembled. Very few original Greek bronzes have survived in Italy, and among them are the Riace Bronzes, cast with the same technique a century and a half earlier.
Look at it before you read the label. A naked man sits on a rock, his forearms resting on his thighs, his hands still bound in the leather boxing wraps, his head turned back and up, to the right, as if someone had just called him. The nose is flattened, the ears are deformed, the eye sockets are empty, and the curly beard covers a swollen cheek.
Why does this athlete not resemble any other athlete from antiquity?
The sculptor did not depict a winner. There is no wreath, no gesture of triumph, no crowd: there is a man who has just finished fighting and raises his eyes without answering.
There is also a technical detail that explains why archaeologists have been debating this statue for a century and a half. The drops of blood on the wounds are neither painted nor incised: they are copper inlays, a different-coloured metal set into the bronze, and they can be seen on the right shoulder, on the forearm, on the wraps and on the thigh. The lips and the scars on the face were also cast separately and applied. They show up best if you move to the right side, the side the head is turned towards.
The statue resurfaced in March 1885 on the Quirinal, near the convent of San Silvestro, six metres underground, resting on a Doric capital. It had not been thrown away: it had been carefully hidden, probably to save it from the foundries.
2. The Hellenistic Prince, the bronze nobody looks for
In the same 1885 excavation on the Quirinal, carried out during work on the Teatro Nazionale and probably inside the remains of the Baths of Constantine, a second original Greek bronze came to light. It stands a few steps from the first, and almost nobody stops in front of it.
The so-called Hellenistic Prince depicts a naked young man, following the heroic convention of Greek sculpture, leaning with his left hand on a long spear whose tip has been lost. We do not know who he is: the name he carries is a name of convenience, and the proposals range from a Hellenistic ruler, perhaps Attalus II, to a Greek who fought against the Romans.
What matters in this room is not the statue alone, but the fact that two original Greek bronzes emerged from the same excavation, in Rome, in the same month. So few survive because the metal was melted down for reuse; here there are two, and they arrived together because someone, in a moment of crisis, chose to bury them rather than sell them by weight.
3. The painted garden from the Villa of Livia
On the second floor, the fresco floor, there is a room that is not a room: it is a garden.
The walls come from an underground space in the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, the country house of Augustus’s wife, and date from the first century AD. Along the bottom edge runs a thin strip of grass, and just above it a pink wall, with a pierced pattern incised on its face and small shrubs at its foot. Behind the wall the vegetation thickens and mixes: fruit trees with yellow and red fruit still recognisable on the branches, flowers, birds of different species, some perched, others in flight against the pale background. At the top the edge of the fresco is torn and irregular.
What was the point of painting a garden underground?
To give that room exactly what it lacked. The space was sunk into the earth, so dark and cool, a refuge from the Roman summer: painting it as a garden meant giving light and greenery to whoever took shelter there precisely because they had none. It is a trompe l’oeil, but one that answers the climate before the taste.
Look at the depth. The painter made the more distant planes hazier and cooler in colour, a technique usually attributed to much later landscape painting. The frescoes were detached in 1951 and brought here; at the villa today there are faithful reproductions.
4. The frescoes from the Villa Farnesina
On the same floor, a few rooms further on, there are the paintings from another house: the Roman Villa Farnesina, found at the Lungara under the sixteenth-century villa when the Tiber embankments were built.
Here the register changes completely. Livia’s garden is a wall that opens up; these are walls that close in, with fake architectural divisions, panels, fine friezes and tiny figures painted with the tip of the brush. They are two opposite ways of solving the same problem, the wall of a wealthy house, and the room places them a few metres apart.
A note on the name: this is an ancient Roman villa, and it has nothing to do with the Collezione Farnesina of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which holds contemporary art. Two different things with the same name, in the same city.
5. The Lancellotti Discobolus, sold and brought back
On the first floor stands the statue with the museum’s most dramatic recent history.
The Lancellotti Discobolus is a Roman marble copy of Myron’s Discobolus, the lost Greek bronze of around 455 BC. It is the best copy that exists, and the only one that preserves the head in its original position, turned towards the discus.
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, against the opinion of the Superior Council for Sciences and Arts. The statue left for the Glyptothek in Munich.
And then?
The war ended, and Rodolfo Siviero, the art historian Italy tasked with recovering works scattered by the conflict, convinced the Allied military authorities that the work had been acquired illegally by exploiting the alliance between two regimes. The Discobolus returned to Italy on 16 November 1948, together with thirty-eight other masterpieces illegally exported.
Keep those two dates in mind as you look at it, 1938 and 1948, because they are also the best introduction to the Museum of Rescued Art, five minutes from here and open with the same ticket. Returning stolen heritage is not a recent theme: it is work Italy has been doing for eighty years.
6. Augustus as Pontifex Maximus
Still on the ground floor, among the imperial portraits, is the statue that shows the first emperor in Rome’s highest religious office.
The Augustus of Via Labicana, found in 1910 on the slopes of the Oppian, along the road that gives it its name, portrays Augustus in a toga with a fold of the cloth drawn over his head: it is the ritual gesture of sacrifice, which the pontifex maximus performed with his head covered. The right arm, now broken off, most likely held the patera used to pour wine. This is not an emperor in arms nor a god: it is a priest at work. The statue is a Tiberian-period copy of a portrait type devised between the first century BC and the first century AD.
Why did Augustus have himself portrayed exactly like this?
Because his power was also built through images, and every image said something precise. Walk slowly through the following rooms of imperial portraits and look at the faces: crooked noses, receding chins, baldness, all carved without mercy. After those faces, the names you read on the labels at the Roman Forum and Palatine stop being just names.
7. The Portonaccio Sarcophagus
On the first floor, the museum’s most crowded piece: a marble chest datable to around 180 AD, found in 1931 in the Portonaccio area of Rome.
Dozens of figures pile up on the front, Romans and barbarians, horses, shields, bodies fallen beneath the hooves, in relief so deep that in several spots the marble is undercut to the point of detaching from the background. Get close and look at where the stone stops: beneath the heads and hooves of the horses there is empty space, and the shadow it casts is part of the sculpture.
The detail worth stopping for is the face of the general on horseback at the centre of the battle, which is left blank: the faces of the main figures were left unfinished, awaiting the features of the deceased, which were never carved. The face stays smooth amid hundreds of details finished to the millimetre. The man buried here was perhaps an officer of Marcus Aurelius’s Germanic and Sarmatian campaigns.
8. The Grottarossa mummy
The last work is in the basement, and it is the one you will remember for years.
On 5 February 1964, at kilometre 13.6 of the Via Cassia, the mummified body of an eight-year-old girl was found in a rubbish dump, discarded there along with her sarcophagus. She is the best-preserved Roman mummy we have, and dates from the middle of the second century AD.
Her parents had her mummified: an Egyptian practice, extremely costly and outside local tradition, which was not used in Rome. Then they placed her grave goods beside her, and that is the part that breaks your heart: a Chinese silk tunic, a gold necklace with sapphires, earrings and a gold ring engraved with a winged Victory, small amber jars, amulets, and a jointed ivory doll 16.5 centimetres tall, with articulated arms and legs.
The sarcophagus, in white marble with masks at the corners, bears a stag-hunt scene inspired by the episode of Aeneas and Dido in the fourth book of the Aeneid.
From that body scholars have gathered data on the health, diet and diseases of a Roman girl of the second century: a real person whose name we do not know. The mummy is displayed in a case with controlled temperature and humidity and filtered light: that is why the room is dark and silent.
The other three venues your ticket opens
The ticket in your hand does not stop here: the other venues are fifteen minutes from one another. Each answers a different question, so it helps to know beforehand what they hold.
- Palazzo Altemps, behind Piazza Navona, houses the antiquities collections of Roman nobility, above all the Ludovisi, inside a Renaissance palace with frescoed rooms: it is the only venue where the statues are not lined up in museum halls.
- Baths of Diocletian, right across from this palace, 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, displays on rotation the works recovered from illicit trafficking and returned to Italy, and takes half an hour to see.
The itinerary that ties together the four venues is told 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: prices and hours change, and this article carries the date above.
The closed venue. The Crypta Balbi, the museum’s fifth venue, is temporarily closed to the public with no reopening date announced. The single ticket still includes it on paper: anyone buying it expecting four venues finds three plus the Octagonal Hall. Better to know before you pay than after.
Tickets. There is no admission ticket for Palazzo Massimo 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. The ticket 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. There is also the MNR Card, which costs 30 euros full price and 20 euros reduced and gives unlimited access for a year from first use. Tickets are not refundable through any official channel.
Opening hours. The venue is open Tuesday to Sunday, 9:00-19:00, with last entry at 18:00. The museum is closed on Mondays.
Free admission. Entry is free on the first Sunday of the month; other free-admission conditions are published on the official website, and it is worth reading them before joining the queue, since they change.
Getting there. Metro lines A and B stop at Termini, three minutes’ walk from here. The entrance is at Largo di Villa Peretti 2, on the Piazza dei Cinquecento side.
How much time to allow. The eight works in this article take an hour and a half if you walk briskly through the four levels. Allow two and a half hours if you also want the coin collection and the imperial portrait rooms, where this museum is at its best.
Temporary exhibitions. The current programme at this venue, with dates, is updated every month in the Rome exhibitions table. This article covers the permanent collection; that table says what has been added today.
If you would rather have the ticket already in hand, you can book entry to the National Roman Museum online and check the available slots. Here the queue is not the main problem: the advantage is having the combined ticket ready and not having to buy it again at each venue.
What to see nearby
This museum holds what was taken from archaeological sites, which is why it works best paired with a site that has been emptied.
The strongest link is with the Roman Forum and Palatine: there you see the settings without the objects, here the objects without the settings. The same goes for Ostia Antica. The Capitoline Museums tell the other half of the story instead, being the oldest public collection in the world, born of papal donations, while this one is the collection of the unified state, born of excavations.
If you leave and cross the square you are in front of the Baths of Diocletian, which your ticket already opens. If you feel like painting rather than marble, twenty minutes away by metro is Palazzo Barberini, with two Caravaggios and the Fornarina.
Photo credits: façade of Palazzo Massimo by Wolters M. (CC BY-SA 4.0); Boxer at Rest by Livioandronico2013 (CC BY-SA 4.0); frescoes from the Villa of Livia by Carole Raddato (CC BY-SA 2.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
