At the top of the Spanish Steps, the avenue that leads to the Pincio runs past a closed, severe facade. It is Villa Medici, and from the street it gives nothing away: on the other side there is a facade covered in ancient reliefs between two towers, a sixteenth-century garden and the rooms of a cardinal who was to become Grand Duke of Tuscany.
Since 1803 it has been the home of the French Academy in Rome, and you visit it the way you visit a lived-in house: the garden and the historic rooms can be seen only on a guided tour, which lasts an hour and a half. The villa is closed on Tuesdays; tours in English leave several times a day, so book ahead.
The first of the six things in this guide can be seen for free, from the avenue.
Why did two pieces of the Ara Pacis never go back to the Ara Pacis?
Let’s begin!
From a cardinal from Montepulciano to Napoleon
The land was bought in 1564 by cardinal Giovanni Ricci da Montepulciano, who began the building. In 1576 the villa passed to cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, who had Bartolomeo Ammannati complete it and filled it with antiquities.
Keep in mind what happened next, because it explains half the visit. Ferdinando became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1587, the villa stayed with the Medici, and over the next two centuries the best pieces took the road to Florence: the Medici Venus, the group of the Niobids, Giambologna’s Mercury. At many points of the visit you will see the place where a masterpiece used to stand, and the villa makes you understand it with copies.
In 1633 Galileo Galilei stayed here, a guest of the Medici during his trial by the Inquisition. In 1803 Napoleon made it the seat of the French Academy, which for a century and a half housed the winners of the Prix de Rome: Hector Berlioz and Claude Debussy passed through, and Ingres directed it. From 1961 to 1977 the director was the painter Balthus, who restored the villa and replanted the pines in the garden.
1. The fountain in front of the villa, and the legend of the cannonball
Before you go in, stop on the terrace in front of the entrance. There is a fountain with a round basin and a sphere of dark stone in the middle, with water coming out of a spout on top, and from there the view opens over Rome. You do not need a ticket: it is the part of the villa every Roman knows without ever having been inside.
The sphere has a legend. The story goes that it is a cannonball fired from Castel Sant’Angelo by Queen Christina of Sweden, and that it stayed where it fell. It is a tale that passes from guidebook to guidebook without a document to support it: take it for what it is, a Roman legend, and enjoy the view.
2. The garden facade, and the Ara Pacis garlands
From the garden the villa changes face. The inner facade is covered with ancient reliefs, laid out symmetrically over four storeys: mythological scenes and sacrifices, episodes of Trajan’s wars against the Dacians, Hercules fighting the Nemean lion. It is a collection set into the wall: in the sixteenth century antiquities were displayed like this, embedded in the architecture.
On the side wings there are garlands with ox skulls from the Ara Pacis, Augustus’s altar of peace. The altar’s reliefs had ended up here as collector’s pieces, long before anyone knew which monument they belonged to; in the eighteenth century most of them left for Florence. When the Ara Pacis was rebuilt in Rome in 1937-1938, the slabs in the Uffizi came back, and the ones set into this wall did not: in the reconstruction they were remade in plaster.
Pick out the garlands, and then go to the Ara Pacis: standing in front of those pieces you will know that the original is here, on the Pincio, inside a French garden.
3. Ferdinando’s Studiolo, and the room of the birds
At the far end of the garden and above the Aurelian Walls, Ferdinando had a small pavilion built that everyone now calls the Studiolo. The main room measures six metres by six and occupies the top of one of the towers of the walls. Its vault was frescoed by Jacopo Zucchi, probably with assistants, between August 1576 and April 1577.
The subject is a pergola full of birds and plants, and its novelty is the background: white, instead of the blue sky that Roman painters of the time put behind their pergolas. The birds and plants are copied from scientific prints and drawings, with the rigour of a herbal. Among the birds, in the branches of a pomegranate, there is a turkey, an animal that had reached Europe from the Americas only a few decades earlier: look for it, because to a cardinal of 1576 it was as exotic a curiosity as a parrot.
How can a vault painted in 1576 stay unknown until 1985?
Because someone covered it. It most probably happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Academy turned the pavilion into a studio: the vault, damaged by leaks, was whitewashed, and further layers of paint wiped it from memory. At the end of the eighteenth century the Marquis de Sade had still seen it, and described and praised it. It was rediscovered in July 1985 by Géraldine Albers, a restorer and at the time a fellow of the Academy, and the latest restoration was completed in 2010-2011.
Next to it there is a small corridor-shaped room that, by contrast, was never covered, and is decorated with Aurora, the seasons, Phaedrus’s fables and small views of the villa and its gardens. Look at them carefully, because they show the garden as it was designed.
4. The Niobids, copies of a group that left for Florence
Deep in the garden are the Niobids: thirteen statues telling the myth of Niobe, the mother who boasted of her children in front of Leto and saw them killed by Apollo and Artemis. Among the figures there is also a horse.
They are copies. The originals were found in Rome in 1583, Ferdinando bought them and set them here, and in 1770 they left for Florence: today they are in the Uffizi, in a room built specially for them.
Why does a villa display copies of the statues it has lost?
Because since 2000 the garden has been restored to recover its sixteenth-century design, and in that design the Niobids had their place. Without the copies, Ferdinando’s garden would lose one of its most famous pieces.
5. The cast gallery, where drawing was learned
Near the Niobids is the gipsoteca, the collection of plaster casts that the Academy’s fellows made from the seventeenth century onwards from ancient originals. There are the Belvedere Torso, an Apollo, the gigantic heads of Juno and Minerva, and many portraits of emperors, philosophers, poets and generals.
Think about what it was for. For a sculptor, copying a cast was the daily exercise, and for a painter it was the way to learn to draw the body from ancient statues. This collection was the Academy’s school. If you have seen the plasters of the Museo Pietro Canonica, the comparison is instructive: there the plaster served to make a statue, here it served to learn.
6. Giambologna’s Mercury, which left from here
Walk back towards the villa. On the fountain in the middle of the steps between the garden and the entrance loggia stands Giambologna’s Mercury, balanced on the tip of his left foot, his right leg thrown back, as if about to take flight.
It is a copy, and the story of the original explains why it is here. Giambologna finished it in 1580, and it was sent from Florence to this very villa, to crown this very fountain. It stayed until 1780, when Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo took it to the Uffizi, and around 1870 it moved to the Bargello, where visitors to Florence see it.
So see it here, with the garden in front and the Roman sky behind: this is the place where the original bronze stood for two centuries, before it became a museum piece.
Practical information
Details checked on 21 September 2026 on the official website, villamedici.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. The guided tour of the garden and the historic rooms costs 18 euros full price. The reduced ticket costs 15 euros and is for under-25s and job seekers. You book on the official website, ideally a few days in advance. The villa’s temporary exhibitions have separate admission, on their own terms. Free admission. Among others, under-18s, disabled visitors with a companion and ICOM members go in free. Opening hours. The villa opens every day except Tuesday, 9:30-19:00, and the ticket office closes at 18:30. The guided tour lasts ninety minutes. In English, tours leave at 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 14:30, 15:30, 16:30 and 17:30, with an extra one at 18:00 at weekends; in Italian at 11:00, 15:30 and 17:30; in French almost every hour; in Spanish on Wednesdays at 15:00 and on Sundays at 11:00. Getting there. The villa is at viale della Trinità dei Monti 1, at the top of the Spanish Steps. The metro A stop is Spagna, and from the square you walk up. How long to allow. The visit needs an hour and a half. Add half an hour for the terrace and the fountain, and an hour if you carry on walking through the Pincio.
Where to go from here
The natural next step is the Ara Pacis, where the garlands from the facade wait for you in plaster. At the foot of the Spanish Steps is the Barcaccia fountain, and the story of the Aurelian Walls on which the Studiolo stands is told by the Museum of the Walls.
From the Pincio you can walk to Villa Borghese and the Galleria Borghese, the other great collection of a cardinal a short walk from here, that of Scipione Borghese. And if you are putting together a round of Roman museums, the place to start is Museums in Rome: the 8 not to miss.
Photo credits: the garden facade is by Laterbat (CC BY-SA 4.0); the fountain is by Robs12 (CC BY 3.0); the Ara Pacis garland is by Sailko (CC BY 3.0); the turkey and the Niobids are by Sailko (CC BY-SA 3.0); the Mercury is by Jean-Pol Grandmont (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons.
