Carlo Bilotti Museum – Orangery of Villa Borghese

The Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese occupies the old Orangery of the park, with entrances at Via Fiorello La Guardia 6 and at Viale dell'Aranciera 4, 00197 Rome, in the southern sector of Villa Borghese, a stone's throw from the Casa del Cinema and a few hundred meters from Porta Pinciana. You get there by Metro A getting off at Spagna, Barberini or Flaminio and continuing on foot through the park, or by the buses that serve Piazzale Brasile and Porta Pinciana: 61, 89, 160, 490, 495, 590, C3, plus the 120F and 150F on holidays and the night buses N1 and N25. The museum is open Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 16:00 and Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00, with last admission 45 minutes before closing. On December 24 and 31 the hours are reduced to 10:00-14:00. It is closed on Monday, on December 25 and on May 1. The ticket for the collection alone costs €7.50 full price and €6.00 reduced. The combined ticket that also includes the Museo Pietro Canonica costs €11.00 full price and €7.50 reduced, and advance purchase online adds €1.00 in presale fee. From February 2, 2026, residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City get in free by showing an ID, and the same free admission applies to holders of the MIC card, which costs €5.00 and lasts 12 months. For some exhibitions, those entitled to free admission must still get a super-reduced ticket of €2.00. Booking is not mandatory for the permanent collection. Information and reservations go through the number 060608, active every day from 9:00 to 19:00, and through the address info@museocarlobilotti.it.

This guide is part of the collection dedicated to Villa Borghese, where you'll find the park's other museums, theaters and gardens with hours and prices.

What the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese really is

It's the civic contemporary art museum of Roma Capitale that nobody expects to find inside a park. Not an encyclopedic museum, not a collection grown by layering over the centuries: a compact core of 23 works donated by a single man to the city, set in a 17th-century building that for 150 years served to shelter pots of citrus trees. The center of gravity is Giorgio de Chirico, with 18 works among paintings, watercolors and sculptures. Around them are arranged three family portraits signed by Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers and Mimmo Rotella, a canvas by Gino Severini, a bronze by Giacomo Manzù and a handful of acquisitions that came later.

The difference from the other museums in the area is worth stating right away, because it shapes the day. You go to the Galleria Borghese for Bernini and Caravaggio, with a timed-slot reservation and a timed visit. You go to the Galleria d'Arte Moderna on Via Francesco Crispi for Roman painting between the 19th and 20th centuries. You go to the Museo Pietro Canonica, on the other side of the park, for a sculptor's house-studio. Here you come for de Chirico, and you stay barely 40 minutes if you look in a hurry, two hours if you really look. The rooms are few, the light is excellent, the visitors are very few compared to any other museum inside the ring road. It's one of the rare places in Rome where you can be alone in front of an important painting without having to get up at seven in the morning.

The museum belongs to the Roma Capitale Museum System, which Romans call Musei in Comune, and is run by the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali. The name that appears on the agency's documents is Museo Carlo Bilotti Aranciera di Villa Borghese: the first name is the donor's, the second the building's. Neither is decorative, and knowing both helps you understand why a collection put together between New York and Palm Beach ended up inside a papal greenhouse.

The Orangery of Villa Borghese before the museum: four centuries in one building

The most common mistake is to believe the Orangery was born as an orangery. It's the opposite: the orangery is its humiliation, not its vocation. Before becoming a warehouse for lemon pots, this building was a prestigious residence, then a party pavilion with water games, then a shelled ruin. The story has to be read backwards from the name it bears.

From the Ceuli to Cardinal Scipione Borghese

A building existed at this spot on the hill before the villa existed. The museum's sources indicate it as a residence of some prestige of the noble Ceuli family, so already a stately construction and not a farmhouse, later absorbed into the purchases with which Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Paul V, put together his villa outside Porta Pinciana from 1606 onward. Scipione bought land and found buildings inside it: some he razed to the ground, others he adapted. This one went into the second group.

It's worth recalling who the patron was, because the villa and the museum are born of the same appetite. Scipione Borghese, who lived between 1576 and 1633, is the cardinal who made the private collection an instrument of political prestige: he bought Caravaggio, had Bernini sculpt, obtained paintings through procedures we would today call abuse of office. Four centuries later, inside one of his buildings, the city placed the private collection of another man who had made a total passion of the art of his own time. The symmetry is accidental, but it's beautiful.

The Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua of Marcantonio IV Borghese

In 1650 Jacopo Manilli, who wrote the most cited description of the villa in the 17th century, records a two-story building with a small tower, covered loggias, a square courtyard painted with figures and landscapes in colored sgraffito, and in the center of the courtyard a fountain in the shape of a little boat. Keep this boat fountain in mind: it's the only 17th-century decorative element of which we have a precise description, and it has vanished entirely.

The leap in quality comes at the end of the 18th century with Marcantonio IV Borghese, who lived between 1730 and 1800, the prince who remade Villa Borghese in a landscape style and invented the Garden of the Lake with the little temple of Aesculapius. The building was enlarged and decorated and became the Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua, so called for the fountains and baroque nymphaea that surrounded it. It was the pavilion where the princely court held parties and society events, at the top of the slope that runs down toward the little lake. To understand what the scene was like, go see the Garden of the Lake and the secret gardens that still exist a few hundred meters away: that logic of water, statues, stagecraft and aristocratic leisure is the same.

Unterperger, Cades and the frescoes that are gone

From 1776 several artists frescoed the interior walls. The two documented names are Cristoforo Unterperger, a painter of Trentino origin active in Rome in the great neoclassical building projects and in the copying of the Vatican Loggias, and Giuseppe Cades, a Roman, a formidable draftsman and one of the inventors of the most theatrical neoclassical taste. They were two top-tier professionals: calling them to decorate a party pavilion says how much that pavilion mattered.

Of those frescoes nothing remains today. It's the building's most painful loss, and the reason why those who enter find themselves facing white walls and bare vaults. Anyone expecting a decorated historic interior is thrown off: here the history is read in the masonry and the proportions, not in the surfaces. I consider this nakedness an advantage for the contemporary painting hung on the walls, but it's a museologist's consolation, not an art historian's: the building lost its most precious layer and will never recover it.

1849, the cannons and the end of the decorations

The war events of 1849, at the fall of the Roman Republic, caused very serious damage to the building. Villa Borghese found itself inside the perimeter of the military operations and the cannon fire did the rest. When the building was rebuilt, it was rebuilt freely and without restoring any of its decorations: from party pavilion it became a winter shelter for pots of citrus trees. Hence the name by which everyone still calls it today.

This is the point to keep in mind when you arrive in front of the museum. The name Orangery celebrates nothing: it records a demotion. It's the name a building takes when nobody has the money or the desire anymore to redo its frescoes.

From 1903 to the municipal offices: 80 years of sleep

In 1903, when Villa Borghese passed to the City of Rome and the park became public, the building was used for offices and housing. From there on its career is the typical one of forgotten municipal property: seat of a religious institute, then municipal offices until 1982. 80 years of desks, files, partitions and false ceilings inside a 17th-century building. Anyone who has worked on Roman public heritage recognizes the pattern.

The restoration and the birth of the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The restoration stripped away those later additions and made the original structure legible again, making it possible, among other things, to reconstruct the building's construction phases. The result is a two-level building with regular rooms, controlled light and a clean break between the old shell and the contemporary installation. The museum was inaugurated on May 10, 2006.

In the following 20 years the structure has welcomed over 100,000 visitors a year and has hosted more than 100 exhibitions, 150 concerts and 300 events. For a museum of a few rooms in the middle of a park these are numbers worth looking at closely: they mean the Orangery works as a living container and not as a display case.

Who Carlo Bilotti was, the man who gave the museum its name

Without him this museum wouldn't exist, and his biography explains why the collection is the way it is and not otherwise. It's not the collection of a connoisseur who buys on the market: it's the collection of a man who knew the artists from having dinner with them.

From the family paper mills to international perfumes

Carlo Bilotti was the son of Mario Bilotti and Edvige Miceli of the barons of Serradileo. He studied law between Naples and Palermo and began working in the family paper mills and in other industries. In 1963 he attended Columbia University in New York. In 1968 he married Margaret Embury Schultz, the Tina of the portraits you'll see on the walls.

His industrial career is that of a luxury manager of the American school. He was vice president for Europe of Shulton. In 1973 he became president of Jacqueline Cochran, the house that produced perfumes for brands like Nina Ricci, Carven and Pierre Cardin. He acquired La Prairie in Switzerland and created a treatment line from it promoted by Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon of the first heart transplant. He then worked in finance and in the art market between Paris, New York, Zurich, Basel and London. He lived between Palm Beach, New York and Rome with his wife and their adopted children Eric and Megan.

The artist friends

The trait that matters, for those looking at the collection, is the list of his friendships: de Chirico, Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Salvador Dalí, Niki de Saint Phalle, Larry Rivers, Mimmo Rotella. They weren't names in an auction catalog, they were people he had dinner with. From many of them he commissioned works directly, and you can see it: three of the museum's non-de Chirico works are family portraits, that is, objects born inside a personal relationship and not bought at a sale.

With Niki de Saint Phalle he had the anthropomorphic bottles produced for Nina Ricci perfumes, one of the rare cases in which a top-level sculptor designed a mass-produced flask. With Warhol, besides the double portrait kept here, series dedicated to the Irises were born. This is the point where the luxury industry and contemporary art truly touch, and Bilotti lived exactly at that point.

Cosenza, the MAB and the double donation

The Roman story is not isolated. Bilotti felt the need to make his collection public and set up two patronage operations, one in Cosenza and one in Rome. In Cosenza he is the originator of the MAB, the Museo all'Aperto Bilotti, which turned the city's main street into a permanent route with about 40 monumental sculptures, and he contributed important donations to the local public gallery, in particular for 20th-century sculpture. In 2000 he donated to the Fondazione Oasi Francescana of Cosenza a plot of land for a shelter. In the United States the Lisa Bilotti Foundation supports research on leukemia every year at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

A firm opinion: Bilotti's patronage was smarter than Italian critics have ever admitted. He didn't build a new museum named after himself in a city that already had a hundred: he put his collection inside a run-down public building, forcing the administration to restore it. The donation was also a lever. It worked.

The collection of the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The permanent collection counts 23 works donated by Carlo Bilotti to the city of Rome. The number is small and should be said without embarrassment: you don't come here for quantity. You come because 18 of those works are by Giorgio de Chirico, 17 displayed in the main room and one, the sculpture Hector and Andromache, placed outdoors in front of the building.

The rest of the donation falls into two groups. The first is the family portraits: Mother and Daughter: Tina and Lisa Bilotti by Andy Warhol from 1981, Carlo with Dubuffet in the Background by Larry Rivers from 1994, Carlo and Tina Bilotti by Mimmo Rotella from 1968. The second is the two historical pieces of greatest weight: Summer by Gino Severini from 1951 and the Cardinal by Giacomo Manzù, whose monumental bronze version welcomes visitors outside. In the years after the donation, works by Pietro Consagra, Jimmie Durham, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Nicola Pucci were added. The list of acquisitions also appears under the name of Marion Greenstone.

A useful clarification, because it avoids disappointment at the ticket desk: some rooms of the museum are set aside for temporary exhibitions, and during installation periods the visible part of the permanent collection shrinks. Those who come for a specific painting do well to call 060608 before setting out.

Giorgio de Chirico at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

18 works don't make a retrospective, but this core covers half a century of work and allows something the big museums almost never grant: seeing de Chirico after Metaphysical art. The season of the Piazze d'Italia and the enigmas, the one everyone knows from the textbooks, is represented only indirectly, through late replicas. What you see in the room is the other de Chirico, the one who from 1929 on lives in Rome, quarrels with the critics, copies himself, paints like a baroque master and sculpts his own mannequins in bronze. It's the most uncomfortable de Chirico, and that's why he's interesting.

Who Giorgio de Chirico was

He was born on July 10, 1888 in Volos, Greece, where his father, an engineer, worked on the construction of the railway line between Athens and Thessaloniki. He studied in Athens, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he looked at Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger and read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Weininger. In 1908 he began painting under the sign of Böcklin, and in 1910 he arrived at that metaphysical subject that changes everything, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon.

In 1911 he moved to Paris, where on the advice of Guillaume Apollinaire and on the recommendation of the painter Pierre Laprade he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne: these are the years of the Piazze d'Italia. In 1915 he was called back to Italy for the war and assigned to Ferrara, where he met Carlo Carrà, Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini and Filippo de Pisis. In 1929 he returned to Italy for good and took a home in Rome. In 1931 he married Isabella Pakszwer, the Isa who appears in all the histories of his late work. He died in 1978 in his home in Piazza di Spagna, a kilometer and a half as the crow flies from the Orangery where his paintings can be seen today.

This geographical closeness is not a postcard detail. De Chirico spent 40 years 200 meters from the Trinità dei Monti staircase, walking up to the Pincio and crossing Villa Borghese like any Roman of the neighborhood. The museum that holds his works is inside his extended block.

Mysterious Archaeologists, the piece that opens the room

The 1926 painting also known as Mannequins and as The Day and the Night is the leader of the core. It belongs to the Paris season in which de Chirico builds his archaeologists: seated mannequins, with egg-shaped heads without a face, bellies swollen with ancient buildings, temples, towers, pediments. It's a very powerful idea and in some ways a cruel one: inside the man there are no organs, there are ruins.

In front of the original, look at two things. The first is the paint: it is dense, almost impasto, very far from the smooth surfaces of the metaphysical paintings of 1913. The second is the position of the hands, which in de Chirico's mannequins never gesture at random.

Furniture in a Room and The Archaeologists

Furniture in a Room, from 1927, belongs to the series in which de Chirico takes bourgeois furnishings outdoors, into the middle of a landscape: dressers, armchairs, mirrors placed on a plain as if someone had emptied an apartment into a field. It's among his inventions that Surrealism plundered the most, and it remains one of his fiercest jokes about domesticity.

The Archaeologists, datable to around 1927, takes up the theme of the previous painting in a double version. In the museum the two paintings are placed side by side and it's best to look at them in sequence: the same idea, developed a few weeks apart, in two different directions.

Horses by the Sea and the ancient horsemen

Horses by the Sea, from 1927-1928, is the theme that made de Chirico hugely popular and, for a long time, suspect in the eyes of militant critics: white horses rearing on a beach, broken columns, a sky out of Greek tragedy. He painted dozens of them, and this is one of the good ones. Next to it you'll find Horseman with Two Ancient Figures by the Sea, from around 1929, and Warrior Holding a Horse by the Bridle, from around 1953, which shows how the same repertoire holds up for 25 years.

This group is, in our view, the part most overrated by the public and most underrated by the critics. The public loves them because they're decorative. The critics dismissed them for the same reason. In reality they are a conscious exercise on the myth of the classical and on how you paint a cliché knowing it's a cliché.

Blonde Woman from Behind

Around 1930 de Chirico paints a female figure seen from behind, a work that the museum also records under the title that describes the nude seen from the back. It's the year in which the painter begins his long war against contemporary art and starts studying Rubens, the 18th-century Venetians, baroque painting. Look at how the hair and skin are rendered: here there is no Metaphysical art, there is a painter who wants to prove he can paint like the old masters.

The Solitary Archaeologist, 1937

Oil on canvas, 60 by 50 centimeters, datable to around 1937. It's a 1930s variant of the series of mannequins that the artist called, from time to time, philosophers, archaeologists, poets or painters, begun in the mid-1920s. The room is almost monochrome, crossed by a warm luminosity that suspends time. The detail to look for is the raised hand of someone about to say something who can't: the whole meaning of the painting is there.

The provenance tells its own story. The painting passed through the Galleria d'Arte La Navicella in Viareggio, the Galleria Medea in Milan, the Galleria Gissi in Turin, the Luisa Spagnoli collection, Christie's in London and the Waddington Gallery. Six documented stages before arriving in a park in Rome.

Self-Portrait with Head of Minerva

Oil on canvas, 80 by 60 centimeters, 1950s. De Chirico portrays himself next to a plaster head of Minerva, one of the casts he kept in his studio, with the palette in one hand and the brush in the other, dressed as a painter of the late Renaissance tradition. The background is a red drape, exactly as in classical Italian portraiture.

The painting is a declaration of war disguised as a self-portrait. In the decade in which Italian art debates Informel and abstraction, the inventor of Metaphysical art paints himself in 17th-century costume with his tools in hand. The provenance passes through Isabella Far de Chirico, the Australian collector Peter Wilenski and a Sotheby's auction in New York in 2001.

Historic Regattas in Venice

Also 1950s. This is the de Chirico who paints sumptuous, colorful Venetian views, openly indebted to the Venetian 18th century. Many visitors stop for a second and move on, convinced they are in front of a minor piece. Stop two minutes longer and look at the water: it's painted by someone who studied Canaletto and Guardi with a pencil in hand, not with nostalgia.

Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits

Oil on canvas, 80 by 60 centimeters, late 1960s. It's a reworking of a famous painting from 1918: the interior space is built with deliberately incoherent perspective planes, opens on the right onto a window and simulates a second opening in the background, where buildings are reproduced on a framed canvas. On the floor rest set squares and geometric shapes. On a vertical shelf are fixed a biscuit, a fife, a box of matches, a white ring-shaped bun with red bands.

The provenance indicates a private owner in Turin and the Galleria Annunciata in Milan. This is one of the paintings on which it's worth spending the talk about replicas, and I do it further on. Here it's enough to say that de Chirico remade his own metaphysical masterpieces for 50 years, and that the museum records the late dating without hiding it.

Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, girl with hoop

Watercolor, 1970s, a replica of one of the most famous paintings in the history of 20th-century art: the girl running with a hoop inside a street in shadow, with the white arcade backlit and the stopped cart. The 1914 original is in a private American collection and is practically invisible to the public. This late version, on paper, is the simplest chance a Roman has to stand in front of that composition without taking a plane.

Solitary Orpheus, 1973

Oil on canvas, 81.3 by 62.2 centimeters, painted five years before his death. The god of music holds the lyre on a stage, with a Mediterranean backdrop of luminous seascapes, white houses and olive trees. The palette is sunny, almost childlike. It's one of the last depictions in which the aged painter looks to his land of origin and takes on the role of artist, singer and mannequin all at once, bidding the public farewell by offering a sample of his repertoire.

If I had to choose a single painting from this museum, I'd choose this one. It's not the most famous and it's not the most beautiful: it's the one in which you feel most clearly that whoever painted it knew he was at the end and decided to leave the stage as an actor, not as a philosopher.

The sculptures: Orestes and Pylades and The Archaeologist

Orestes and Pylades is a bronze 28 centimeters tall, edition VI/VI from 1965 from a terracotta of 1940, placed in Room 2. The subject is the pair of inseparable friends from Greek tragedy: Orestes, who killed his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus to avenge his father Agamemnon, and his cousin Pylades who followed him everywhere. The work is also known by the title Ancient Friends, which better clarifies its meaning: the figure on the left rests his hand on his companion's shoulder and the two heads touch. De Chirico represents them as mannequins with egg-shaped heads, their bellies covered by a proliferation of ancient buildings.

The Archaeologist is a sculpture from 1972, edition IV/VII made in 1988. Together with Orestes and Pylades it demonstrates something that escapes those who know de Chirico only as a painter: in the last 20 years of his life he systematically translated into three dimensions the figures he had invented on canvas 60 years earlier.

The watercolors: Horse and Ancient Horseman

Two sheets, one datable to around 1950 and the other to around 1960. They are the pieces the public walks past fastest and that instead tell best of all how the hand worked: the line is quick, the watercolor is laid down in a few fields of color, there is none of the smoothing the painter put into his oils. Those who draw look at them longer than anyone else.

Hector and Andromache in front of the Orangery of Villa Borghese

The sculpture you see outside before even buying a ticket is a bronze 230 centimeters tall, cast in only two copies in 2006 by the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico on the direct commission of Carlo Bilotti, from a plaster model the artist had made in 1966. It reproduces, larger than life, the last farewell between the two Homeric spouses, Hector going to die beneath the walls of Troy and Andromache holding him back.

The mannequins here are almost completely humanized: they have shoulders, twists, a real embrace. A dramatic wind shakes Andromache's dress and conveys the universal value of the gesture. It's the only piece in the museum that can be seen for free 24 hours a day, and it works as a draw for anyone passing along the avenue.

A professional's detail: look at it by walking around it, not from the front. De Chirico built the composition to be read at three quarters, and from that angle the embrace truly closes, while from the front the two bodies seem detached.

The family portraits: Warhol, Rivers and Rotella

These are three paintings that in a public museum would make a strict curator turn up his nose, because they are private portraits of people of no historical importance. Yet together they are the most interesting document of the collection: they show how a collector has himself portrayed by his artist friends over the span of 26 years.

Andy Warhol, Mother and Daughter: Tina and Lisa Bilotti

Acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 101.6 by 101.6 centimeters, 1981, which came to the museum directly from the artist. It portrays Tina and Lisa Bilotti, the collector's wife and daughter. It's a double portrait that is rare in Warhol's output, since he normally worked on a single replicated face.

Its success lies in the oblique pose of the two figures, with long, elegant necks, and in the warm tones emphasized on the lips, which give the faces a dimension at once classical and intimate, with the mother figure predominating and protecting that of the girl. The detail everyone misses: Warhol gave mother and daughter the same brown hair color to underline their resemblance, and in reality that color didn't match. The daughter was 12 years old.

Lisa Bilotti's name returns, many years later, in the American foundation that supports leukemia research at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. In front of this canvas it's worth knowing this, because it completely changes how you look at it.

Larry Rivers, Carlo with Dubuffet in the Background

From 1994. Larry Rivers, one of the protagonists of American painting between Abstract Expressionism and Pop, portrays the collector with a work by Jean Dubuffet behind him. It's a portrait with a built-in quotation, that is, an elegant way of saying who the patron was through what he owned. The game is learned and slightly ironic, and Rivers was a master of this register.

Mimmo Rotella, Carlo and Tina Bilotti

From 1968, the oldest of the three. Rotella, from Calabria like Bilotti, is the inventor of décollage, the technique that tears advertising posters off walls and reassembles them as painting. A couple's portrait signed by him, in the thick of the 1960s, places the family within the circuit of Italian art of the moment, as well as within the American one.

Severini, Manzù and the recent acquisitions

Gino Severini, Summer

Oil on canvas, 116 by 70 centimeters, 1951, from the Prospero Guarini collection in Milan. A majestic female figure whose contours dissolve into an almost abstract geometric structure. Severini uses a simultaneous, faceted vision: angular lines, flat fields of color, zigzag contours, dotted passages and calculated voids that let the background color surface, held together by a rigorous formal logic.

The painting alone sums up three seasons of 20th-century Italian painting: the Roman divisionism of his training, the cubism enriched with color of the Paris years, the futurist dynamism of his youth. All channeled into an elegant and deliberately decorative personification. If the late de Chirico left you perplexed, this is the painting that makes peace between you and the museum.

Giacomo Manzù, the Large Cardinal

A bronze in an edition of eight copies made in 2004 from an original cast of 1965, placed outside the museum. Manzù's cardinals are one of the most recognizable series of 20th-century Italian sculpture: conical forms, almost mountains of cloth, where the body disappears inside the vestment and only a profile of power and solitude remains. Manzù remade them for decades, at all scales, from the tabletop sketch to the monumental figure.

Placing one in front of a papal orangery, a stone's throw from the villa of a cardinal nephew, is one of the few truly witty installation choices that Rome's municipal heritage has allowed itself.

The acquisitions after the donation

The museum did not stop at the initial bequest. Over the years works have entered the collection by Pietro Consagra, among the founders of the Forma 1 group and theorist of frontal sculpture, by Jimmie Durham, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, photographic portraitist of the New York art world, and by Nicola Pucci. The name of Marion Greenstone also appears in the lists. These are additions that shift the center of gravity of the collection slightly from the historical 20th century to the truly contemporary, and it's the right direction for a museum that calls itself a museum of contemporary art.

Room by room: how to visit the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The route is short and runs over two levels. Outside, before going in, are the two monumental bronzes: Hector and Andromache by de Chirico and the Large Cardinal by Manzù. Inside, the main room holds the bulk of the de Chirico core, 17 works, with the family portraits and the Severini pieces forming a crown. Room 2 holds, among other things, the bronze Orestes and Pylades. The remaining rooms are set aside for temporary exhibitions, which at the Bilotti are not a side dish but half of the programming.

The practical advice is to go through the museum twice. The first pass is to satisfy your curiosity and lasts 20 minutes. The second is done in reverse, starting from the last wall, and it's the one in which you see things: the difference in paint between the 1920s and the 1970s, the obsessive recurrence of the same figures, the small formats that get lost next to the big ones. In crowded museums this trick is impossible. Here, on a Tuesday morning, nobody will disturb you.

The permanent collection can also be visited with a guide from the Sovrintendenza. The guided visit lasts 60 minutes, takes a maximum of 25 people, retraces the history of the collection from the original core to the latest acquisitions and is free, admission included. You book at 060608 and it's available with translation into Italian Sign Language. Deaf visitors can also book through the multimedia global communication service for the deaf, active Monday to Friday from 8:30 to 18:30 and Saturday from 8:30 to 13:30.

The temporary exhibitions at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The Bilotti is one of the few Roman civic museums where the temporary programming is worth the trip as much as the collection. In 20 years it has hosted more than 100 exhibitions, with a declared vocation for photography and for the less commercial side of Italian contemporary art.

Magic Lanterns. Photographs from the Valerio De Paolis Collection

From February 14 to September 6, 2026, curated by Alessandra Mauro and Roberto Koch with Suleima Autore. Over 100 photographs by some of the leading figures of the international scene, organized in three thematic sections: An Idea of Woman, An Idea of Space, The Space of Art. It's a route built on pairings, which puts different gazes, spaces and contexts in dialogue instead of following a chronological order. Holders of a Casa del Cinema ticket are entitled to the reduced rate. On this exhibition you'll find a dedicated page on Magic Lanterns at the Bilotti Museum.

Artists at Villa Borghese #3

A cycle of talks on art and nature, from June 18 to October 16, 2026, curated by Claudio Crescentini of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina, with free admission until seats run out and booking recommended at 060608. The calendar alternates living artists and historical reinterpretations: on June 18 at 18:30 Giuseppe Modica with Metaphysical Nature, the Visual Miracle of Light. On July 19 at 10:30 Lina Passalacqua with The Futurist Nature of Existence. On September 15 at 18:30 Gabriele Stabile with The Flight of the Wild Goose, Within Without. On October 2 at 18:00 an event dedicated to Cesare Zavattini. On October 16 at 18:00 one dedicated to Corrado Cagli and his totemic nature.

With the Senses at Work

Throughout 2026, from January 2 to December 31, the museum offers tactile and sensory visits to the collection. It's a program designed for people who are blind or have low vision and for those who want to try another way of standing in front of a sculpture, and you book at 060608. Among Rome's museums it's one of the most continuous accessibility offerings, and it deserves to be known far more than it is.

Hours, tickets and free admission at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The hours change between weekdays and weekends, and it's the mistake the most people make. From Tuesday to Friday you can enter from 10:00 to 16:00. On Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00. Last admission is 45 minutes before closing, so at 15:15 on weekdays and 18:15 on weekends. On December 24 and 31 opening is reduced to 10:00-14:00. Closing days: every Monday, December 25, May 1.

The prices for the collection alone are €7.50 full price and €6.00 reduced. There is a combined ticket with the Museo Pietro Canonica, the other civic museum inside Villa Borghese, at €11.00 full price and €7.50 reduced. If you plan to see both, the saving is four euros per person. Advance purchase online carries €1.00 in presale fees and tickets are neither refundable nor changeable.

The free admission chapter changed recently and it's the most useful news of all. From February 2, 2026 free admission to the System's museums and archaeological areas applies to residents of Rome and the Metropolitan City, who enter by showing an ID. The Carlo Bilotti Museum is in the group of five museums that remain paid for non-residents, along with the Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco, the Museo Pietro Canonica, the Museo Napoleonico and the Villa di Massenzio. Watch out for a clause that surprises many: for some exhibitions even those entitled to free admission must get a super-reduced ticket of €2.00.

The MIC card remains the most convenient tool for those who live, have a domicile or study in Rome and the metropolitan area: €5.00, 12 months, unlimited admissions to the whole Roma Capitale Museum System, reductions on exhibitions and a 10 percent discount in museum bookshops. You buy it online, with the dedicated app, at all the System's sites and at tourist information points. The complete picture of free opportunities in the city is on the page about free museums in Rome.

How to get to the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The official address is double, and this creates confusion: Via Fiorello La Guardia 6 and Viale dell'Aranciera 4. They are the two sides of the same building, which is in the southern sector of the park, between the Garden of the Lake and the Casa del Cinema.

By metro, line A serves three useful stations: Spagna, with the exit inside Villa Borghese that saves you the climb. Barberini, from which you go up Via Vittorio Veneto to Porta Pinciana in about 10 minutes. Flaminio, from which you enter the park from the side of the Pincio. By bus, the lines that serve Piazzale Brasile and Porta Pinciana are 61, 89, 160, 490, 495, 590 and C3, to which are added the 120F and 150F on holidays and the night buses N1 and N25.

The practical advice is to get off at Barberini and walk up Via Veneto. It's 12 minutes on foot, slightly uphill, and it brings you into the park through the right gate, with the Casa del Cinema on the right and the museum a little further on. Those arriving from Piazza di Spagna by metro can use the elevator inside the station and find themselves already inside Villa Borghese, which in summer makes a notable difference.

By car it's best to give up. Villa Borghese has paid underground parking, but the area around the Orangery is pedestrian and the traffic at Piazzale Brasile at rush hour is what it is. If you really have to, the Villa Borghese parking under the Galoppatoio is the least bad choice, then you walk.

A curiosity about the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The real curiosity concerns the name, and almost nobody tells it. An orangery, in the vocabulary of Italian villas, is a service building: the place where in winter you shelter the pots of citrus trees, which the January frost in Rome would kill. It's useful architecture, not representational architecture. This building, instead, served as an orangery only in the last stretch of its life, and as a punishment.

Until the middle of the 19th century it was the Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua, that is, one of the Borghese party pavilions. It had fountains, baroque nymphaea, a square courtyard painted in sgraffito and colors, and in the center of the courtyard a fountain modeled in the shape of a little boat, described by Jacopo Manilli in 1650. From 1776 the interior walls were frescoed by artists of the caliber of Cristoforo Unterperger and Giuseppe Cades. It was, in short, a luxurious place meant for aristocratic entertainment, not a storeroom.

Then came 1849. The war events of the fall of the Roman Republic reduced the building to such a condition that nobody thought of restoring its decorations: it was rebuilt freely and used as a winter shelter for citrus trees. The name Orangery is born there, at that moment, and certifies a demotion. A party pavilion turning into a pot warehouse is not a promotion.

The curiosity ends with a reversal that is worth the ticket. In 2000 that humbled building became a place of leisure and culture again thanks to a heavy restoration, and what put it back in the game was the private collection of a Calabrian industrialist who lived between Palm Beach and New York. The Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua, after 150 years of lemons and desks, took back its role by proxy. Stories of buildings rarely have such clean endings.

Something nobody tells you about the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

Beneath the Orangery there are underground spaces, and the public never sees them. They don't appear in the visit route, they aren't mentioned in the captions, you won't find them on any map handed out at the ticket desk. Their existence emerged explicitly in the program with which the museum celebrated its 20th anniversary, when the Sovrintendenza organized a three-dimensional video projection of the building's underground spaces: the only way, for now, that a visitor can see them.

This detail says two things. The first is that the restoration brought to light much more than is visitable today: the 17th-century structure is deeper and more articulated than what you see climbing the stairs. The second is that the building still keeps a margin of open research, which for a building inside Villa Borghese is not obvious, given how much that villa has been studied.

The second thing nobody tells you concerns the man in the title. Carlo Bilotti died on November 17, 2006, at the age of 72. The museum had been inaugurated on May 10 of the same year. Six months. He lived long enough to see his collection hung in a Roman public building restored for it, and little else. Anyone who enters here thinking of a foundation built by an elderly patron who enjoyed it for decades has the wrong story in mind: this is a donation that reached the finish line by a whisker.

Third thing, small but valuable: on weekdays the museum closes at 16:00, not at 19:00. Every week someone arrives at 16:30 on a Thursday convinced that Roman museums close in the evening, finds the door barred and takes a 20-minute walk for nothing inside the park. On weekends, instead, it stays open until 19:00. Make a note of it: it's the difference between a visit and a stroll.

My advice for visiting the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

Go on Saturday or Sunday in the late afternoon, between 17:00 and 18:15. It's the only window in which the museum has long light, extended hours and no crowd, because whoever visits Villa Borghese on a weekend at that hour has already come out of the Galleria Borghese, sat down at the little lake and no longer thinks about going into a museum. The rooms are practically empty and the light that comes in through the windows onto the late de Chiricos, the ones with the sunny palette, is exactly the one they were painted for.

Second piece of advice, about your wallet. If you aren't a resident of Rome or the Metropolitan City, don't buy the single ticket. Take the combined one with the Museo Pietro Canonica at €11.00. The two museums are both inside Villa Borghese, about 20 minutes apart on foot along tree-lined avenues, and put together they make a sensible half day of 20th-century art inside a park. Buying the two tickets separately costs €15.00. The combined one costs €11.00.

Third piece of advice, about method. Don't go in right away. Do the outside loop first: Hector and Andromache on one side, Manzù's Large Cardinal on the other. They are two monumental bronzes that you look at for free and that prepare your eye for what you'll find inside, because the same figures you see in three dimensions outdoors come back painted in the rooms. The museum is understood much better if you approach it in this order.

Fourth and last. Call 060608 the day before and ask how many rooms of the permanent collection are visible. When there's a big exhibition, part of the permanent route shrinks. It's a two-minute phone call that avoids the one serious disappointment this museum can give you.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely mentioned

Everyone knows the heart of the collection is de Chirico. What is rarely mentioned, and what should instead be said out loud, is that a substantial part of that core is made up of late replicas and posthumous casts, and that the museum states this openly in its own entries.

Look at the dates carefully. Metaphysical Interior with Biscuits is a 1960s reworking of a famous painting from 1918. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, girl with hoop is a watercolor from the 1970s that replicates the 1914 composition. Orestes and Pylades is an edition of 1965 from a terracotta of 1940. The Archaeologist is a sculpture of 1972 in an edition of 1988. Hector and Andromache is a cast of 2006 from a plaster of 1966, commissioned by Bilotti from the Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico after the artist's death.

This is not a diminishment, and it's the point that almost no guide explains. De Chirico practiced replicating himself as a conscious artistic program for over 50 years, sometimes backdating his own works, quarreling with dealers and critics, maintaining that a painter has the right to remake his own paintings as a musician replays a concert. The market accused him of devaluing his own output. He answered by painting more. Anyone who wants to understand this affair has in this museum a rare case study, because here the replicas are displayed next to originals by the same hand, with the dates declared.

Plainly put: the season of the replicas is the most interesting part of de Chirico from a theoretical point of view, and it's the one the Italian public took longest to accept. Anyone who dismisses a painting because it's from 1968 and not from 1918 hasn't understood what that painter was doing. But whoever pays for the ticket has the right to know what they are looking at, and here they do.

The right photo to take at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The photo is outside, not inside, and it's Hector and Andromache. The bronze is 230 centimeters tall, so it towers over whoever photographs it, and the backdrop is the facade of the Orangery with the pines of Villa Borghese behind. The combination of metaphysical sculpture, 17th-century building and Roman pine grove exists in no other spot in the city.

The right time is the end of the afternoon, when the sun arrives raking from the west and cuts the volumes of the two embracing mannequins. At noon the flat light flattens the bronze and the sculpture becomes a dark silhouette. Position yourself at three quarters to the couple, get a hand's width lower and include a piece of sky above Andromache's head: from that angle the wind that shakes her dress can be read, and the composition closes.

The second photo I recommend is the least spectacular and the most useful: the facade of the building from the avenue, in a wide shot, with the sculpture on the left. It lets whoever looks at it understand where you were, because a museum inside a park without context looks like any building. It's also the photo that pays off the most months later, when all that's left of the paintings is the titles.

Inside the rooms the rules of all Roman civic museums apply: no flash, no tripod, no selfie sticks. Ask the staff before shooting near the loans for the temporary exhibitions, because for those the lenders' restrictions can be tighter than for the permanent collection. Manzù's Large Cardinal, outside, can be photographed without problems and is a good subject in black and white.

Some important events that happened here in history

The first documented event is a description. In 1650 Jacopo Manilli, custodian and chronicler of the villa, records the building as a two-story structure with a small tower, covered loggias and a square courtyard painted with figures and landscapes, with the boat fountain in the center. That page is today the main proof of what the building was like before everything else, and without it we would know nothing of its 17th-century appearance.

The second is the great building project of the late 18th century. Marcantonio IV Borghese, the prince who redesigns the villa in a landscape style and creates the Garden of the Lake, has the building enlarged and decorated and turns it into the Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua. From 1776 Cristoforo Unterperger, Giuseppe Cades and other artists fresco the interior walls. For about 20 years this is one of the most sought-after society venues of the Roman aristocracy, with fountains and nymphaea that put on a show for the guests.

The third event is the destruction. In 1849, at the fall of the Roman Republic, the fighting seriously damages the building. The decorations by Unterperger and Cades are lost forever. The building is rebuilt without ornaments and converted into a winter shelter for citrus trees: it loses its name, its function and its face in one blow.

The fourth is administrative but decisive. In 1903 Villa Borghese passes to the City of Rome and becomes a public park. The Orangery, at that moment, houses offices and housing. Then a religious institute. Then municipal offices until 1982. 80 years in which the building's heritage is preserved by inertia and degraded by neglect.

The fifth is the restoration and the inauguration of May 10, 2006. The original structure becomes legible again, the construction phases are reconstructed, the Bilotti donation finds a home. It's the date the museum considers its birth certificate.

The sixth, and for now the last, is from June 12, 2026: the day of the 20th anniversary, with extraordinary free opening until 21:00, a guided visit to the Magic Lanterns exhibition led by the curator Alessandra Mauro at 11:00, an afternoon talk dedicated to the history of the Orangery with the three-dimensional projection of the underground spaces, and in the evening two concerts: at 18:30 a program for bass and guitar titled Singing landscapes, at 19:15 film soundtracks for piano and flute. In 20 years the structure has hosted more than 100 exhibitions, 150 concerts and 300 events, with over 100,000 visitors a year.

Who has passed through the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

The list begins with the owners. Before the Borghese the building belonged to the Ceuli, a noble family who had made it a residence of some prestige. Then it entered the orbit of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, who lived between 1576 and 1633, the most voracious collector of the Rome of Paul V, the man who kept Bernini in his workshop and who gave the Villa the form still recognizable today.

Jacopo Manilli passed through here, who in 1650 wrote the description of the villa and left us the only reliable image of the building before the transformations. Marcantonio IV Borghese passed through, who lived between 1730 and 1800, and who made it his party pavilion. Cristoforo Unterperger and Giuseppe Cades passed through, with scaffolding and brushes, two of the best decorators active in Rome in the last quarter of the 18th century, who worked here from 1776 and whose work has been entirely lost.

In 1849 the armies passed through. Then, for 80 years, municipal employees, religious and tenants passed through, the most prosaic public a Borghese building could have wished for.

Contemporary history brings other names. Carlo Bilotti, who died in November 2006, passed through here a few months after the inauguration of the museum named after him. His wife Tina and his daughter Lisa are permanently present, painted by Andy Warhol in 1981. The collector himself is portrayed twice, by Larry Rivers in 1994 with a Dubuffet behind him and by Mimmo Rotella in 1968.

Giorgio de Chirico, instead, never saw this museum: he died in Rome in 1978, 28 years before it opened. But he lived a kilometer and a half from here, in Piazza di Spagna, and for 40 years crossed Villa Borghese like anyone who lives in that quadrant. His biggest sculpture, in front of the entrance, reached him posthumously by the will of a collector who had known him in person.

In recent years the artists and curators of contemporary Rome have passed through here: Claudio Crescentini, who curates for the Sovrintendenza the cycle Artists at Villa Borghese. Giuseppe Modica, Lina Passalacqua and Gabriele Stabile, protagonists of the 2026 talks. Alessandra Mauro and Roberto Koch, curators of the photography exhibition now on. The Bilotti is not a museum of only illustrious dead people, and it's one of the reasons it's worth coming back.

The Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese with kids

It works better than you'd expect, and for a mundane reason: it's short. An eight-year-old lasts 40 minutes in a museum, not three hours, and here 40 minutes are enough to see everything. The park outside absorbs the rest of the day.

The works that capture the little ones are always the same. The mannequins with the egg-shaped head and the belly full of houses have an immediate effect, because they are figures that seem to have come out of a comic book and are instead 100 years old. The white horses by the sea work on everyone. The sculpture of Hector and Andromache outside is the absolute winner: it's more than two meters tall, you can walk around it, you touch it with your eyes from every side.

The game I recommend to parents is the inventory: get the kids to count how many times the same object appears in the different rooms, the horse, the egg-shaped head, the temple inside the body, the set square. It's the quickest way to make them understand, without explanations, how an artist works who repeats his own themes for 50 years. Then you go out and head to the Casina di Raffaello, the park's play center, or to the Bioparco if the day is long.

Accessibility of the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

Among its services the museum declares accessibility for visitors with disabilities, wifi and educational visits. The free guided visit to the permanent collection is available with translation into Italian Sign Language, and deaf people can also book it through the multimedia global communication service for the deaf, active Monday to Friday from 8:30 to 18:30 and Saturday from 8:30 to 13:30.

The With the Senses at Work program, active throughout 2026, offers tactile and sensory visits to the collection, designed in particular for people who are blind or have low vision. You book at 060608.

On the physical details of the route, elevators, equipped restrooms and the width of passages, the most reliable source remains the ticket office: a phone call to 060608 before the visit settles it. The building is historic and runs over two levels, so wheelchair users do well to have the conditions of the day confirmed. The stretch of park that leads to the entrance is flat and paved on the side of Viale dell'Aranciera, while arriving from Porta Pinciana involves a modest but continuous change in elevation.

What to see around the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

Within a 10-minute walk there is more material than fits in a day. The Casa del Cinema is practically next door, at Largo Marcello Mastroianni 1, inside the Casina delle Rose: screenings, festivals, summer arena, and at this time the Casa del Cinema ticket entitles you to the reduced rate on the museum's photography exhibition. The Garden of the Lake with the little temple of Aesculapius is a few hundred meters away and lets you grasp the landscape context in which the Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua was conceived.

A quarter of an hour's walk away is the Galleria Borghese, which requires a timed-slot reservation and can't be improvised. On the opposite side of the park the Museo Pietro Canonica completes the combined ticket. Toward Valle Giulia you reach the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Toward the Pincio you come out on the terrace that looks over Piazza del Popolo, with the water clock and the busts of illustrious Italians.

If you stay inside the park, the Bioparco and the Globe Theatre complete the picture. If you head down toward the city, Via Veneto takes you in 10 minutes to the neighborhood that cinema made famous, and Piazza di Spagna is an elevator ride away from the metro station.

When to go to the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese and when to avoid it

The best time is the weekend in the late afternoon, as already said, or Tuesday and Wednesday morning right at opening, at 10:00, when the park is full of people running and the museum is empty. Spring and the start of autumn are the right seasons, because the visit combines with a long walk inside Villa Borghese without suffering.

To avoid: weekday afternoons after 15:15, because last admission has already passed. Bridge-day Sundays, when the park becomes impassable and the free civic museums gather unexpected lines. Days of heavy rain, not because the museum gets worse but because all the charm of the place consists in getting there walking among the pines, and in a downpour that piece of the experience is lost.

August deserves a separate mention. Rome empties out, the museum stays open with its usual hours and the photography exhibition now on runs until September 6. Whoever is in town in mid-August has in front of them an air-conditioned, almost deserted museum inside a park: in the Roman calendar it's one of the best opportunities of the year, and almost nobody notices.

Quick questions about the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese

How much is a ticket to the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

The collection alone costs €7.50 full price and €6.00 reduced. The combined ticket with the Museo Pietro Canonica costs €11.00 full price and €7.50 reduced. Advance purchase online adds €1.00 in presale fees.

Is admission free to the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

Yes, if you are a resident of Rome or the Metropolitan City: from February 2, 2026 free admission to the museums of the Roma Capitale System applies to residents, who enter by showing an ID. MIC card holders also get in free. For some exhibitions, however, even those entitled to free admission must buy a super-reduced ticket of €2.00.

What are the opening hours of the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 16:00, Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 to 19:00. Last admission 45 minutes before closing. On December 24 and 31 the hours are 10:00-14:00.

When is the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese closed?

Every Monday, December 25 and May 1.

How long does a visit to the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese take?

40 minutes for a quick visit, an hour and a half or two if you stop in front of every work and there's a temporary exhibition on. The guided visit led by the Sovrintendenza lasts 60 minutes.

Do you need to book to visit the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

No, not for the permanent collection: you buy the ticket on site. Booking is mandatory for the free guided visit and recommended for the talks in the Artists at Villa Borghese cycle. The number is 060608, active every day from 9:00 to 19:00.

What is the exact address of the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

Via Fiorello La Guardia 6 and Viale dell'Aranciera 4, 00197 Rome. They are the two entrances of the same building inside Villa Borghese.

How do you get to the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese by public transport?

Metro A to Spagna, Barberini or Flaminio, then on foot inside the park. Buses 61, 89, 160, 490, 495, 590 and C3 toward Piazzale Brasile and Porta Pinciana, plus 120F and 150F on holidays and the night buses N1 and N25.

What can you see at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

23 works donated by Carlo Bilotti: 18 by Giorgio de Chirico among paintings, watercolors and sculptures, three family portraits signed by Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers and Mimmo Rotella, Summer by Gino Severini and the Cardinal by Giacomo Manzù, plus the later acquisitions.

How many works by de Chirico are at the Carlo Bilotti Museum?

18: 17 displayed inside and one, the sculpture Hector and Andromache, placed outdoors in front of the building.

Can you take photos inside the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

Photographs without flash are normally allowed in Roman civic museums, but for temporary exhibitions the lenders' restrictions can be tighter. Ask the staff in the room before shooting. The sculptures outside can be photographed freely.

Is the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese wheelchair accessible?

The museum lists accessibility among its services, but the building is historic and runs over two levels: it's best to have the conditions of the route confirmed by calling 060608 before the visit. The flat approach is the one from the side of Viale dell'Aranciera.

Are there visits for blind visitors at the Carlo Bilotti Museum?

Yes. The With the Senses at Work program offers tactile and sensory visits to the collection throughout 2026, with booking at 060608. The guided visit to the permanent collection is also available with translation into Italian Sign Language.

What is the difference between the Carlo Bilotti Museum and the Galleria Borghese?

They are two opposite museums inside the same park. The Galleria Borghese is state-run, holds Bernini, Caravaggio, Titian and Raphael, and requires a mandatory timed-slot reservation and a timed visit. The Carlo Bilotti Museum is civic, contemporary, small, with no reservation and no crowd. Confusing them at the planning stage is the most common mistake.

Is the combined ticket with the Museo Pietro Canonica worth it?

For non-residents, yes: €11.00 versus €15.00 for two single tickets. Both museums are inside Villa Borghese and are about 20 minutes apart on foot.

What is the MIC card and is it worth it?

It's the Roma Capitale card that for €5.00 allows unlimited admissions for 12 months to the city's Museum System, with reductions on exhibitions and a 10 percent discount in museum bookshops. It can be bought by adults who are residents or domiciled in the metropolitan area of Rome and by university students who study there. Anyone who visits even a single paid civic museum has already made it back.

What exhibitions are on now at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

Magic Lanterns, photographs from the Valerio De Paolis collection, from February 14 to September 6, 2026, curated by Alessandra Mauro and Roberto Koch with Suleima Autore. In parallel, the cycle of talks Artists at Villa Borghese #3 continues until October 16, 2026, with free admission.

Why is the museum called Orangery?

Because after the war damage of 1849 the building was rebuilt without decorations and used as a winter shelter for pots of citrus trees. Before that it was the Casino dei Giuochi d'Acqua, the Borghese party pavilion.

Who was Carlo Bilotti?

An Italian-American entrepreneur and collector, president of Jacqueline Cochran and producer of perfumes for brands like Nina Ricci, Carven and Pierre Cardin, a personal friend of de Chirico, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Dalí, Niki de Saint Phalle, Larry Rivers and Rotella. He donated his collection to Rome and created in Cosenza the MAB, Museo all'Aperto Bilotti. He died on November 17, 2006 at the age of 72.

When was the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese inaugurated?

May 10, 2006. In 2026 the museum turned 20, celebrated on June 12 with extraordinary free opening, concerts and a three-dimensional projection of the building's underground spaces.

Is the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese suitable for kids?

Very, precisely because it's short. The de Chirico mannequins and the horses by the sea strike the little ones, and the sculpture of Hector and Andromache outside, more than two meters tall, is the real attraction. After 40 minutes you go out and the park does the rest.

Is there a bookshop or a café at the Carlo Bilotti Museum?

The Museum System sells guides and catalogs in its venues, and the museum lists wifi and educational visits among its services. For dining, the most convenient reference is the Casa del Cinema, a few steps away, or the park's kiosks.

Can you visit the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese on the first Sunday of the month?

Yes, and in the Roma Capitale Museum System the first Sunday of the month remains a day of heavy attendance. With the new fare structure in force since February 2, 2026, residents get in free all year, so the advantage of the first Sunday mainly concerns those who aren't residents.

How much time do you need to see the park too?

Half a day is the right measure: the museum, the Garden of the Lake, the Casa del Cinema and a walk to the Pincio fit comfortably into four hours. Adding the Museo Pietro Canonica with the combined ticket makes a full day.

Is the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese open in August?

Yes, with the usual hours and the weekly Monday closing. August is in fact one of the best months to come, because the city is empty and the rooms are deserted.

What is the most important work at the Carlo Bilotti Museum - Orangery of Villa Borghese?

It depends on the criterion. For international fame, Andy Warhol's double portrait of 1981. For painterly quality, de Chirico's Solitary Orpheus of 1973. For immediate impact, the sculpture Hector and Andromache in front of the entrance. If you have only a minute, look at the latter: it's free and doesn't even require going in.

I come back to the Bilotti at least twice a year and I keep thinking it's the easiest museum to love in Rome. It asks for no reservations, imposes no time slots, doesn't force you to deal with the crush, and in return it offers 18 real de Chiricos inside a building with four centuries of troubles behind it. If you have a free afternoon and a minimum of curiosity about 20th-century art, enter from Porta Pinciana, stop for two minutes in front of Hector and Andromache and then go up. On the way out, take the avenue toward the little lake: it's the right way to end the visit.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

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