Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia is at Piazza di Corte 14, in Ariccia, in the province of Rome, and it's open every day except Monday. From October 1 to March 31 the hours are 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00, and from April 1 to September 30 they are 10:00-13:00 and 15:30-18:30. The guided visit to the piano nobile with the cardinal's rooms and the Museum of Roman Baroque costs €15 full price and €12 reduced. The self-guided visit costs €12 full price and €9 reduced. Groups of at least 15 people pay €12 with the palace guide and €10 without. The reduced rate applies to young people from 6 to 18 years old, university students up to age 25, people over 65, residents of Ariccia and military personnel. The guided tours start at 10:30 and 11:45 in the morning. In the afternoon they start at 15:30 or 16:45 on winter hours, and at 16:00 or 17:15 on summer hours, with a maximum of 30 people per group. The phone number is 06 93 30 053, the mobile and WhatsApp number is 3891641721, the email is info@palazzochigiariccia.it, and the official website is palazzochigiariccia.it, where advance online sales are also available through the reseller authorized by the museum. If you arrive by car, you'll find the palace facing the town's main square, a few steps from the monumental bridge. If you arrive by public transport, you use the regional coaches to the Castelli Romani, and the schedule should be checked on the carrier's website the day before.

The palace and the park belong to the municipality of Ariccia, and are part of the territory of the Castelli Romani Park.

What you actually visit at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Let me set things straight right away, because this is the point people get most wrong before leaving. Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia is not a house museum refitted by a technical office with furniture bought at auction to fill the rooms. It's a baroque residence that has kept the furnishings it was born with, mostly from the 1600s, which stayed with the same family from 1661 until the end of the 1900s. The official website calls it a unique example in the world of a baroque interior, a time capsule. The phrase sounds like advertising, but for once it describes a fact: in Europe you can count on the fingers of one hand the palaces where the wall hangings, the console tables, the paintings and the chairs are still where the patron put them.

The visit is made up of three parts that you buy together. The first is the piano nobile, with the Sala Maestra in the middle and two independent apartments opening on either side of it. The second is the cardinal's rooms, the private apartment tied to the memory of Flavio Chigi, nephew of Pope Alexander VII. The third is the Museum of Roman Baroque, which since 2007 has occupied rooms of the palace with a collection of about 300 works, paintings and drawings. Outside, with the same hours, is Chigi Park, 28 hectares of woodland that is not an ornamental garden but a piece of Alban forest that survived.

The difference between the self-guided and guided visit at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The two options are three euros apart. Our advice is to pay it. In a palace where the objects have stayed in their place, the value of the visit lies entirely in the ability to read that place: why a table is there, why that portrait looks toward that door, why the summer dining room is in the wing that gets the least sun. Without someone to tell the story, the visitor walks through an enfilade of beautiful rooms and comes out with the vague idea of having seen old furniture. The self-guided visit makes sense in one specific case: the second time, when you come back to look at the museum's paintings at your leisure.

How long the visit to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia takes

The guided tour covers the piano nobile, the cardinal's rooms and the museum in a little over an hour. If you add the park, which deserves at least 40 minutes even in a quick version, and a stop in Piazza di Corte, the half day is full. Anyone who comes from Rome planning to do Ariccia in two hours goes home feeling they ran, and it's a justified feeling.

Frequently asked questions about Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Where is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia?

Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia is at Piazza di Corte 14, in Ariccia, in the province of Rome, in the Alban Hills, facing the square designed by Bernini and a few steps from the monumental bridge that spans the ravine.

How much does a ticket to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia cost?

The guided visit to the piano nobile with the cardinal's rooms and the Museum of Roman Baroque at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia costs €15 full price and €12 reduced, while the self-guided visit costs €12 full price. Children up to six years old get in free, and people with a recognized disability get in free together with a companion.

What are the opening hours of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia?

Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia is closed on Mondays, both the palace and the park. From October 1 to March 31 you can enter from 10:00 to 13:00 and from 15:00 to 18:00, and from April 1 to September 30 from 10:00 to 13:00 and from 15:30 to 18:30, with a midday break that is real and non-negotiable.

How do you get to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia from Rome?

To reach Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia from Rome, you leave the Grande Raccordo Anulare toward Ciampino and continue on Via Appia Nuova to Albano Laziale and then Ariccia. The last stretch crosses the monumental bridge over the ravine, and the palace appears right at the end of the bridge. Parking in the historic center is scarce and regulated.

What can you see inside Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia?

Inside Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia you visit the piano nobile with the Sala Maestra, the private rooms of Cardinal Flavio Chigi, the historic picture gallery with works by Cavalier d'Arpino and Baciccio, and the Museum of Roman Baroque, opened in 2007, which displays about 300 paintings and drawings of the Roman school of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia accessible for people with mobility difficulties?

A 17th-century building with piani nobili and historic staircases like Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia is not a structure designed for wheelchairs, so anyone with specific needs does well to call 06 93 30 053 or write to info@palazzochigiariccia.it before setting out.

Is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia suitable for children?

Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia works well with kids from eight years old and up, as long as the visit is built around two or three stories instead of a list of furniture, like the Savelli castle that became a palace or the movie shot in the rooms. The guided visit lasts a little over an hour, a limit for a small child, while the park remains the winning card for families.

How much does a day at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia cost?

A day at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia costs, for the full guided visit alone, €15 per person or €12 with the reduction. A lunch in a fraschetta with porchetta, a side dish and half a liter of wine stays under €25 per person in the places away from the main square, while the park is included in the ticket and requires no additional spending.

How to get to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Ariccia is in the Alban Hills, southeast of Rome, along the Appia route. By car you leave the Grande Raccordo Anulare toward Ciampino and continue on Via Appia Nuova to Albano Laziale, then Ariccia. The last stretch crosses the monumental bridge over the ravine, and the palace appears right at the end of the bridge, on the left. Parking in the historic center is scarce and regulated. It's better to leave the car in the areas along the ring road and walk up, it's a few minutes.

By public transport you use the regional coaches that connect Rome to the Castelli Romani. The schedules change between weekdays, Saturdays and holidays, and they also change in the summer months. They need to be checked on the carrier's website before leaving, because the wrong ride means an hour of waiting in the square. Anyone who prefers not to think about connections does well to consider the accompaniment service of a licensed guide. The network of professionals of TourLeaderPro in Rome organizes transfers and visits in the Castelli with authorized staff, and for a group the final bill is often lower than you'd imagine.

Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia as a day trip from Rome

A day trip works well if you build it around two stops and not five. Palazzo Chigi in the morning, lunch in a fraschetta in Ariccia, afternoon at the park or at Nemi, or on Lake Albano. Adding Castel Gandolfo and Frascati in the same afternoon is a mistake I see often: you spend the day in the car and don't look at anything. Anyone planning a trip to Italy who reads English will find similar reasoning in the day trips guide from ItalyPlanner.

Hours, tickets and bookings for Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

On Mondays the palace is closed, and that includes the park. On the other days the opening follows two seasons. From October 1 to March 31 you enter from 10:00 to 13:00 and from 15:00 to 18:00. From April 1 to September 30 you enter from 10:00 to 13:00 and from 15:30 to 18:30. The midday break is real and non-negotiable: anyone who arrives at 13:15 finds the door closed and two hours to fill.

Prices at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The full guided visit, which includes the piano nobile with the cardinal's rooms and the Museum of Roman Baroque, costs €15 per person, €12 with the reduction. The self-guided visit costs €12 full price and €9 reduced. Groups of 15 people or more pay €12 with the palace's in-house guide or €10 without. The rates include value-added tax unless otherwise stated. The official website keeps the rates page updated also for non-museum uses, from weddings to concerts to film shoots, which are booked separately.

Who gets the reduced rate and who gets in free at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The reduced ticket is for young people from 6 to 18 years old, university students up to age 25, people over 65, residents of Ariccia and military personnel. Free entry applies to children up to six years old, school groups from Ariccia, people over 65 who live in Ariccia, people with a recognized disability together with their companion, teachers accompanying classes, authorized tour guides, one companion per group, journalists registered with the Order, scholars authorized by the Curator and official visits authorized by the Mayor. Bring the document that proves your entitlement: they ask for it at the ticket office.

Do you need to book for Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

For the self-guided visit, no, you go in during opening hours. For the guided visit, yes, in the sense that the tours run at fixed times and the group is limited to 30 people: showing up at 10:50 hoping to join the 10:30 tour won't get you far. The palace sells tickets online through the reseller listed on its own home page, and answers the phone and WhatsApp for groups and school groups. On weekends when an exhibition is on, or on the days of the sagra, booking is the difference between getting in and staying outside.

A curiosity about Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The real curiosity doesn't concern a painting or a room, it concerns the shape of the building. In Ariccia, Bernini did not design a city palace or a country villa: he built a hybrid, putting together three types that the architecture of his time kept separate. The villa, that is, the leisure residence set in greenery. The castle, with four corner towers inherited from the Savelli fortress and kept in view instead of being hidden. The palace, with the noble layout and the urban front that looks onto the square. The museum's official website says it in almost identical words: a hybridization among the types of the villa, the castle and the palace, with four corner towers.

Why it is a curiosity and not a technical detail: because that choice explains everything else. A late 16th-century Savelli castle, enlarged in the 1590s by Cardinal Silvio Savelli, could not become a regular Roman palace without being demolished. Bernini did the opposite: he kept the structure, covered it, and turned its military clumsiness into a character. The corner towers, which on a classical facade would be an embarrassment, become the distinguishing mark of the Chigi residence. This is the reason why Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia looks like no other baroque palace in Lazio: it was not born out of nothing on free ground, it was born on top of something that was already there.

In front of the facade on the square there is a corollary to notice. The palace is not symmetrical by birth. The northwest wing, the so-called Torrione Nuovo or Quarto Nuovo, arrived only in 1740, when Prince Augusto Chigi spent 40,000 scudi to build it and give the building back the balance that the 1600s had not given it. 70 years of asymmetry, then the evening out. Anyone who looks at the facade today sees a finished front and thinks of a unified design: it is instead the result of two construction sites almost three generations apart.

From the Savelli to the Chigi: the history of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The story begins before the Chigi, and it's best told from the beginning because without the first chapter the second makes no sense.

The Savelli castle

Ariccia was a fief of the Savelli, one of the baronial families of Lazio that from the Middle Ages controlled the castles around Rome. The core of the building that is now called Palazzo Chigi is their castle, enlarged in the 1590s by Cardinal Silvio Savelli. Of that fortress the four corner towers and the overall layout remain, which the baroque construction site did not erase. In the 1600s the Savelli were in financial difficulty, like almost the whole Roman baronial aristocracy crushed by debts and loans: the sale of the fief was the consequence of that collapse.

1661 and the arrival of the Chigi in Ariccia

On July 20, 1661, Cardinal Flavio Chigi, together with the princes Mario and Agostino, bought the fief of Ariccia from Prince Giulio Savelli for 358,000 scudi. It was not an agricultural investment. It was a dynastic prestige operation, made at the moment when the family was at the height of its power: on the throne of Peter sat Fabio Chigi, elected in 1655 with the name Alexander VII, the pope who more than any other gave Rome its baroque face. Buying a fief at the gates of the city, an hour by carriage from the Quirinale, meant giving the family a private capital.

The Chigi were not Romans. They came from Siena, and their fortune had begun two centuries earlier with Agostino Chigi, called the Magnificent, who lived between 1465 and 1520, a banker and merchant who built his empire on the monopoly of Tolfa alum. He was one of the great patrons of the Renaissance: he called Raphael and Baldassarre Peruzzi to work for him, and the Villa Farnesina on the Tiber is his best-known work. When two centuries later the Sienese branch reached the papacy, the taste for commissioning art was already written into the family's genetic code.

The construction site of 1664-1672

In 1664 the Chigi called Gian Lorenzo Bernini to take in hand the overall project: the palace, the Collegiata, the square. The renovation took place between 1664 and 1672 under the operational direction of Carlo Fontana, Bernini's pupil and close collaborator, who translated the master's ideas into working drawings and took them to the site. The work on the palace ended in 1672 with the construction of the wing next to Porta Napoletana. In the same years the Chigi enlarged the Savelli's existing park, 28 hectares, with new paths, fountains and structures, again with Fontana directing and Bernini supervising.

The Torrione Nuovo of 1740

In 1740 Prince Augusto Chigi used 40,000 scudi to build the Torrione Nuovo, also called Quarto Nuovo, the wing now next to the Ariccia bridge, perfectly symmetrical to the older wing. The entrance portal was modified on the same occasion. It was the last major intervention on the building: from that moment the palace took on the appearance it keeps.

The wars, the damage and 1988

During the events of the Roman Republic, between 1798 and 1799, the park and the palace were upended by the passage and the camps of troops. In the Second World War some units of the Allied army camped in the palace and in the park, which was opened to civilian traffic to make up for the collapse of the Ariccia bridge, blown up on June 2, 1944. In the air raid the neoclassical frescoes of two rooms of the piano nobile were partly damaged, but the building remained substantially unharmed. It's 50 meters of difference between art history and its disappearance.

On December 29, 1988, Agostino Chigi Albani della Rovere sold the palace and the park to the municipality of Ariccia on terms particularly favorable to the public body. That is the reason why today you go in by paying €12 instead of looking at the gates from outside. That sale saved a set of furnishings that, broken up at auction, would have ended up in 20 different collections and could never have been put back together.

Bernini, Carlo Fontana and the invention of baroque Ariccia

Ariccia is one of the very few cases in which an architect remade an entire town. Not a building, not a square: the town.

Bernini's urban project in Ariccia

Bernini's great construction site worked between 1661 and 1672 on the radical transformation of the old medieval village. The complex of Piazza di Corte was conceived as a unified system: the collegiate church of the Assunta in the center, the two exedrae that embrace it on the sides, the fountains, the front of the renovated palace closing off the space. The museum's official website describes Bernini's design as work that went from the urban scale to the architectural one and all the way to the design of the furnishings. That is the point that makes Ariccia a case study: the same man designed the square and the furnishings placed in it.

Anyone who has Bernini's works in Rome in mind recognizes the same thinking in Ariccia, applied on a reduced scale. The logic that governs the colonnade of St. Peter's, or the scenic setting of the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, here becomes a village square that works like a theater. It's not a reduction, it's a synthesis.

Carlo Fontana, the man who held the construction site together

The name of Carlo Fontana always appears in the second row, and that is unfair. In 1664 Bernini was 66 years old and was the busiest artist in Europe: the working project, the accounting, the relationship with the workers, the daily decisions on site passed to Fontana. Many of the solutions carried out in Ariccia bear his hand, even when the idea is the master's. If today the palace is a coherent organism and not a sum of patches, the credit goes to the man who worked on the spot for eight years.

Alexander VII, the pope at the origin of everything

Fabio Chigi was pope from 1655 to 1667 with the name Alexander VII. He entrusted to Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona the construction sites that gave Rome the shape that tourists photograph today. Ariccia is the private chapter of that policy: the pope transformed the capital, the family transformed its own fief, with the same artists and the same language. The cardinal nephew Flavio Chigi, who lived between 1631 and 1693, was the main creator of the family collections, a protector of artists and a patron of theater and music. Without him the picture gallery that you walk through today on the piano nobile would not exist.

Piazza di Corte, the Collegiata and the Ariccia bridge

Stepping out of the palace's main door you are inside the work of art, and it's worth stopping for five minutes before going to lunch.

Piazza di Corte in front of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The square is a perspective machine. The palace on one side, the church opposite, the two side exedrae that close and frame, the fountains marking the axes. Anyone who enters Ariccia from the bridge sees it open up all at once, and that is exactly the effect the design wanted: an entrance on stage. Today's paving and traffic don't help, and the wild parking on holidays ruins the view, but the geometry holds.

The church of Santa Maria Assunta

The collegiate church of the Assunta is a rotunda with a dome and a portico, and the complex's official website calls it a true baroque Pantheon. The reference to the ancient model is explicit: central plan, dome, pronaos. Bernini took the most famous building of imperial Rome and rewrote it at domestic size for a town of a few thousand souls. Go in, it takes five minutes and changes your judgment of the square: from the inside you understand that the church is not a backdrop, it is the geometric center of the whole system.

The monumental bridge of Ariccia

The bridge that spans the ravine and brings the road into the town is the structure that marked the modern history of Ariccia, and its destruction on June 2, 1944, forced civilian traffic to be rerouted through the Chigi park. Today you cross it without noticing, by car, in 20 seconds. The best point for grasping its scale is not the bridge itself: it's the palace's belvedere and the Salita di Ariccia, from which the structure can be seen in full against the green of the ravine.

Something nobody tells you about Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

No guide writes it, and yet it's the piece of information that changes the visit: the palace is one of the few Italian historic residences in which the arrangement of the furniture has the value of a document. It's not about preserving old pieces, it's about preserving relationships. The gilded leather wall hanging covering a wall was cut for that wall. The console designed in Bernini's circle was conceived for that bay between two windows. The portrait hanging above a door was painted for that door, with the perspective calculated on the point of view of whoever walks in. Anyone who moves a single element destroys information that no inventory can recover.

From this follows a practical thing the visitor doesn't expect: the light. In baroque residences that are not deeply electrified, natural lighting is part of the display. The rooms to the east get the sun in the morning, those to the west in the afternoon, and the same room changes appearance between the 10:30 tour and the 17:15 one. The gilded leathers in particular work with raking light: at full midday they look dull, in the late afternoon they light up. If you can choose the tour, and you're interested in the wall hangings, choose late afternoon. If you're interested in oil paintings with glossy varnishes, which become unreadable with raking light because of the reflections, choose the morning.

The second thing almost nobody mentions is the university function. The palace is not only a museum: it also hosts a campus of Auburn University, which carries out teaching activity there. It means that in Ariccia, at certain times of the year, Roman baroque is taught inside a baroque building to foreign students, with the works one meter away. It's not a folkloric detail: it's the reason why the palace has a research and publishing activity that much bigger museums dream of, and why the bookshop sells scholarly catalogs instead of magnets.

The piano nobile of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, room by room

The piano nobile is organized in a simple way and it's worth keeping in mind as you walk, because the layout logic is the key to reading everything.

The Sala Maestra

The fulcrum of the whole floor is the Sala Maestra, the great reception room around which two independent apartments are arranged, one per wing. In a noble house of the 1600s this scheme has a precise meaning: the central room is the public space, where the master shows himself, where formal visits are received, where parties are organized. The side apartments are private life. The visitor who starts from the Sala Maestra and then enters an apartment is repeating exactly the route of a guest admitted to the intimacy of the family.

The east wing: the prince's apartment and the summer dining room

In the eastern wing are the rooms of the prince's apartment, arranged around the summer dining room. The name is not decorative: in Rome and Lazio noble residences had summer rooms and winter rooms, and the criterion was thermal before it was aesthetic. In summer people ate in the coolest room, protected from the afternoon sun, often with floors and coverings that gave back coolness. It's an aspect of baroque material life that museums rarely explain, and that in Ariccia you can read on the spot.

The west wing and the Sala delle Udienze

The western wing includes the Sala delle Udienze. Here ceremony is everything: who came in, where he sat, how long he waited, at what distance from the master of the house. Audiences were the mechanism by which the power of a papal family worked, and the furnishing of an audience room is the stage set of that mechanism. Look at the height of the seats and the position of the doors: the social hierarchy of the 1600s is written in centimeters.

The Sala Borghese and the Taking of Christ attributed to Caravaggio

Since September 27, 2025, a Taking of Christ attributed to Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio has been on display in the Sala Borghese of the piano nobile, on a five-year loan from the owner, the antiques dealer Mario Bigetti. The canvas has a declared provenance from the Mattei collection and then from the Ruffo collection, and the attribution to the Lombard master has been supported by leading scholars such as Denis Mahon, Mina Gregori and Maurizio Marini. It is worth saying clearly that on Caravaggio attributions the debate is open by definition, and that a painting shown under Caravaggio's name is not for that reason a verified Caravaggio: the museum presents it as an attributed work, and that is how it should be looked at.

What makes the display interesting, beyond the name, is the choice of setting. The work is not in a white room of a temporary exhibition: it hangs inside a furnished room of the palace, as a guest of the 1600s would have seen it. This is how these paintings were really looked at, among the furniture, with the light from the windows, without wall labels. Anyone who wants a direct comparison with certain Caravaggio works has in Rome the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi and the Cerasi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo.

The rooms with 17th-century and neoclassical frescoes

The piano nobile doesn't only have movable paintings: it has cycles painted on the walls and on the vaults. The decorations cover two distinct seasons. The first is from the 1600s and belongs to the Chigi construction site, with the contribution of Pietro Mulier. The second is neoclassical, from the late 1700s and early 1800s, and carries the names of Giuseppe Cades, Nicola la Piccola, Liborio Coccetti and Annibale Angelini. Two of these neoclassical rooms were damaged in the air raid of 1944, and the later restorations recovered what could be recovered. Looking at a baroque vault and a neoclassical one in the same visit lets you measure with the naked eye what changes in 120 years of taste: from the illusionistic machine of the 1600s, which breaks through the ceiling, to the orderly grammar of the late 1700s, which decorates it without pretending to open it.

The leather wall hangings and the furnishings from Bernini's circle

The gilded and embossed leather coverings are among the most precious and least noticed pieces in the house. They cost huge sums, were produced to order, and lasted decades. In Ariccia some are kept in their original places. Next to the wall hangings are pieces of furniture from Bernini's close circle, consoles and seats designed in the orbit of the master or of his workshop: it's rare to be able to see baroque furnishings designed by the same hand that designed the architecture, and this is the circumstance that makes Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia a one-of-a-kind and not a beautiful old house.

The cardinal's rooms at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The cardinal's apartment is included in the ticket for the guided visit, and for many visitors it's the part that stays in the mind. The reference figure is Flavio Chigi, the nephew of Alexander VII, a cardinal at 24, a compulsive collector and a man of sure taste. It was he who built the family's artistic heritage, buying, commissioning, protecting painters and musicians.

The private rooms of a cardinal of the 1600s tell something that the reception rooms hide: the domestic scale of power. Smaller rooms, more personal furnishings, objects chosen to be looked at up close and not to impress a crowd. It's the level at which collecting stops being propaganda and becomes private pleasure. Anyone who has in mind the picture gallery of Palazzo Barberini or of the Borghese Gallery finds in Ariccia the intimate version of the same phenomenon, with the advantage of still being in its original container.

The picture gallery of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The palace's historic collection, the one that came with the house and not by donation, lines up top-level names of Roman painting between the 1500s and the 1600s.

The painters of the Chigi collection

Among the authors present are the Cavalier d'Arpino, that is Giuseppe Cesari, the painter who trained Caravaggio in his workshop and who dominated the Roman scene around 1600. Baciccio, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, the Genoese who frescoed the vault of the Gesù and was a portraitist of popes and cardinals. Pier Francesco Mola, a Lombard of Venetian training, one of the most refined landscape painters of the century. Mario Nuzzi, called Mario de' Fiori, a specialist in floral still lifes, which in Rome were a luxury genre. Salvator Rosa, a Neapolitan, a painter of stormy landscapes, philosopher and polemicist, the most nonconformist personality of the Roman 1600s.

This is not a catalog list. It's the precise portrait of a family's taste: official portraiture, landscape, still life, history painting. They are the four pillars of Roman aristocratic collecting, and in Ariccia you see them all together in their setting.

The fresco painters of the palace

On the side of wall decoration the names to keep are Pietro Mulier for the 17th-century season and, for the neoclassical one, Giuseppe Cades, Nicola la Piccola, Liborio Coccetti and Annibale Angelini. Cades in particular deserves attention: he was one of the most gifted draftsmen of late 18th-century Rome, admired by Grand Tour travelers and able to move from rigorous neoclassicism to almost Romantic inventions.

The Museum of Roman Baroque at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

In 2007 the palace opened the Museum of Roman Baroque, which occupies part of the rooms and gathers works of the Roman 1600s and 1700s that arrived by donation. The picture gallery displays about 300 works, paintings and drawings, mostly of the Roman school, coming from bequests and donations concentrated above all between 2002 and 2008, with later additions.

The picture-gallery hanging

The display follows the picture-gallery hanging, on the model of the old Roman residences: paintings on several registers, a dense wall, frames that touch. The works are grouped by schools for teaching purposes. It's a brave and countercurrent choice. The standard contemporary museum isolates the work, puts it at the center of an empty wall and lights it like a relic. The picture gallery does the opposite: it puts the painting back inside a mass of paintings, as it was really seen in the 1600s. You have to get your eye used to it for a few minutes, then the system works and you start to compare instead of contemplate.

The Lemme Collection

The collection donated by the lawyers Fabrizio and Fiammetta Lemme is the best-known core of the museum. Fabrizio Lemme was one of the most active Italian collectors of the Roman 1700s, a period long neglected by the market and by critics precisely because it was squeezed between mature baroque and neoclassicism. The collection has the merit of documenting second- and third-rank authors alongside the greatest: that's how you understand how a painting school really worked.

The Fagiolo Collection

The collection that belonged to Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, one of the most influential art historians in the study of Roman baroque and of Italian art of the 1900s, entered the museum as a donation. The value of a scholar's collection is not the single piece: it's the criterion with which it was put together. It reads like an argument written with paintings.

The Laschena and Ferrari collections and the other donations

Alongside the two main collections are the Laschena Collection, the Ferrari Collection and other particular donations that have come in over time. Among the donors and collectors who have fed the palace's exhibitions are Fabrizio Forti Bernini, a descendant of the sculptor, the scholar of Roman baroque Valentino Martinelli, the physician Pier Luigi Amata and the antiques dealer Miriam Di Penta.

The artists of the Museum of Roman Baroque

In the museum's rooms and in the exhibitions that have followed one another you meet Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Mattia Preti and his brother Gregorio, Agostino Tassi, Gaspar Dughet, Giovanni Baglione, Benedetto Luti, Francesco Cozza, Giuseppe Recco, Pierre Subleyras. Among the works of greatest impact is a Saint Sebastian dated between 1635 and 1644 attributed to the hand of Bernini, which catches the saint at half length as he twists in a gesture of heroic fury. Bernini as a painter is a little-known side of the man: he painted for himself, with a freedom that in public sculpture he could not afford.

The temporary exhibitions at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The palace has a continuous exhibition program, often philological in approach and with serious catalogs. Over the years there have been shows on Bernini and 17th-century painting, on Baciccio, on Ferdinand Voet, on the Tommasi Ferroni, on the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea in 18th-century engravings, and popular shows like the one on period-style costumes from the 16th to the 19th century. The calendar should be checked on the official website before leaving: an exhibition under way can mean lines, but also one extra section for the same ticket.

The Chigi Library and the art history collections

The palace holds the Chigi Library, to which have been added art history libraries that arrived by donation: that of the collector Beatrice Chiovenda Canestro, that of Deoclecio Redig De Campos, who was director of the Vatican Museums, and other collections. It's not material accessible to the ordinary visit, but it explains why in Ariccia they produce studies and not only tickets: a museum with a library inside is a museum that still has something to say.

The advice I give you for visiting Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

There is only one piece of advice and I give it without beating around the bush: take the first guided tour of the afternoon on a weekday, off season, and give the park the time left before closing. Let me explain the reasoning.

The first tour in the morning, at 10:30, is the one all the organized groups choose, the ones leaving Rome after breakfast. The 11:45 tour risks colliding with the lunch break and leaves you in the square with the palace closed until 15:00 or 15:30. The first afternoon tour, instead, finds the palace empty, the best light on the leathers and the wall hangings, and leaves you time for the park until closing. On weekdays, then, the town is a different town: Piazza di Corte without the Sunday cars reads the way Bernini thought of it.

The second piece of advice concerns the order of things. Don't go into the museum after a lunch in a fraschetta. It's a firm opinion and I stand by it: the porchetta and the wine of the Castelli are excellent and should be honored, but an hour on your feet in warm rooms after a heavy meal wipes out your concentration. Palace first, table after. The park after lunch is the right solution, because you walk in the open air and the woods do the rest.

Third recommendation, for those who come with a group: the group rate starts at 15 people and drops to €12 with the palace guide. For numbers like these it's better to phone in advance instead of showing up at the counter, because the guided tour has a cap of 30 people and two groups at the same time won't fit. Anyone who organizes trips for companies or for international groups can rely on the structure of TourLeaderPro, which works with authorized guides and knows the real timing of the Castelli.

Chigi Park in Ariccia: 28 hectares of ancient woodland

The park attached to the palace, also called Barco Chigi, is a municipal green area of 28 hectares. The first core dates to the 1500s, to the time of the Savelli, but the present shape is the result of the work of the Chigi family, owners between 1661 and 1988, under the direction of Bernini and Carlo Fontana between 1662 and 1672.

The Nemus aricinum, Diana's sacred grove

Here is the fact that makes even distracted visitors look up. The park is considered a remnant of the Nemus aricinum, the sacred grove tied to the cult of Diana recorded by the classical sources. It's not a garden designed on agricultural land: it's a piece of Alban forest that was never entirely cut, first because it was sacred, then because it was a baronial hunting reserve, finally because it was the park of a family that could afford not to exploit it. 2,000 years of uninterrupted ownership are the reason why those trees still exist.

The transformation from an enclosed hunting barco to a landscape garden of proto-Romantic taste took place in the Bernini decade. It's a remarkable precocity: the English-style landscape garden would become a European fashion a century later, while in Ariccia the natural woodland is valued as such already in the 1600s.

The monumental trees of Chigi Park

The woodland is mixed broadleaf, with century-old specimens. Here you find the largest holm oak of the Castelli Romani and the largest field maple in Italy, as well as monumental specimens of elm, laurel and hornbeam. The park is one of the few green areas of the Alban Hills where the chestnut did not move in, a crop that elsewhere replaced the original vegetation: here the oldest species survived, for the most part oaks. For this reason scholars point to it as the most important ecosystem of the Castelli Romani.

The redwoods of 1861

In the park grow three coast redwoods planted in 1861, among the first specimens planted in Europe. The species had arrived from California only a very few years earlier and was a botanical curiosity for collectors. They are trees that tell two stories together: the 19th-century fashion for exotic species and the continuity of a family management that could afford to plant something destined to be appreciated by great-grandchildren.

The rare minerals of the park's quarries

A detail that thrills mineralogists and surprises everyone else: from the historic quarries inside the park have come rare minerals such as latiumite, harkerite and malanite, now kept in science museums around half the world. The Alban subsoil is of volcanic origin, and the contacts between the lavas and the limestones they enclosed produced mineral associations that exist nowhere else. Ariccia is a type locality for the international mineralogical literature, and almost none of the visitors know it.

How to visit Chigi Park

The park follows the same hours as the palace, Monday closure included: 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00 on winter hours, 10:00-13:00 and 15:30-18:30 on summer hours. You walk on paths and avenues, in closed shoes and without trekking pretensions: the change in elevation is modest, and the ground gets muddy after rain. In summer the woods give you quite a few degrees less than the square. The park also hosts events and series, like Fantastiche Visioni al Parco Chigi: on those days the hours and the access can change.

Another well-known fact, yet rarely cited

Everyone knows that Luchino Visconti's The Leopard was shot in part at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia. The guides write it, the signs repeat it, anyone who has seen the film knows it. What is cited much less is the cultural consequence of that set, and it's worth explaining.

In 1962, when Visconti arrived in Ariccia, Italian cinema rebuilt noble interiors on studio sets, at Cinecittà, with scenery made on purpose. Visconti did the opposite: he looked for authentic rooms, with authentic furnishings, because he wanted the material to be real in front of the camera. In Ariccia he found what no set designer could build: rooms in which the furniture was where it had always been. He shot a large part of the film in the palace, including the scene of the dialogue between Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.

Here a stubborn misunderstanding is corrected, one you hear repeated often. The ball scene, the most famous of the film, with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, was not shot in Ariccia: it was shot at Palazzo Valguarnera Gangi in Palermo, where the shooting was completed. Other Sicilian scenes were shot at Villa Boscogrande, also in Palermo. Anyone who enters Palazzo Chigi looking for the ballroom of The Leopard is looking for something 900 kilometers away.

The little-cited fact, then, is this: Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia was one of the places where Italian cinema stopped faking historic interiors and began to use them. From then on the palace became a recurring set, and that vocation continues today, with a rate list dedicated to film and television shoots that the municipality keeps public on the museum's website.

The right photo to take at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The photograph everyone takes is the front of the palace from Piazza di Corte, head-on, with the church behind. It's a correct and useless photo: it flattens the perspective, frames the parked cars and tells nothing that you can't find on a thousand postcards.

The right photo is another one, and it takes two minutes of walking. Go to the start of the monumental bridge, on the Albano side, and frame the palace in a three-quarter view with the ravine below. From there you see what is invisible from the square: Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia is not an urban building, it's a castle perched on the edge of a volcanic precipice. The corner towers read for what they are, the green of the ravine acts as a base, the bulk of the Torrione Nuovo of 1740 closes the composition. The best light is that of late morning in winter and late afternoon in summer, when the sun hits the facade at an angle and the moldings exist instead of flattening out.

The second photograph I recommend is inside the park, and it takes a precise choice: don't photograph the whole tree. A century-old holm oak photographed whole becomes an indistinct green mass. Get close to the trunk, put a person next to it to give the scale, and shoot from below toward the crown. It's the only way to convey what you feel on the spot.

Inside the palace, check at the ticket office what is allowed: in historic residences with original furnishings the rules on photographs, and above all on flash and tripods, are stricter than in an ordinary museum, for conservation reasons that concern textiles, leathers and varnishes. Flash on a gilded leather wall hanging from the 1600s is not discourtesy toward the other visitors: it is cumulative damage.

Some important events that took place here in history

The chronology of this palace is livelier than its quiet look suggests, and it includes music, wars and a change of ownership that is nothing short of sensational.

The world premieres of the 1600s

In 1672, the year the work was finished, the palace hosted the world premiere of La sincerità con la sincerità, overo Il Tirinto, by Bernardo Pasquini, one of the most important musicians of baroque Rome, an organist and harpsichordist of European fame. The following year, 1673, it was the turn of Gl'inganni innocenti, ovvero L'Adalinda, by Pietro Simone Agostini. Two world premieres in two years in a country palace just finished say precisely what Ariccia was for the Chigi: not a refuge, but a court seat in every respect, where cultural politics were carried out with the same means used in Rome.

The Roman Republic of 1798-1799

Between 1798 and 1799, during the events of the Roman Republic and the French occupation, the palace and the park were upended by the movements of the warring troops. Armies crossing the Castelli Romani are a constant of the history of Lazio: the dominant position on Via Appia, which for 15 centuries was the reason for the good fortune of these towns, in wartime always turned into their condemnation.

June 2, 1944

In the Second World War units of the Allied army camped inside the palace and in the park. On June 2, 1944, with the front moving up toward Rome after the breakthrough at Anzio and Cassino, the Ariccia bridge was blown up: the Chigi park was opened to civilian traffic to replace the interrupted connection. In the air raid of those days the neoclassical frescoes of two rooms of the piano nobile were partly damaged, but the palace as a whole remained unharmed. Considering that Albano Laziale and Genzano suffered very heavy bombing in those weeks, the survival of the Chigi furnishings is one of the least commented pieces of luck in the art history of Lazio.

The sale of 1988 and the birth of the museum

On December 29, 1988, Agostino Chigi Albani della Rovere sold the palace and the park to the municipality of Ariccia, with particular conditions that bound the property to public use. It was an almost isolated case in Italy: as a rule the great aristocratic residences are emptied, the furnishings go to auction separately and the container is left without contents. Here the opposite happened. 19 years later, in 2007, that choice produced the Museum of Roman Baroque, and in 2025 the arrival of the Taking of Christ attributed to Caravaggio in the Sala Borghese.

Who has passed through Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The list of figures who have passed through these rooms divides into two eras: that of the Chigi and that of the cinema.

The Chigi and the Rome of the popes

The first name is Alexander VII, Fabio Chigi, pope from 1655 to 1667, the pontiff who entrusted to Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona the construction sites that made baroque Rome. The second is Cardinal Flavio Chigi, who lived from 1631 to 1693, nephew of the pope and creator of the family collections, protector of painters and musicians. The third, chronologically the first, is Agostino Chigi the Magnificent, the Sienese banker who died in 1520, who financed Raphael and Peruzzi and from whom the whole fortune of the house descends. And naturally Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Carlo Fontana, who did not just pass through here: they worked here for eight years.

Cinema, television, music

In 1962 Luchino Visconti and the crew of The Leopard arrived, with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa. In 1989 Alberto Sordi shot part of L'Avaro here. In 1990 it was the turn of Franco Nero and Carlo delle Piane for Io e il re. Between 2004 and 2005 the palace hosted the shooting of Caterina e le sue figlie with Virna Lisi and Iva Zanicchi, and in 2006 that of I Vicerè with Daniele Pecci, Lando Buzzanca and Lucia Bosè. In 2005 Eros Ramazzotti and Anastacia shot a music video there.

Scholars, collectors and institutions

In 1998 Vittorio Sgarbi, Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco and Nicola Bulgari passed through Ariccia. In 1999, for the initiatives on Baciccio, came the great British connoisseur Sir Denis Mahon, the greatest scholar of the Italian 1600s of the last century. In 2001 Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Massimo Girotti returned to the palace for the exhibition La scena del Principe. In 2004 the President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi paid a visit.

I notice something that says a lot: among the illustrious visitors there are not only actors and politicians, there are connoisseurs. A palace where Denis Mahon comes is a palace that has material to study, and this is the best guarantee of quality a museum can show.

Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia with children

Children up to six years old get in free, and young people from 6 to 18 pay the reduced rate. The guided visit lasts a little over an hour, which for a small child is at the limit. It works well with kids from eight years old and up, as long as you build it around two or three stories instead of a list of furniture: the Savelli castle that became a palace, the bridge that was blown up, the movie shot in the rooms. The park is the winning card: after an hour of silence among the paintings, 28 hectares of woodland with the biggest trees of the Castelli put everyone back in a good mood. The palace also organizes art workshops and themed events, whose calendar is published on the official website.

Accessibility and services at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

People with a recognized disability get in free together with a companion. On the level of physical accessibility of the rooms it has to be said frankly that a 17th-century building with piani nobili and historic staircases is not a structure designed for wheelchairs: anyone with specific needs does well to call 06 93 30 053 or write to info@palazzochigiariccia.it before setting out, and to be told which rooms can be reached. The museum has a bookshop with catalogs and its own scholarly publications, many of which can also be consulted in the online publications section of the website.

When to go to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia and when to avoid it

The best period is the shoulder season, April and May, or October. Spring puts the park in ideal condition and the summer schedule stretches the afternoon to 18:30. Autumn gives the woods colors that don't exist in summer.

There are three times to avoid, and I say so clearly. The first is Monday, because it's closed, and every year someone comes from Rome and finds the door barred. The second is the month of August in the middle hours of the day: it's hot, the town is deserted in the worst sense of the word and many fraschette close for vacation. The third is the days of the Sagra della Porchetta, which in 2026 reached its 73rd edition and took place on September 4, 5 and 6. On those days Ariccia is beautiful and unmanageable at the same time: crowds, parking impossible to find, modified traffic flow. If you come for the sagra, come for the sagra and accept that the palace will be a side dish. If you come for the palace, choose another weekend.

What to see around Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

You can tour Ariccia on foot in an hour, and around it is one of the densest territories of Lazio.

The fraschette and the porchetta of Ariccia

The porchetta of Ariccia has the Protected Geographical Indication mark, registered at the European level on June 15, 2011, and the production area coincides with the municipal territory. The specification describes a product of cylindrical shape with a crisp, brown crust, pinkish white meat with brown specks of spices, flavored with rosemary, garlic, black pepper and sea salt, cooked between 160 and 280 degrees for a time ranging from three to six hours. The whole porchetta weighs between 27 and 45 kilograms, the tronchetto between 7 and 13. The crust, the specification says, stays crisp even after several days.

The fraschette are the town's historic taverns, born as shops selling loose wine that hung a leafy branch on the door. Today they are places with long tables, paper tablecloths and cutting boards: you eat porchetta, cured meats, cheeses, and drink wine of the Castelli. The advice is to avoid the ones on the main square on peak days and walk 200 meters toward the side streets, where prices go down and the local clientele goes up. The relationship between these two indicators almost never fails.

The other Castelli Romani in a day

From Ariccia you can reach in a few minutes Genzano di Roma with Palazzo Sforza Cesarini, Nemi overlooking its volcanic lake, Castel Gandolfo with the papal palace, Albano Laziale with the remains of the Castra Albana, Marino and Grottaferrata with the Greek abbey. All of it falls within the Castelli Romani Regional Park, which is headquartered in Rocca di Papa at Via Cesare Battisti 5. Anyone traveling with foreign friends who wants a Roman itinerary already set up in English finds a solid base in the guide to things to do in Rome from ItalyPlanner.

How much a day at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia costs

Let's do the math, because transparency on costs is worth more than 10 adjectives. Full guided visit €15 per person, €12 with the reduction. Lunch in a fraschetta with porchetta, a side dish and half a liter of wine: the average spend stays under €25 per person in the places away from the square. The park is included in the outing and asks for no additional tickets beyond ordinary access. Anyone arriving by car should count the fuel and the fees for paid parking. Anyone arriving by coach spends a few euros on a regional ticket. A full day for two people, museum and lunch included, comes in comfortably under €90. For the ratio between what you see and what you pay, it remains one of the best deals in the province of Rome.

How you really save: the reduced rate for university students up to 25 and for people over 65 cuts three euros. The group rate from 15 people up drops to €12 with the palace guide and to €10 without. Families with children under six don't pay for them. I advise against the self-guided visit taken to save money, instead: three euros less in exchange for half of what there is to understand is not a bargain.

Quick questions about Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Where is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

At Piazza di Corte 14, in Ariccia, in the province of Rome, in the Alban Hills, facing the square designed by Bernini and a few steps from the monumental bridge.

How much does a ticket to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia cost

The guided visit to the piano nobile with the cardinal's rooms and the Museum of Roman Baroque costs €15 full price and €12 reduced. The self-guided visit costs €12 full price and €9 reduced.

What are the hours of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

From October 1 to March 31 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00. From April 1 to September 30 10:00-13:00 and 15:30-18:30. Closed on Monday.

Is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia open on Monday

No. Monday is the weekly closing day, and it also applies to Chigi Park.

What time do the guided tours of Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia start

At 10:30 and 11:45 in the morning. In the afternoon at 15:30 or 16:45 on winter hours, at 16:00 or 17:15 on summer hours. The group has a limit of 30 people.

How long does the visit to Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia take

The guided tour covers the piano nobile, the cardinal's rooms and the museum in a little over an hour. With the park and a walk in Piazza di Corte you comfortably reach half a day.

Do you need to book to visit Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

For the self-guided visit, no. For the guided visit it's advisable, because the tours have fixed times and limited places. Groups and school groups book at 06 93 30 053 or 3891641721.

Can you buy tickets online

Yes. The museum sells online through the authorized reseller listed on the home page of the official website palazzochigiariccia.it.

Who is entitled to the reduced ticket

Young people from 6 to 18 years old, university students up to age 25, people over 65, residents of Ariccia and military personnel.

Who gets in free at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Children up to six years old, school groups from Ariccia, people over 65 who live in Ariccia, people with a recognized disability and their companion, accompanying teachers, authorized tour guides, one companion per group, journalists registered with the Order, scholars authorized by the Curator and official visits authorized by the Mayor.

How much does the visit cost for a group

From 15 people up, €12 each with the palace guide or €10 without a guide.

Is Chigi Park included in the visit

The park is a municipal green area attached to the palace and follows the same opening hours. For the access conditions in force it's best to ask at the ticket office, because during events and series they can change.

How big is Chigi Park in Ariccia

28 hectares. It is considered a remnant of the Nemus aricinum, the grove sacred to Diana, and it is home to the largest holm oak of the Castelli Romani and the largest field maple in Italy.

Can you take photographs inside Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

The rules should be asked about at the ticket office: in a residence with original textile furnishings and leathers, flash and tripods are normally forbidden for conservation reasons.

Is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia wheelchair accessible

It is a historic building with piani nobili and period staircases. Entry is free for people with a recognized disability and for their companion, but on the routes that are actually passable it's best to phone first at 06 93 30 053.

Is it true that The Leopard was shot at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

In part yes: Visconti shot a large part of the film there in 1962, including the dialogue between Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon. The ball scene, however, was shot at Palazzo Valguarnera Gangi in Palermo.

What is the Museum of Roman Baroque

The museum opened in 2007 inside the palace, with about 300 works, paintings and drawings of the Roman school of the 17th and 18th centuries, arrived mostly by donation between 2002 and 2008: the Lemme, Fagiolo, Laschena and Ferrari collections and others.

Is there really a Caravaggio at Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

In the Sala Borghese, since September 27, 2025, on a five-year loan, a Taking of Christ attributed to Caravaggio is on display, with a Mattei and then Ruffo provenance. The attribution is supported by leading scholars and remains a matter of critical discussion.

Who designed Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

Gian Lorenzo Bernini supplied the design idea and the overall direction, and Carlo Fontana directed the work between 1664 and 1672. The preexisting core was the Savelli castle, enlarged in the 1590s.

Who owns Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia today

The municipality of Ariccia, which bought it with the park on December 29, 1988, from Agostino Chigi Albani della Rovere.

Is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia the same as Palazzo Chigi in Rome

No. The one in Rome, the seat of the government, is another building, also tied to the Chigi family. In Ariccia you visit the family's country residence, with its original furnishings.

Is Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia suitable for children

From eight years old and up it works well, especially if the visit ends with the park. Under six entry is free, but the hour of guided visit is long for a small child.

How long does it take to get from Rome to Ariccia

By car, traffic permitting, you arrive in a little over half an hour from the Grande Raccordo Anulare along Via Appia Nuova toward Albano. By regional coach the times depend on the stops: the schedule should be checked on the carrier's website.

Where do you eat porchetta in Ariccia

In the fraschette of the historic center. The Porchetta di Ariccia is PGI since June 15, 2011 and is produced in the municipal territory. In the side streets you spend less than on the main square.

When is the Sagra della Porchetta di Ariccia held

In 2026 the 73rd edition was held, on September 4, 5 and 6. On the days of the sagra the town changes its traffic flow and the parking fills up.

What is the difference between Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia and the other villas of the Castelli

The preservation of the furnishings. In the other historic residences you visit the architecture, here you also visit the contents, which stayed in their rooms with the original arrangement.

Can you rent Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia for weddings or events

Yes, the museum's public rate list includes items for weddings, conferences, concerts and film and television shoots, with different amounts depending on the room and the duration. Requests are submitted through the official website.

Is it worth visiting Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia in half a day from Rome

Yes, and it is in fact the right format: palace in the morning or on the first afternoon tour, park next, lunch or a snack in a fraschetta. Adding three other towns on the same day means looking at nothing.

The verdict on Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia

There are hundreds of baroque places in Lazio, and few force you to change the way you describe them like this one. The reason is simple: here you don't explain an isolated masterpiece, you explain a system. A pope, an architect, a family, a town remade from scratch, a house that kept its furniture for three and a half centuries. Anyone who arrives in Ariccia looking for the work to photograph is a little disappointed, because the greatness of the place is not concentrated in one point. Anyone who arrives ready to look at how people lived inside the baroque leaves with something that in Rome, among the lines and the crowds, is almost impossible to get. Take the first tour of the afternoon, on a weekday. And leave half an hour for the woods: it's the part you will remember a year from now.

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

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