On via della Lungara, the straight street that runs from porta Settimiana towards the Vatican, a low wall lets you glimpse a garden, and behind the garden a two-storey building with two projecting wings, wide and low like a country house. No flight of steps, no monumental front.
Inside there are frescoes by Raphael, by Sebastiano del Piombo, by Sodoma and by Baldassare Peruzzi. The patron was neither a pope nor a cardinal: he was Agostino Chigi, a Sienese banker who lent money to popes and who had the house where he entertained built here. The difficulty is getting there at the right hour, because the villa closes at 14:00 and does not open on Sundays, apart from the second Sunday of the month.
The whole villa is six rooms, and it is worth taking them in the order in which you meet them, first the two ground-floor loggias and then the two rooms upstairs.
Why does a villa built for a Sienese banker carry the name of the Farnese?
Let’s begin!
The banker, the villa and the name that is not his
Agostino Chigi was born in Siena in 1466 and in Rome became the man who financed the popes’ wars, with the concession of the alum mines at Tolfa and a network of branches across half of Europe. In May 1505 he called in Baldassare Peruzzi, a fellow Sienese, and on 22 April 1506 the first stone was laid.
He asked for a suburban villa, a kind of building that did not yet exist in Rome in that form: outside the inhabited walls, in the middle of a garden that ran down to the Tiber, with loggias open onto the greenery and banquets served outdoors. The two loggias you visit today behind glass were open, and you grasp it by looking at where the frescoes stop.
Chigi died in 1520, at fifty-four, and the villa changed hands several times. In 1579 it was bought by cardinal Alessandro Farnese the Younger, who already owned the enormous palace on the other bank of the river: from then on this one, to tell them apart, has been the Farnesina, the little one. Today it belongs to the Accademia dei Lincei, which has its seat in palazzo Corsini across the road.
1. The Triumph of Galatea
Walk into the loggia on the right and look for the end wall. The nymph Galatea crosses the sea standing on a shell drawn by two dolphins, her red cloak billowing behind her shoulders, while in the sky cupids draw their bows and around her tritons carry off the nereids, one of them blowing a horn. Raphael painted her around 1511-1512.
What is Galatea looking at, if she is not looking at the person looking at her?
Galatea looks up to the left, towards the one cupid who is not shooting: he emerges from behind a cloud with a bundle of arrows in his hand, and he is read as the symbol of chaste love. Raphael builds the whole composition on a spiral: the bodies turn around the nymph, the three cupids in the sky point their arrows at her, and below the boy Palaemon drives the dolphins. Follow the lines of the bows and you find yourself on her face without meaning to.
Who posed for Galatea we do not know, and in all likelihood nobody did. In a letter to count Baldassarre Castiglione, Raphael wrote that to paint a beautiful woman he did not copy a model, but made use of «a certain idea» that came into his mind. That line has always been quoted about this figure. It is one of the few times a sixteenth-century painter puts down in writing how he works.
2. The Polyphemus by Sebastiano del Piombo
On the same wall, to the left of the Galatea, a giant sits with his back to us and his head turned towards her. He is Polyphemus, the cyclops in love with the nymph, and he was painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, who had arrived in Rome from Venice a few years earlier. The sources do not agree on which of the two painted first, and what matters is that the two hands face each other from a metre away.
Look at the two frescoes side by side, because it is for the comparison that they were put on the same wall. Sebastiano comes from Venice and paints with colour: the giant’s flesh is built out of shifts of tone, and the landscape behind him is lost in a damp light. Raphael builds with drawing and with movement. Two Italian schools set a metre apart, and it is no accident: Chigi set his artists in competition inside the same room.
In the lunettes above, also by Sebastiano, run scenes taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Looking at them means tipping your head back, which is why almost everybody skips them; they are, though, the part where the Venetian painter is at his freest.
One curiosity: there are ten lunettes, and the tenth has no scene. It carries the huge head of a young man, drawn in charcoal and never painted. Art historians assign it to Peruzzi or to Sebastiano himself; legend, on the other hand, will have it that Michelangelo traced it, having slipped in to show Raphael what he was capable of. No document proves it and the story appears much later, so take it for what it is: a tale handed down in front of a drawing that is there all the same.
3. The vault with Chigi’s horoscope
Now look at the ceiling of that same loggia, which Peruzzi frescoed in the first months of 1511. It looks like an ordinary sequence of deities and constellations, and it is not: it is the horoscope of the master of the house, the exact position of the sky at the moment Agostino Chigi was born.
The programme was calculated by an astrologer and put into shape by the humanist Cornelio Benigni, and each panel corresponds to a planet, a sign or a constellation in the position it occupied that night. This is not mythological decoration: it is a painted astronomical document, and scholars have used it to work out Chigi’s date of birth.
Keep one thing in mind while you look at it: for the man who commissioned a vault like this, a horoscope was not a game. It was the way a man declared that his fortune was written in the sky, and therefore legitimate.
4. The Loggia of Cupid and Psyche
Go back into the entrance hall and pass into the large loggia, the one that gives onto the garden. The vault tells the fable of Cupid and Psyche as Apuleius writes it, and it was painted in 1518 by Raphael with his workshop, which is to say by Giulio Romano, Giovan Francesco Penni and Giovanni da Udine.
The overall design is Raphael’s and the execution almost entirely his men’s, and it shows: the figures are large, clear, a little cold. The thing that on its own makes the visit worthwhile is the border instead. Giovanni da Udine painted a pergola of plant festoons all around the scenes, and put a hundred and seventy plant species into it, counted by botanical studies, along with dozens of animals painted from life.
Look for the maize, the pumpkin and the beans. All three come from the Americas, discovered only a few decades earlier, and they are among the oldest European depictions of those plants: they reached the ceiling of a Roman loggia before they reached an Italian field.
5. The Hall of Perspectives, and the writing left by the Landsknechts
Go up to the first floor and walk into the great hall. The walls open onto a painted colonnade, and between the columns you see Rome: countryside, roofs, bell towers, the city as it looked from here in the sixteenth century. It was painted by Peruzzi, who was an architect before he was a painter, and who built the whole room on the illusion of space.
Find the spot in the room from which the illusion holds best, then move towards one of the walls: the colonnade distorts and the trick comes apart. It is the proof that Peruzzi worked for an observer standing still at a precise point.
Now get close to the painted columns and look at the plaster. Between one column and the next there is graffiti left by the Landsknechts who camped inside the villa in 1527, during the Sack of Rome. One of them, in German and in gothic characters, is dated 1528 and runs roughly like this: why should I who write not laugh, if the Landsknechts have made the pope run away.
There are very few rooms in which the great painting of the Renaissance and the signature of the men who were looting it can be read on the same wall.
6. The Wedding of Alexander and Roxana
The last room was Chigi’s bedroom, and it was frescoed by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, whom everybody calls Sodoma, around 1519.
The main scene is the marriage between Alexander the Great and Roxana, the Persian princess: she sits on the bed surrounded by cupids taking off her sandals and her veil, he holds out the crown to her, and on the right, outside the canopy, a young man with a torch leans on a naked companion. The sources identify them as Hephaestion, Alexander’s friend, and Hymen, the god of weddings, but they do not agree on which of the two holds the torch. On the floor, in the foreground, a helmet has been left behind.
Why have the wedding of an ancient king painted in your own bedroom?
The subject was not picked at random, and it is not a generic compliment either. Agostino Chigi had brought Francesca Ordeaschi to Rome, a Venetian woman he had lived with for years and with whom he had had children. He married her on 28 August 1519, in the presence of pope Leo X, and the wedding was celebrated in the Hall of Perspectives, the room you have just read about: this bedroom comments on it by comparing it to a king’s.
Practical information
Details checked on 17 September 2026 on the official website, villafarnesina.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Full price is 12 euros and covers the villa and any exhibition on show. The reduced ticket costs 10 euros and is for students, over-65s and anyone holding one of the partnerships listed by the ticket office. Opening hours. Monday to Saturday 9:00-14:00, with last admission at 13:15. On Sundays the villa is closed, with one exception: on the second Sunday of every month it opens 9:00-17:00, with last admission at 16:15. Free admission. Children up to ten go in free, as do people with disabilities with a companion, licensed tour guides and accredited journalists. Mind the name. In Rome there are three things called this, and the confusion sends people to the wrong place. This is Chigi’s villa, in Trastevere. The Farnesina Collection is the contemporary art collection of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the other end of the city. The Roman villa of the Farnesina is instead an ancient house excavated right below here in the nineteenth century, and its frescoes are on show at Palazzo Massimo. Getting there. The villa is at via della Lungara 230. Buses 23 and 280 stop on the lungotevere two hundred metres away; from piazza Trilussa you walk here in ten minutes going up via della Lungara. How long to allow. The six rooms need an hour. Make it an hour and a half if you read the lunettes by Sebastiano del Piombo and if you hunt for the plants of the loggia one by one.
Where to go from here
Across the street, fifty metres from the door, is the Galleria Corsini, the only eighteenth-century picture gallery in Rome left as it was: the two visits are done one after the other in the same morning, and that is the best reason to come to this side of the river.
If you are here for Raphael, the sequel is the Stanze of the Vatican Museums, painted in the same years and a kilometre from here. To find your way among all the collections in the city there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: garden front, Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, Hall of Perspectives and Wedding of Alexander and Roxana by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra (CC BY 2.0); Triumph of Galatea by Vicenç Valcárcel Pérez (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
