Between Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni, on a street tourists cross by bus without getting off, there is a squared-off building that spent half a century as a carcass: walls standing, nothing inside.
Inside, today, there are ninety works of Italian painting and sculpture from between the wars: the season in which Rome had a school of its own. Sironi, Donghi, De Chirico, Balla, Mafai, Raphaël, Scipione, Capogrossi are names you meet one at a time in Italian museums, and here they live together in the same collection, the one put together by Elena and Claudio Cerasi.
The six works in this guide follow that season from the silent realism of the 1920s to the eve of abstraction, and they start on the ground floor, where you go in without a ticket.
What happened to painting in Rome between the wars that was so different from the rest of Italy?
Let’s begin!
The building: an urban void that lasted half a century
The palace was built in 1929 to house the public health office of the city of Rome. In the 1960s it was decided to demolish it and rebuild it in reinforced concrete and glass: the project was never completed, and the building stayed gutted for decades, in the middle of a densely inhabited district.
The recovery was carried out by the Fondazione Elena e Claudio Cerasi, set up in 2014, and the museum opened on 10 May 2018.
Keep it in mind as you go up: this is not a historic palace adapted into a museum, it is a shell left empty for fifty years and filled with a private collection. The rooms are clean, tall, undecorated, and that is why the paintings of the 1930s breathe in here.
1. The sculpture hall, which you visit without a ticket
The hall on the ground floor, with the sculptures, the café and the bookshop, is free to enter from Wednesday to Sunday: you can walk in, sit down and look around without paying anything.
Among the pieces in the collection is the Erma per fontana, a herm for a fountain, by Duilio Cambellotti, and from here you already grasp the character of the collection. Not only easel painting: sculpture too, applied arts and drawing, which is to say everything that was being made in Rome in those years, including things meant to stand in a garden or on a facade.
2. The two boat trips, a year apart
This is the comparison that makes the visit worthwhile, and almost nobody tells you about it. The collection owns two paintings with almost the same name: the Gita in barca, the boat trip, by Giuseppe Capogrossi, of 1932-33, also known as I canottieri, the rowers, and the Gita in barca by Antonio Donghi, of 1934.
How did two Roman painters, within the same handful of months, come to paint the same Sunday on the river?
Because that was the Rome they had in front of them, and because both were after the same thing: an ordinary subject treated with the solemnity of a history painting. Look at how they solve it in opposite ways. Capogrossi keeps the figure soft, the light diffused, the colour loose; Donghi draws every contour with a sharpness like glass, and stops the people as if they were not breathing.
They are two diverging roads that start from the same point. Sixteen years later, in 1949, Capogrossi would stop painting figures altogether: from Sundays on the river to the comb-like signs of the Superfici, inside a single career.
3. Donghi’s Washerwomen and Little Acrobats
The collection includes two more fundamental Donghis: the Lavandaie, the washerwomen, of 1922-23, and the Piccoli saltimbanchi, the little acrobats, of 1938.
Donghi is the painter of magic realism, and the formula makes more sense in front of the paintings than in a definition: the figures are described with textbook precision, but they are motionless, they do not look at one another, and the air around them is still. There is nothing fantastic in them, and that is exactly what makes the scenes unsettling.
Look for the hands of the acrobats. They are the hands of children who work, painted with the same care other painters gave to saints.
4. De Chirico’s Mysterious Baths
Giorgio de Chirico painted the Cabine misteriose, the mysterious bathing huts, in 1934, and they are the piece that ties this collection to the rest of Europe.
The huts are beach huts, wooden, crowded one against the other; inside you glimpse figures and outside there is emptiness. It is a theme de Chirico returned to for years, and it is worth looking at here, next to the Romans: they paint the real until it turns motionless, he starts from stillness and loads it with an enigma.
5. Scipione, Mafai and Raphaël, and the via Cavour school
At the centre of the collection are the painters critics later called the Roman School: Scipione, Mario Mafai and Antonietta Raphaël.
They are the exact reverse of Donghi. Where he freezes, they dissolve: burnt colours, contours that come apart, a Rome seen at night, from the outer districts, with the churches bending. Mafai and Raphaël were husband and wife, and they worked in a studio on via Cavour a few minutes from here, with Scipione and Mazzacurati. The group took its name from the street, the via Cavour school, and that studio is one of the places where Italian painting of the twentieth century changed.
Scipione died of tuberculosis at twenty-nine, in 1933. His entire output fits into less than ten years of work.
6. Sironi, Balla and the century that wanted to be monumental
The collection closes with the names that lead out of Rome: Mario Sironi, Giacomo Balla, and beside them Casorati, Campigli, Severini, and a contemporary such as Jan Fabre.
Sironi is the opposite of a boat trip: massive figures, outskirts of squared-off houses, leaden skies, a painting that wants to be as solemn as a wall. Balla, who in 1912 had painted movement by taking it apart, is here in a different phase. Putting them in a row in the same visit serves one purpose only, which is to make clear that «Italian art between the wars» is not a style: it is at least four different programmes, and they argued with each other.
A practical note about these rooms: almost all these artists are still in copyright, so you will find no free images of the works you are about to see, not online and not in this article. Of the building itself there is not one free photograph in circulation: the picture at the top is via Merulana, the street the museum faces, and not the museum. A collection like this is told in words and looked at in person.
Practical information
Details checked on 16 September 2026 on the official Palazzo Merulana website and on the CoopCulture ticket office. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 13 euros and covers both the permanent collection and the exhibitions on show; the reduced ticket costs 11 euros and is for over-65s, working teachers and holders of several partner cards. Anyone between 7 and 25 pays 8 euros, which is the lowest rate: ask for it, because it is not the one you are given by default. Schools pay 6 euros per student and booking online adds 2 euros. Free admission. Children under seven go in free, as do people with disabilities with a companion, one teacher for every ten students, ICOM members and licensed tour guides. Opening hours. Wednesday to Friday 12:00-20:00, with entry on the hour; Saturday and Sunday 10:00-20:00. Last admission is at 19:00. The museum stays closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and that is what wrecks most visits: it is one of the few museums in Rome with two closing days in a row. What you can see for free. The sculpture hall, the café and the bookshop are open without a ticket from Wednesday to Sunday, from 9:00 to 20:00. Getting there. The museum is at via Merulana 121. The nearest metro A stops are Vittorio Emanuele and Manzoni, about ten minutes away on foot; from Santa Maria Maggiore you walk down via Merulana itself. How long to allow. The collection needs an hour. Allow an hour and a half if there is a temporary exhibition, and half an hour more if you stop in the ground-floor hall.
Where to go from here
The public collection covering the same period, with many more works and less concentration on Rome, is the National Gallery of Modern Art, on the other side of the city inside Villa Borghese. For the art of the following century, the Roman reference is the MAXXI.
If the neighbourhood interests you more than the collection, Santa Maria Maggiore and San Giovanni are a few minutes away on foot, and the full map of the city’s museums is in Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: via Merulana by NikonZ7II (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
