Palazzo Massimo alle Terme – National Roman Museum

Largo di Villa Peretti 2, 00185 Rome: the museum's door opens about a hundred meters from Piazza dei Cinquecento exit of Termini Station, which is both the terminus of metro lines A and B, the hub of almost all the surface lines of the center, and the regional train station for Fiumicino. If you arrive by subway, you exit, cross the square keeping the Baths of Diocletian on your right, and in three minutes you are at the entrance. The full ticket costs 15.00 euros and the reduced ticket 2.00 euros. The formula is that of the single ticket of the National Roman Museum, which allows one entry to each of the sites within a week of the first access. There is also a ticket for the Octagonal Hall alone at 5.00 euros, and an annual card (MNRCard) at 30.00 euros full price and 20.00 reduced. The hours are Tuesday to Sunday, from 9.00 to 19.00, with ticket office and last entry at 18.00. Monday is the weekly closing day. On the first Sunday of the month admission is free, as at all state-run cultural sites. Booking is not required and tickets are bought at the box office or online on the Museiitaliani portal. A notice that changes the plans of anyone who wants to do the full circuit: the Crypta Balbi is temporarily closed to the public, so the single ticket today concretely opens three doors out of four. Prices and hours should always be rechecked on the museum's official site before you go.

This guide is part of the section dedicated to the state museums of Rome, where you will find the other state sites in the city, and it reads well together with the general overview of the museums of Rome.

Why Palazzo Massimo alle Terme Is the Museum I Recommend First to Anyone Who Has Already Seen the Colosseum

Our conviction is firm: whoever wants to understand Roman art, the real thing, does not learn it at the Colosseum. They learn it here. The Colosseum tells of the engineering and politics of spectacle. Palazzo Massimo tells of faces, houses, gardens, money and the dead. They are two different conversations, and the second is the one that stays with you.

There is also a practical reason that counts as much as the cultural one. This museum is almost always empty. On a July afternoon, with the city boiling, you can find yourself alone in front of a Greek bronze of the fourth century BC while 400 meters away people are lining up for a selfie. Air conditioning, silence, well-written labels, spacious rooms. Among the underrated Roman museums, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme is in first place by an embarrassing margin.

The Palace of Massimiliano Massimo: A Jesuit College Turned Museum

The building was not born as a museum, and it shows. It was commissioned by the Jesuit father Massimiliano Massimo, of the great Roman Massimo family, and built between 1883 and 1887 to a design by the architect Camillo Pistrucci to house the new seat of the Jesuit College, which was moving from the family palace in the center to the new neighborhood rising around the station. The language Pistrucci chose is that of the neo-Renaissance, inspired by the great sixteenth-century palaces: rustication, cornices, framed windows, a regular inner courtyard. A serious building, the kind that Umbertine Italy built to last.

The ground has a history older and more interesting than the facade. The palace stands on what had been the perimeter of Villa Montalto Peretti, the residence that Cardinal Felice Peretti, later Pope Sixtus V, had built on the Esquiline in the second half of the sixteenth century. It was one of the great suburban villas of Rome, with avenues, fountains and ancient statues, and it was broken up and largely erased by the works for the railway station and by the city plan of Rome as capital. The name of the largo, Largo di Villa Peretti, is what remains of that villa: a place name that survives a vanished garden.

The college remained in operation until 1960. In 1981 the Italian state bought the building to make it one of the new seats of the National Roman Museum, which had been suffocating for decades under the weight of its collections at the Baths of Diocletian. The transformation project was entrusted to the architect Costantino Dardi, and the work was long: it went on for years, with partial openings, until the route was completed in 1998, when the palace took the form you visit today, with the ground floor, the first floor, the second floor and the basement level all devoted to display, plus offices, library and conference room.

Dardi made a choice worth noticing as you walk: he did not fake an ancient palace and did not hide the nineteenth-century one. The rooms have light walls, neutral floors, controlled lighting and a display that lets the works breathe. In some rooms the route deliberately recalls the crowding of the sixteenth-century collections, with the pieces close together as in the galleries of the collecting cardinals. In others, as in the room of the Discobolus, the work is isolated and made the absolute protagonist. It is a display that by now has its years and in places shows its date, but it still works better than many recent restylings.

The Four Sites of the National Roman Museum and the Single Ticket

The National Roman Museum is not one building: it is four. It was born in 1889 as a state museum to gather the materials that came out in an avalanche from the excavations of Rome as capital, that is, from all the digs carried out in the city and the surrounding territory starting in 1870. The historic seat was the complex of the Baths of Diocletian, where you still find the epigraphic and protohistoric sections, the cloister traditionally attributed to Michelangelo and the great bath halls. To that first nucleus, three other sites were added at different times.

Palazzo Altemps, near Piazza Navona, houses the Renaissance collections of ancient sculpture, that is, the great noble collections, from the Ludovisi to the Mattei, with the Ludovisi Throne and the Dying Gaul. The Crypta Balbi, between Via delle Botteghe Oscure and Via Caetani, is the museum of the changing city, devoted to early medieval Rome and the layering of a city block from the Theater of Balbus to the convent. It is the site now temporarily closed to the public. And finally Palazzo Massimo, which has the marble and bronze sculpture, the painting, the mosaics and the Coin Cabinet: the part that most visitors are most interested in.

Then there is the Octagonal Hall, the large octagonal room of the Baths of Diocletian facing Via Giuseppe Romita, which has a somewhat separate administrative life and for which the museum also offers a separate ticket at 5.00 euros.

The single ticket at 15.00 euros covers the sites of the circuit and is valid for a week from the first entry, with one access per site. A clear judgment, which not everyone shares: that ticket is worth it only if you already know you will come back. If you have two days in Rome and a free afternoon, spend the 15 euros in here and that's it, without chasing the other sites. If instead you have a week, the single ticket is one of the best cultural bargains in the city, because it puts together four museums that alone would each be worth the price.

How the Visit to Palazzo Massimo alle Terme Is Organized

Four floors, an order that is chronological and thematic at once, and a simple rule: you go up. The ground floor starts from the late Republican portrait and the Greek originals that came to Rome with the conquests. The first floor continues with imperial portraiture, ideal statuary and the great sarcophagi. The second floor is all painting, stucco and mosaic, that is, the walls and floors of the houses of the rich. The basement closes with the coins, the gold and the materials that tell of money and daily life. Whoever starts from the top to avoid the stairs gets the story wrong, because the museum is built as a discourse that goes from marble to painting and from public celebration to private life.

What it helps to know before entering is that the four levels do not have the same weight. The ground floor and the first floor can be visited freely and are the largest part. The second floor, the one with the frescoes, has historically had more regulated access, because the rooms are delicate and small: ask at the ticket office about the arrangements for the day, because it is the floor nobody will forgive you for skipping. The basement of the Coin Cabinet is the one most visitors skip out of tiredness, and it is a mistake that I explain further on.

The Ground Floor of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: The Faces of the Romans

The ground floor is a gallery of faces, and the declared theme is the evolution of the portrait: from a privilege reserved for the most illustrious citizens of the archaic age to a very widespread genre, practiced even by freedmen who with a funerary bust told the world they had become somebody. This is the key to not walking through it absently. Every face is a political or social statement, and the Romans knew it very well.

The Gallery of Anonymous Portraits at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

The first gallery lines up dozens of nameless male and female portraits. The display is designed to evoke the gallery of ancestors that stood in the atrium of Roman houses: the imagines maiorum, the masks and busts of forebears shown to whoever came in, like a family résumé in marble. Stop at the portrait of an elderly woman from Palombara Sabina, with deep wrinkles and a tight mouth: it is late Republican verism in its hardest form, where age is not hidden but displayed as a title of authority. In the same area is the portrait of the priest of Isis, datable to the middle of the first century BC, recovered from the Tiber: shaved skull, fixed gaze, the image of an Egyptian cult already at home in Rome.

On the floor of the gallery is a mosaic of Hylas and the nymphs from a Roman villa in the Tor Bella Monaca area. It is worth looking at for a technical reason: the scene of the young man seized by the nymphs at the spring is one of the most frequently told tales in domestic decoration, and it will return on the second floor in another, much later version, from the basilica of Junius Bassus. The museum does this on purpose: the same subjects reappear centuries and floors apart.

The General of Tivoli and the Fasti Antiates at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

In the first room you enter the heart of late Republican portraiture. The most debated piece is the male portrait of Hellenistic design from Via Barberini, for which scholars have proposed different identifications, from Lucius Aemilius Paullus to Titus Quinctius Flamininus. None is proven, and the label does well to keep the question open. Next to it is the so-called General of Tivoli, from the sanctuary of Hercules Victor at Tivoli, datable to the beginning of the first century BC. Look at it closely, because it is one of the most instructive statues in the museum: the head is a realistic portrait, wrinkled, thoroughly Roman, while the body is a heroic nude of Greek derivation, with the cloak and cuirass resting on a support. Roman head on Greek body. It is the exact snapshot of what was happening to Roman figurative culture in those years.

In the same room are the Fasti Antiates, two frescoed panels from Anzio, datable between 88 and 55 BC. They are the oldest painted Roman calendar to have come down to us, with the days marked as fasti and nefasti, the festivals and the months. They are not beautiful in the way a bronze is beautiful, but they are one of the most precious documents in the whole room: from them we know how the Romans organized time before the Julian reform.

The Relief of the Rabirii and the Fasti Praenestini

The second room leads to the Caesarian and Augustan age. The funerary relief of the Rabirii, from Via Appia, shows three figures in a row: Gaius Rabirius Hermodorus, Rabiria Demaris and Usia Prima, the latter shown as a priestess of Isis with the sistrum. It is a monument of freedmen, that is, former slaves who had been freed, and it says a great deal about social mobility in Rome in the first century BC: those who had made their fortune had themselves portrayed with the same seriousness as the nobles. In the same room are the Fasti Praenestini, the calendar of Praeneste annotated in the Augustan age, which scholars connect to the grammarian Verrius Flaccus. Whoever has the patience to read the captions here takes home more Roman history than from a day at the Forum.

The Julio-Claudian Room of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

This is the room that makes an impression even on those who know nothing about archaeology, because it is a family reunion of the dynasty that invented the empire. There are, in marble and in bronze: Gaius Octavius, the father of Augustus, with a dry, realistic portrait. Young Augustus, with the idealized construction of the face that would become the official model. Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the general who won at Actium. Tiberius as a boy. Germanicus. Drusus the Younger. Agrippa Postumus. Caligula. On the female side, Octavia the Younger, Livia Drusilla, Agrippina the Younger, Poppaea Sabina and Claudia Octavia.

My advice here is to look at the hairstyles instead of the names. Women's hairstyles in Rome changed with the court and dated a portrait better than any inscription: the nodus on the forehead of the Augustan age, the tower of curls of the Flavian age, the gathered braids of the Antonines. Imperial heads worked like election posters, and the empress's fashion was the font of propaganda. In the same room is the statue of a young girl from Ostia, from the baths of the Cisarii, portrayed as Artemis: a girl from a well-off family dressed up as a goddess, which is the Roman way of saying that the daughter was worth as much as a monument.

The Augustus of Via Labicana and the Painted Frieze of the Esquiline

The next room contains one of the statues most reproduced in textbooks: the Augustus of Via Labicana, found in the area of the ancient villa of Livia near Via Labicana, which portrays the princeps with his head veiled by a fold of the toga, in the role of pontifex maximus. Augustus took that office in 12 BC, and from then on had himself represented this way continually: not the commander, but the priest. It is the portrait of a man who had understood that power is better preserved with religion than with the army.

In the same area is the historical frieze of the Basilica Aemilia, from the Roman Forum, whose dating oscillates between the Sullan-Caesarian and the Augustan age. The scenes tell of the founding of Rome and the punishment of Tarpeia before the Sabine king Titus Tatius, that is, the founding myths treated as chronicle. And there is the painted frieze of the Esquiline, found in 1875 near Piazzale di Porta Maggiore in a small columbarium linked to Titus Statilius Taurus: superimposed registers with stories of Aeneas, the meeting of Mars and Rhea Silvia and the birth of the twins. It is among the oldest Roman historical paintings preserved, and the fact that it survived is almost a stroke of luck of age.

The Gallery of Greek Portraits and the Mosaic of the Felines

The third gallery of the ground floor is devoted to Roman copies of Greek portraits, and it serves to remind us that cultured Romans surrounded themselves with heads of philosophers and poets the way we surround ourselves with books. There are Socrates, Hesiod, Epicurus, Herodotus, the poet Diphilus, Philip V of Macedon, a boxer from the villa at Genazzano and a gilded bronze portrait of Alexander the Great of the imperial age. Alexander opens the museum's route for a precise reason: the Hellenistic portrait that deifies the sovereign is the matrix from which the whole image of Roman power derives.

On the floor is a mosaic from a villa along Via Ardeatina, datable to the first century BC, with a cat sinking its teeth into a bird and two ducks. It is in opus vermiculatum, with tiny tesserae, and seen up close it looks like painting. It's worth stopping on purpose: whoever thinks of mosaic as crude art changes their mind in 10 seconds.

The Niobid of the Sallustian Gardens at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

Then you arrive at the room that alone justifies the ticket. The Niobid from the Horti Sallustiani, that is, the gardens that had belonged to the historian Sallust and then passed to the imperial estate, is a Greek original of the fifth century BC, not a copy: Greek marble, Greek hand, and in Rome as war booty or as a luxury purchase. It was found in the excavations of 1906, in an underground space about 11 meters below modern ground level, in the area between Via Veneto and Via Sallustiana.

It portrays one of the daughters of Niobe struck by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis: the girl twists backward, the chiton slips, and her hand searches behind her shoulder for the arrow lodged there. It is a gesture that no photograph conveys, because it is three-dimensional by construction: you have to walk around it. In our judgment it is the most beautiful sculpture in the whole museum, above the Boxer, and the public walks past it too quickly because nobody ever put it on a cover.

In the same room is the statue of a girl in a peplos found in Piazza Barberini, a Greek original from around 470 BC, traced by scholars to a Magna Graecia or Sicilian milieu. Two Greek originals in the same room is a rare condition in any museum in the world.

The Boxer at Rest and the Hellenistic Prince at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

And then there are the two bronzes. The Boxer at Rest, or Quirinal Boxer, was found in 1885 on the slopes of the Quirinal, in the area of the Baths of Constantine, during the digging for the new neighborhood. The excavation also yielded the so-called Hellenistic Prince, a heroic nude leaning on a spear. The Boxer is generally dated to the second half of the fourth century BC, and the scholarly tradition has linked it to Lysippus or his circle: the attribution remains a hypothesis, not a documented fact, and the labels do well to be cautious.

What is not a hypothesis is the effect it has. The man is seated, elbows on his knees, his face turned upward as if someone had called him. He has a broken nose, cauliflower ears, the leather cestus still tied at his wrists. On the shoulders and face there are inlays of red copper that render the blood of fresh wounds. He is not a hero: he is a professional at the end of his shift, with a body that has already paid the bill. Whoever excavated it told of having the impression, as the head emerged from the earth, of witnessing the resurrection of a real person.

If I had to name a single room in the museum for someone who has 20 minutes in all, I would say this one. The rest can be put off. This one can't.

The Neo-Attic Works and the Bowl from Lungotevere in Sassia

The last room of the ground floor gathers the Neo-Attic production, that is, that current of workshops which from the second and first century BC worked in Rome reproducing and reworking classical models to furnish villas. There are an Athena, an Aphrodite signed by the sculptor Menophantos, a base decorated with dancing Maenads of the first century BC, a Muse Melpomene. The piece I recommend looking at last is the large Pentelic marble bowl supported by animal paws, from Lungotevere in Sassia near the Ospedale Santo Spirito, that is, from the area of the Horti Agrippinae. It is decorated with Eros on a winged swan, Nereids and sea Centaurs carrying the arms of Achilles, and dates to the late Hellenistic period or the first decades of the first century BC. It was used to furnish a garden. It was, in essence, outdoor furniture for very rich people.

The First Floor of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: Emperors, Gods and Sarcophagi

You go up a monumental staircase flanked by statues of divinities from the villas of Lazio, Roman copies or reworkings of Greek originals: Jupiter, Apollo, Dionysus, Athena. It is a deliberate stage set, and it works: you enter the first floor already with the idea that here we are talking about models and copies. The floor continues the story of the imperial portrait down to late antiquity, devotes whole rooms to ideal sculpture and closes with the great sarcophagi.

The Gallery of Portraits from Hadrian's Villa

The first gallery of the floor is occupied in large part by materials from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, which for centuries was the most productive quarry of sculptures in Italy. There are Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius from Piazza d'Oro, Bruttia Crispina, wife of Commodus, and a Caracalla of the mature phase, between 212 and 217 AD, with a short beard and his face turned sharply to the left. That portrait needs to be looked at carefully because it marks a turning point: after two centuries of emperors portrayed as serene philosophers, here comes the face of the soldier giving you a dirty look. The history of the empire can be read in the eyebrows.

The Flavians, Trajan and Hadrian

The following rooms run through the dynastic sequence. For the Flavians there are two heads of Vespasian, one from Ostia recovered from the Tiber and one with a civic crown from Minturno, and the bust of Julia, daughter of Titus, found on the Tiber Island near the Fatebenefratelli hospital, with a tower of curls in her hairstyle that is a masterpiece of the drill. There is also the bust of Nerva from Tivoli.

For the Trajanic and Hadrianic age the museum displays a Trajan assimilated to Hercules, with the lion skin and the crown of branches, Plotina, Hadrian with short curls and the beard that introduced a fashion destined to last three centuries, and Antinous portrayed as a priest of the Magna Mater. The relief from Lanuvium showing Antinous as Silvanus cutting a bunch of grapes is one of the most delicate pieces on the floor: the emperor's young favorite, who died in the Nile in 130 AD, was transformed into a rustic deity by the machinery of imperial mourning.

The Reliefs of the Provinces from the Temple of Hadrian

In the room devoted to Antoninus Pius are two large reliefs with personifications of the Roman provinces, from the Temple of Hadrian in Piazza di Pietra, the temple that today is recognized by the 11 columns incorporated into the facade of the old Stock Exchange. The temple was dedicated by Antoninus Pius in 145 AD to the memory of his adoptive father, and the base of the cella was covered with a series of female figures representing the provinces of the empire, alternating with trophies. Here Egypt and Thrace are preserved. They are slabs over a meter and a half high, and whoever has seen them at the museum no longer looks at Piazza di Pietra the same way: those columns once had a sculpted geography around them.

The Ideal Sculptures and the Sleeping Hermaphrodite

The central rooms of the floor are devoted to ideal sculpture, that is, to the Roman copies and reworkings of Greek models that decorated villas, baths and gardens. There are the Ephebe of Subiaco, the Offering Girl from Anzio, the Apollo of Anzio with almost feminine features, a Hermes reproducing a bronze original of the fifth century attributed to the circle of Phidias, a headless Amazon fighting a Celtic warrior, a Dionysus from Hadrian's Villa, a Hypnos, two versions of the Crouching Aphrodite of Doidalsas, one in Parian marble found in Via Palermo in 1913 and one in Pentelic marble from the heliocaminus baths of Hadrian's Villa recovered in 1914.

Then there is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, and here the most entertaining scene of the whole visit plays out. The figure lies on its side, asleep, with soft drapery and a pose of perfect abandon. From one side it is a naked girl sleeping. You only need to take a few steps and walk around the bed to discover that it is not. It is a sculpture built on the change of viewpoint, a narrative mechanism in marble: the ancients asked the visitor to move, and whoever stays still in front of it loses half the work. If you come with teenagers, this is the piece that finally wakes them up.

The Two Discus Throwers of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

In the room of the ornamenta gymnasii, that is, the sculptures that furnished the spaces of the body and of exercise, stands the most famous piece in the museum: the Discobolus Lancellotti. It is a Roman copy of the Hadrianic age of the lost bronze by Myron, a sculptor active in the fifth century BC, and it was found in 1781 in the excavations conducted on the Esquiline in the area of Villa Palombara, the villa also known for the alchemical Porta Magica. It passed to the Massimo Lancellotti family, hence the name by which we know it.

It is considered the best copy among those preserved, and the reason is visible right away: the head is turned backward toward the discus, which is the right position according to the ancient description of Myron's Discobolus, while other replicas have it restored facing forward. In the same room is in fact the Discobolus from Castelporziano, headless, which allows the comparison: twice the same model, with two different fates. Do make the comparison. It helps you understand what copying meant in antiquity, that is, not mechanical reproduction but reinterpretation.

I come back to the story of the Discobolus Lancellotti further on, in the chapter on events, because it is a twentieth-century story and not an ancient one, and it is one of the most incredible you can tell in front of a statue.

The room also displays the Apollo of the Tiber, the work of a Neo-Attic sculptor of the Augustan age, the Ephebe Athlete of Monteverde, two heads of Apollo of the Lyceus type attributed to Praxiteles, and a torso of the Polykleitan school. It is, overall, a handbook of Greek sculpture told through Roman originals.

The Gods, the Flute-Playing Satyr and the Eros of Lysippus

The room of the divine figures is a deliberate crowding: an African acrobat, a flute-playing Satyr, an Apollo Citharoedus from the Villa dei Quintili on the Appia, a headless Artemis with her quiver, a Dionysus dressed as Sardanapalus from Via Appia, a young Dionysus in bronze recovered from the banks of the Tiber in modern times, Athena, Pan, Thetis with a triton, the Crouching Aphrodite and the Eros the archer reproducing the Lysippan type, also from the Villa dei Quintili. Whoever wants to understand how a luxury suburban villa was furnished has the complete sample set here.

The Mythological Groups and the Theatrical Sculptures

Next comes a room with mythological groups in fragmentary state but of great interest: a head of Heracles from Nemi, a torso of the Minotaur found in Rome together with a male torso that could be Theseus, an Odysseus with Diomedes and the Palladium, the pedagogue trying to protect the younger children of Niobe. This last group takes up the same myth as the Niobid of the ground floor: the museum repeats it on purpose, two floors apart and five centuries apart in style.

The theater room gathers herms of Hermes and Dionysus, herms of Homer and Menander, stage masks and a Papposilenus found in 1906 in Via Flavia, in the area of Villa Spithoever, in Luni marble. It is a Roman copy of the second century AD from a Hellenistic original. The marble theater masks served as architectural decoration in buildings for spectacles, and it is useful to know this so as not to mistake them for stage props.

The Bronzes of the Nemi Ships at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

There is a room that almost no one expects to find here and that deserves a long stop: the one with the bronzes of the ships of Caligula recovered from Lake Nemi. The two vessels, of enormous size for antiquity, were brought back to light between 1895 and 1932 with the partial draining of the lake, and destroyed by a fire during World War II. What was saved is largely what had already been detached and taken elsewhere: the balustrade with small pillars decorated by Dionysiac herms, the animal heads that ornamented the beams, four wolves, three lions, a leopard, a Medusa, a bronze in the shape of a hand.

Looking at them knowing the ships are gone changes everything. These wolf heads are what remains of two floating palaces built for the whim of an emperor, dug out with a colossal hydraulic operation and burned in a single night in 1944. It is the piece of the museum that best tells how fragile conservation is.

The Portonaccio Sarcophagus at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

The first floor culminates in one of the most impressive sculptures of Roman art: the Portonaccio Sarcophagus, found in 1931 in Via delle Cave di Pietralata, in the Portonaccio neighborhood along Via Tiburtina, and datable to around 180 AD. It belonged to a general who had fought in the Germanic and Sarmatian campaigns of Marcus Aurelius between 172 and 175. One proposed identification links him to Aulus Julius Pompilius, but it remains a scholarly hypothesis, not an inscribed fact.

The front is a melee: dozens of bodies of Romans and barbarians intertwined in a relief so deep that it becomes almost fully in the round, with the voids carved by the drill creating black shadows. At the center the general on horseback. His head was left unfinished, that is, roughed out and never portrayed: the sarcophagus was ready in the workshop and the face was finished at the time of purchase, and for some reason it was never completed. It is my favorite detail in the whole museum, because it shows the industrial workings of an ancient workshop better than any caption.

On the lid are four scenes from the life of the deceased: the presentation of the newborn, education with the Muses, marriage with the handshake between the spouses, clemency toward the defeated barbarians. On the sides, trophies with barbarian chiefs recognizable by the Suebian knot in their hair, Quadi, Marcomanni and Buri, and a military standard with the number of the legion IV Flavia Felix, stationed in Upper Moesia. Whoever reads these details is reading a résumé carved in marble.

The Severans and the Sarcophagi of the Third Century

The next gallery lines up the busts of emperors and above all empresses from the Severan period to the military anarchy: Julia Domna, Fulvia Plautilla, Etruscilla, Salonina, Furia Sabina Tranquillina, Marcia Otacilia Severa, wife of Philip the Arab. In the Severan room are a cuirassed bust of Septimius Severus in Greek marble from Ostia and a portrait of Caracalla in Greek marble recovered in 1948 on Via Cassia, plus a Geta portrayed as young Apollo and a colossal head of Severus Alexander.

The last room of the floor gathers the great sarcophagi of the third century. The Sarcophagus of the Muses proposes the heroization of the deceased through culture, with the Muses inside niches: whoever has studied does not die entirely. The Annona Sarcophagus, datable to around 270 or 280 AD, shows an official of the annona, the office that guaranteed grain to the city, with his wife in the ritual handshake and the figures lined up under a drape. It is cultured popular art, with proportions beginning to move away from classical naturalism. The Acilia Sarcophagus, with the young man with the portrait face whom Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli proposed identifying as Gordian III, is a textbook case of disputed attribution.

The sequence closes with the works of the fourth century, with the arrival of Christian iconography: a slab with scenes of miracles, the sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus, and a statuette of Christ seated teaching, with his right hand raised as he explains the scroll. That young, beardless Christ, of still fully classical design, is the piece that shows how the new religion used the figurative language of the old one for a century. There is no break: there is reuse.

The Second Floor of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: The Frescoes Nobody Expects

The second floor is the reason this museum is unique in the world. There are no statues: there are the walls and floors of Roman houses, detached, restored and reassembled at their original dimensions. Entering here means entering an ancient room, not looking at a hanging fragment.

The Painted Garden of the Villa of Livia at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

The room of the painted garden is, without exaggeration, one of the most beautiful spaces preserved from classical antiquity. The frescoes come from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, the residence that ancient tradition calls ad Gallinas Albas, which belonged to Livia Drusilla, wife of Augustus. They decorated the four walls of a semi-basement room, probably a cool room for summer, and were detached in the mid-twentieth century to save them from damp.

The painter depicted a continuous garden that runs around all four sides. In the foreground is a low fence, then a short lawn, then a second enclosure, then the woods. There are pomegranates, quinces, strawberry trees, laurels, palms, pines, oleanders, irises, roses, daisies. And there are the birds: robins, orioles, thrushes, pigeons, a quail, a magpie in a cage. Scholars have recognized dozens of different botanical and ornithological species, many of them identifiable with precision.

Two things need to be said to whoever enters. The first is that the room is painted without central perspective: the green becomes more blurred and bluish as it recedes, with an atmospheric rendering that will not be seen again in the West for 1,500 years. The second is that the garden is impossible. Spring flowers, autumn fruits, migratory and resident birds coexist on the same wall: it is a garden outside of time, a vegetal eternity painted for the wife of the first emperor. If I had to name the most moving room in Rome after the Sistine Chapel, I would name this one, and I'm not joking.

One last piece of advice: sit down. In the room there is usually a bench in the center. Stay there for 10 minutes in silence and the room begins to work as it worked 2,000 years ago, that is, as a place where you stay, not as a display case you walk past.

The Stuccoes and Frescoes of the Villa della Farnesina at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

The other major complex on this floor comes from the so-called Villa della Farnesina, a luxury residence from the Augustan age excavated at the end of the 19th century on the right bank of the Tiber, beneath the gardens of the 16th-century villa built by Baldassarre Peruzzi for Agostino Chigi, the one where Raphael painted the Galatea. The works on the Tiber embankment walls cut into the ancient rooms, and what could be detached was taken to the museum.

The villa has been tentatively linked, as a hypothesis, with Agrippa and Julia, daughter of Augustus, on the basis of chronology and location: it is a proposal, not a documented certainty, and it should be told as such. What is certain is the level of the decoration. The cubicula have walls in the Pompeian second and third styles with very fine painted architecture, candelabra, small mythological pictures set in like hanging panels, friezes with scenes of judgment and everyday life in miniature, and Egyptianizing landscapes.

The most extraordinary part, though, is the white stucco vaults. They are very thin reliefs, modeled by hand on fresh plaster, with figures of maenads, satyrs, sacred landscapes, aedicules. Look at them against the light and you'll see that the modeling doesn't exceed a few millimeters in thickness. It's the most refined decorative technique antiquity ever produced, and in Rome it survives almost only here and in the underground basilica at Porta Maggiore.

The Mosaics, the Megalographies, and the Basilica of Junius Bassus

The floor also displays floor and wall mosaics of a very high level and a series of large late imperial decorations. Among the most notable pieces are the opus sectile panels, that is, inlays of colored marble, from the basilica of Junius Bassus on the Esquiline Hill, a building of the fourth century AD later turned into a church and demolished in modern times. One panel shows the pompa circensis, the procession that opened the games, with the magistrates on the cart. Another takes up the theme of Hylas abducted by the nymphs, the same myth you saw in mosaic on the ground floor. The difference in language between the two, five centuries apart, is a lesson in art history in two images.

Then there are the frescoes from the river port area near San Paolo and the decorations from the so-called Villa di Termini, that is, from the remains of residences cut into during the very excavations in the area where you are now. It's worth pausing on this detail: part of what you see on the second floor came out from under the neighborhood you crossed to get here.

The Nile Mosaics and the Floor Decorations

Among the mosaic floors on display you find Nilotic scenes, large-scale geometric patterns, and figured panels that came from the domus and villas of the Roman countryside. The display criterion is to show the whole room rather than the precious fragment: the floors are mounted flat on the ground or on a slight slope, and you walk along the edge the way you would walk in a house. It's a museum choice that seems obvious today and in 1998 was not obvious at all.

The Basement Level of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme: the Medagliere, the Gold, and the Mummy

The basement level is the part of the museum that tired visitors skip, and they're wrong twice over: because it's the most original section and because it's the one where you understand what life in Rome was really like. The declared theme is the economy and the use of money, and the route brings together the Medagliere of the National Roman Museum, that is, one of the most important numismatic collections in the world, with jewelry, precious furnishings, and documents on the cost of daily life.

The Medagliere of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme and the History of Coinage

The coin sequence starts with pre-monetary forms, that is, weighed bronze ingots, and runs through Republican coinage, the denarius, the aureus, the reform of Augustus, the devaluation of the third century, and the Constantinian reform. The coins are displayed with lenses and magnification, because otherwise you wouldn't see them: a Roman coin is a four-centimeter poster, with the portrait of the princeps on one side and the political message on the other.

My advice in front of these cases is to look for the coins of the emperors whose portraits you've just seen on the floors above. You find the same face 30 centimeters tall in marble and two centimeters tall in silver: it was the same communication campaign, carried out across two media. Rome invented image marketing long before we did.

The Gold, the Jewelry, and Daily Life

The goldsmithing section displays rings, necklaces, earrings, bracelets, buckles, and precious tableware. The techniques stand out: granulation, twisted gold wire, mountings of hard stones and glass paste. There are entire sets of grave goods, and their strength lies in being objects of use: they were things that someone put on in the morning. Along with the gold, the route presents documents on the cost of daily life, on prices, wages, and weights, that is, the least spectacular and most illuminating part of the whole museum.

The Grottarossa Mummy at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

At the end of the route is the display case in front of which everyone goes quiet: the girl from Grottarossa. She was found in 1964 during work in the Grottarossa area, along Via Cassia, inside a marble sarcophagus. The body of a girl of about eight, who lived in the second half of the second century AD, had been embalmed following a practice that was extremely rare in the Western Roman world, and it has been preserved with its hair, nails, and tissues.

Her grave goods were recovered along with her: jewelry, a small mirror, and above all a little articulated ivory doll, with movable joints, which is the object that breaks the distance between us and them better than any statue. The analyses carried out on the body have allowed reconstructions of her state of health and the probable causes of death, and it is one of the few cases in which Roman archaeology gives back not a type but a person, with a lost name and an individual story.

I'm warning you, because it's right that you know: the display case is intense. With small children, you decide. With kids from 11 up, though, it's often the thing they remember for years.

How to Really Visit Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, and How Long It Takes

The complete, honest visit to this museum takes between two and a half and three hours. Whoever says 90 minutes is describing a sprint. Whoever says five hours is an archaeologist colleague and doesn't count.

The recommended breakdown: 40 minutes on the ground floor, 50 on the first floor, 40 on the second, 20 in the basement, plus the time for the stairs and breaks. If you only have 90 minutes, the cut that hurts least is this: ground floor quickly, stopping only at the Tivoli General, the Julio-Claudian room, the Niobid, and the two bronzes. First floor only the Discobolus, the Hermaphrodite, and the Portonaccio Sarcophagus. Then go up to the second and give it the time you have left. The second floor is never sacrificed.

The Recommended Route at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

I always go up in order, from the bottom to the top, for a narrative reason: the museum is built like a story that starts from the public face of the Roman citizen and ends in his private rooms and his wallet. Doing it backward is like reading a novel from the last chapter. The only exception I allow is for someone who arrives at 17:30 with barely an hour: in that case you start from the second floor, because it's the part that closes first in practice and because it's the one that's worth the ticket.

Audio Guides, Guided Tours, and Labels

The room labels at Palazzo Massimo are among the best in Rome: bilingual, precise, with provenance and dating always indicated and without that bloated prose that afflicts many museums. Whoever reads calmly can do without any aid. For the services available on the day, guided tours included, it's best to ask at the ticket office at the entrance, because the offer changes over the course of the year.

Photos, Backpacks, and Coat Check at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

Photographs without flash and without a tripod are generally allowed in Italian state museums, and here no problems are on record. The flash remains forbidden, especially on the second floor where there are ancient paintings. Large backpacks and umbrellas must be left at the coat check at the entrance. The detailed rules may change: the final word is that of the room staff.

Palazzo Massimo alle Terme with Children

It's a museum that works better with children than the reputation for severity of the National Roman Museum suggests, as long as you don't treat it like a lesson. The three winning cards are the Boxer, the Hermaphrodite, and the basement level.

The Boxer at Rest wins them over because he's a real body, with the wounds, the broken nose, and the gloves: in front of that bronze you can talk about ancient sport, training, and pain without citing a single date. The Sleeping Hermaphrodite wins them over because it forces them to move and discover a surprise, and it's the only way to get a 12-year-old to walk around a statue. The basement level wins them over with the coins, the jewelry, and the little jointed doll from Grottarossa, which is a toy from 2,000 years ago with arms that move.

The practical tip: give each child a hunting task, three faces to find on the ground floor, a dog or a bird to find in the frescoes, a coin with the face of an emperor already seen in marble. It works much better than explanations. And remember that the painted garden room appeals to little ones as much as to adults, because it's a room full of animals.

An honest warning: the mummy's display case can upset the youngest. If you have doubts, move on and stop at the jewelry. It's not a piece you absolutely have to see.

Accessibility at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

The building is served by elevators and ramps, and the museum declares the availability of wheelchairs, marked routes, and assistance for visitors with disabilities. Compared with other Roman archaeological sites the difference is enormous: here you're indoors, on flat floors, with no cobblestones or ancient steps. Anyone who has difficulty getting around and wants to see Roman art of the very top level has in this museum the best choice in the city.

Two practical warnings remain. The first is that the entrance still has an outside staircase, and it's best to ask the reception for the alternative access. The second is that the second floor, with its reconstructed rooms, has narrower passages than the other levels. For a tailored site inspection, call or write to the museum before the visit: they answer, and they schedule.

People with disabilities and a companion fall under the free admissions provided for state cultural sites. The updated conditions are published by the Ministry of Culture and should be checked there.

When to Go to Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, and When to Avoid It

This is one of the few Roman museums that doesn't need a complicated strategy, and I say it gladly. There's almost never a line. The best time slots remain two, though: opening, that is 9:00 on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, when the rooms are empty and the light on the second floor is at its best. And late afternoon on weekdays, from 16:30 on, when the school groups have gone.

The two situations to avoid are the first Sunday of the month and Saturday afternoons in spring. The free first Sunday brings in an audience that normally wouldn't come here, and the painted garden room, which is small, becomes impassable. A clear piece of advice: if you can afford the €15, don't come on the first Sunday. Treat yourself to the silence, which here is half the experience.

In summer the museum is one of the best ideas in Rome: it's air-conditioned, it's covered, and it's three minutes from the metro. In the hours when the Forum is an oven, it's very comfortable here. In winter the opposite holds, in a good sense: on rainy days it's the place to spend three hours with no regrets.

How Much It Costs and How to Save at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

The math is simple: €15.00 full price, €2.00 reduced, free for the categories provided by state law, and free admission on the first Sunday of the month. The ticket is valid for all the sites of the circuit with one entry each within a week of the first entry, so the way to save is not to look for discounts but to use the week well.

The most efficient combination, for those staying in Rome a few days, is this: Palazzo Massimo on the first day, the Baths of Diocletian the next day (they're 200 meters away, but they're two different visits and combining them is tiring), Palazzo Altemps on an afternoon when you're already at Piazza Navona. With the Crypta Balbi temporarily closed, the circuit is reduced to these three stops plus the Octagonal Hall.

Whoever returns to Rome often, or lives there, should consider the MNRCard: €30.00 full and €20.00 reduced for a year. It pays for itself in two visits. If you're looking instead for the days and places with free admission, it's worth checking the calendar of free openings published by the Ministry of Culture.

What's Around Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

This is one of the spots in Rome with the highest museum density and the worst reputation, because it's the station area and people pass through quickly. Whoever stops finds four serious things within 10 minutes on foot.

The Baths of Diocletian and Santa Maria degli Angeli, Steps from Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

On the other side of Piazza dei Cinquecento are the Baths of Diocletian, the largest bath complex ever built in Rome, inaugurated in the early years of the fourth century. Today they house the epigraphic and protohistoric section of the National Roman Museum and a monumental cloister that tradition attributes to Michelangelo. Within the perimeter of the same baths, on Piazza della Repubblica, stands the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, carved by Michelangelo out of the hall of the frigidarium: admission is free and 20 minutes are enough to understand how high those vaults were. Visit it right after the museum, with the statues still in your eyes: it changes your perception of size.

The National Museum of Musical Instruments and Santa Maria Maggiore

A little farther on, toward Porta Maggiore, is the National Museum of Musical Instruments, a little-visited and surprising collection. Going up the Esquiline Hill instead, in 10 minutes you reach Santa Maria Maggiore Church, with the fifth-century mosaics of the nave, which are the perfect complement to the ancient painting seen on the second floor: same city, same technique, three centuries later and another religion. In the same direction, the Basilica of Santa Prassede holds the Chapel of San Zeno, which is the most beautiful mosaic room in Italy after Ravenna.

Palazzo Merulana and the Neighborhood

If you still have energy and want to step out of the ancient, Palazzo Merulana on Via Merulana displays the Cerasi collection of Italian 20th-century art, and it's a quarter of an hour's walk away. For eating, the advice from a person who works in this area: move away from the station by at least three blocks in any direction. Toward Via Palestro and the Castro Pretorio, or toward the Monti district, you eat much better and spend less. The triangle in front of Termini is the only spot in the area that I advise against without hesitation.

Palazzo Massimo alle Terme and Rome's Other Archaeological Museums

Frequent question: if I have time for only one archaeological museum in Rome, which do I choose? The answer is Palazzo Massimo, and here's why. The Capitoline Museums are more beautiful as a place and have the She-Wolf, the Marcus Aurelius, and the Capitoline Gaul, but they are a collection born of papal collecting, arranged by taste and not by context. The Centrale Montemartini is the most fascinating display in the city, ancient statues among turbines, but it is a detached site of the Capitoline Museums and doesn't offer a complete route. The Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia is indispensable, but it's about the Etruscans, which is another chapter.

Palazzo Massimo is the only place where you can see, in three hours and under the same roof, the Roman portrait from the Republic to late antiquity, two Greek originals in bronze, the best copy of the Discobolus, a battle sarcophagus, and an entire painted room. There's no competition, in Italy and perhaps in Europe.

A Curiosity About Palazzo Massimo alle Terme - National Roman Museum

The curiosity lies in one word of the name: Terme. Many visitors arrive convinced that the museum is called that because it's inside the Baths of Diocletian. It isn't so: Palazzo Massimo is an independent building, built 1,600 years later, and the addition of alle Terme serves to distinguish it from the other palaces of the Massimo family located in the center, first of all Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, the masterpiece of Baldassarre Peruzzi on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In Rome the palaces of the great families are distinguished by a phrase of place, like churches: alle Colonne, alle Terme, ai Monti, in Trastevere.

There's also a second curiosity concerning the land. The palace occupies a portion of what had been the Villa Montalto Peretti, the suburban residence of Cardinal Felice Peretti, who became Pope Sixtus V in 1585. It was an immense villa, with tree-lined avenues, fountains, casini, and a collection of antiquities, and it covered a large part of the area between the Viminal and the Esquiline Hill. It was sold, broken up, and finally almost entirely erased by the construction of the railway station and by the building plans of Rome as the capital between 1870 and 1890. Of that very large garden there remain today the name of the Largo in front of the museum, a few fragments of wall in the basements of the nearby blocks, and some sculptures that ended up in collections scattered across Europe.

I find it a beautiful short circuit. A museum that preserves the sculptures and the painted gardens of ancient Roman villas is built on top of a destroyed Renaissance villa, which in turn had been built over the ancient quarter of the Horti. Three layers of vanished gardens, one on top of the other, and in the end a building that tells them all without saying so. It's the first thing to notice while you're still outside the main door.

A Thing Nobody Tells You About Palazzo Massimo alle Terme - National Roman Museum

That the second floor has its own access rules, and that this can ruin your visit if you find out at 17:45.

The rooms of the second floor contain detached ancient paintings and very fragile stuccoes, and for reasons of conservation and supervision, access to that level has been managed over time in ways different from the rest of the museum: fixed-time shifts, limited groups, closures earlier than the general hours. The arrangements change over the course of the year and depending on the staff available, and they are not always clearly written at the entrance.

The practical rule that no printed guide gives: the first question to ask at the ticket office, even before paying, is how you access the second floor today. If there's a shift, book right away and organize the rest of the visit around that time. If there isn't, go up whenever you like, but still not last. Too many people reach the painted garden at 18:10 and find the door closed after walking for three hours. If you have to cut something, cut the first floor, not the second.

There's a second thing nobody says as well: the basement level often has part of the route visitable differently from the rest, because the Medagliere is a study structure before it is an exhibition room. That too is worth asking about at the entrance. It's the difference between leaving the museum having seen the Grottarossa mummy and the ivory doll, or not.

The Advice I Give You for Visiting Palazzo Massimo alle Terme - National Roman Museum

Go on a Tuesday morning at nine, and do nothing else that day.

Let me explain why each of the three conditions matters. Tuesday, because it's the day after the weekly closing: the museum reopens rested, the staff is complete, and the flow of weekend tourists has already dissolved. At nine, because you're the first and can be alone in the room of the bronzes and in the painted garden, which are the two rooms where solitude changes the experience in a measurable way. And nothing else that day, because this museum asks for a concentration that is finished after three hours, and if you squeeze the Colosseum in at 14:00 you'll have seen two things halfway.

The second piece of advice concerns how to look. Don't try to see everything. In this museum there are thousands of pieces and nobody, not even an archaeologist, looks at them all at once. Pick a thread and follow it: the faces, for example, from the Tivoli General to Severus Alexander, skipping the rest. Or bronze, which is rare and here is present in quantity. Or painting. You'll leave having understood something instead of having a mush of marbles in your head.

The third, less widely shared: read the labels instead of listening to an explanation. Here the room texts are well written, with provenance and dating always indicated, and reading in silence in front of the work is a slower and more effective way of looking than listening. Guided tours at Palazzo Massimo make sense for school groups and for people starting from zero. For everyone else, the museum explains itself better than you'd expect.

Last: bring a bottle of water and plan on a break. Three hours on your feet on hard floors are felt. There's a cafeteria in the entrance area and there are benches in several rooms: use them, especially in the room of the Garden of Livia, where sitting down is exactly the right way to look.

Another Well-Known Fact, Yet Seldom Cited

That this museum was born from a demolition, and that practically everything it contains came out from under Rome between 1870 and the first decades of the 20th century.

The panels say it, the labels say it, and nobody notices. The National Roman Museum was established in 1889 because the State had a concrete problem: the construction of the new capital was turning out of the ground a quantity of ancient material that no existing institution was able to receive. The new districts of the Esquiline Hill, the Viminal, the Castro Pretorio, the Ludovisi, and the Prati rose over the imperial horti, the suburban villas, and the necropolises, and every palace foundation cut into something. The Boxer came out in 1885 from the excavations on the Quirinal, the Niobid in 1906 from the work in the Sallustian Gardens, the Farnesina frescoes from the Tiber embankment walls, the painted frieze of the Esquiline Hill in 1875 at Porta Maggiore, the Portonaccio Sarcophagus in 1931 along the Tiburtina.

Put brutally: the works you admire here exist in display cases because the context in which they had been conceived was destroyed. The Villa Ludovisi, the Villa Montalto Peretti, the Horti Sallustiani, the house of the Farnesina, the nymphaeum of Prima Porta: of those places almost nothing remains, and what was saved is in here. The same goes, even more clearly, for the detached frescoes on the second floor: they were removed from the wall because leaving them there would have meant losing them.

It's a fact that changes how you look. An archaeological museum is not a place of celebration: it's an emergency room that worked. And the reason why at Palazzo Massimo the labels always indicate the provenance, often with the street and the year, is exactly this: without the context, the piece loses half its meaning, and the least that can be done is to tell you where it comes from. When you read on a label Via delle Cave di Pietralata, 1931, you are reading the record of a rescue.

The Right Photo to Take at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme - National Roman Museum

The right photo is not the Discobolus. The Discobolus is the photo everyone takes and it always comes out the same, because the statue is isolated against a light background and there's nothing to compose: that photograph already exists in 10,000 identical copies on the internet, and yours will add nothing.

The right photo is the Boxer at Rest taken from below and slightly to the side, from his left, with the lens at the height of his knees. From that point three things happen together: the twist of the neck becomes readable, the face stands out against the dark background of the room, and the copper inlays of the wounds catch the light. Don't use the flash, which is forbidden and would flatten the bronze anyway, taking away its patina. If you have a recent smartphone, keep the exposure a little under: the dark bronze fools the automatic metering and comes out a washed-out gray.

The second photo I recommend is the opposite in kind. It's the room of the painted garden of the Villa of Livia shot from the corner, so that two walls converge in the frame. Don't photograph the detail of a pomegranate: photograph the room. The sense of that space is continuity, the fact that the garden never ends and goes around whoever looks at it, and a detail photo destroys it. With the phone's wide-angle, leaning against a doorpost so you don't move, it comes out well even in low light.

The third, for those who want a photograph nobody takes: the unfinished face of the general on the Portonaccio Sarcophagus. A roughed-out head, without features, in the middle of a battle sculpted down to the last hair. It's an image that tells about antiquity better than any finished masterpiece, and it's also a nice metaphor, if you like metaphors.

Outside the museum, finally, the framing to keep is the neo-Renaissance facade by Pistrucci seen at an angle from Largo di Villa Peretti with the bulk of the Baths of Diocletian in the background: two Romes 16 centuries apart in a single frame. Better in the evening, with side light.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

The first event is a dig. In 1885, on the slopes of the Quirinal, in an area occupied in antiquity by the Baths of Constantine, the excavations for the new buildings cut into a buried structure and two large bronzes came out of it: the Boxer at Rest and the so-called Hellenistic Prince. They had been deliberately hidden in antiquity, probably to protect them, and for that reason they were saved from the melting down that destroyed almost all Greek bronze statuary. The account of the emotion of that discovery is tied to Rodolfo Lanciani, who followed the building works of the new Rome and who described the appearance of the boxer's face from the earth as something resembling a resurrection. In the history of European archaeology there are very few days comparable to that one.

The second event is a sale, and it's the bitterest page. In 1938 the Lancellotti Discobolus was ceded to Nazi Germany for 5 million lire of the time, with the direct intervention of Hitler, who wanted it, and despite the opposition of part of the academic world and of State officials. The statue left Italy and ended up in Munich, in the Glyptothek. It was recovered in 1948 thanks to the work of Rodolfo Siviero, the official charged by the Italian government with repatriating the works of art taken away during the war, and it returned to Rome. When you stop in front of that copy from the Hadrianic age, know that it crossed the Alps twice and was, for a decade, a political trophy.

The third event is a fire. The two ships of Caligula recovered from Lake Nemi between 1895 and 1932, in a partial draining operation that was one of the most spectacular archaeological undertakings of the 20th century, were destroyed by a fire on the night between May 31 and June 1, 1944, in the museum built expressly to house them. The precise circumstances have been discussed at length and the responsibility has never been established with documentary certainty. What remains of the ships is almost only what had been detached and taken elsewhere: part of that material can be seen at this site, and it's the reason why in a museum of Roman sculptures you find bronze heads of wolves and lions.

The fourth event is a rescue. Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the frescoes of the underground nymphaeum of the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta were detached from the walls and transferred to the museum, because the humidity and the deterioration of the site would have caused their loss. It's an operation debated from the standpoint of modern museology, which tends to conserve in situ, and it should be judged by the yardstick of its time: without that detachment, that garden would not exist today.

The fifth is a discovery of 1964, on Via Cassia, in the Grottarossa area: a marble sarcophagus containing the embalmed body of a girl of about eight, with her set of jewelry and an articulated ivory doll. Mummification was an exceptional practice in the Rome of the West, and the discovery opened a line of research on medicine, funerary rites, and Roman childhood that continues to this day.

The last event concerns the building. In 1981 the State purchased the old Jesuit college and entrusted its transformation to Costantino Dardi. The construction site lasted the whole following decade and ended with the completion of the museum route in 1998. It was one of the most successful reuse operations in contemporary Rome, and it still remains the best way to answer anyone who says that in Italy we don't know how to make a new museum.

Who Passed Through Palazzo Massimo alle Terme - National Roman Museum

The first name is that of the patron. Massimiliano Massimo, a Jesuit of the patrician Massimo family, wanted and financed the building to give the Society's college a new seat in post-unification Rome, in a district that was being born from nothing. The commission went to Camillo Pistrucci, an architect active in Rome in the Umbertine period, who chose the neo-Renaissance register as a declaration of continuity with the Roman tradition. The college operated here until 1960, and for almost 80 years generations of Roman students passed through these classrooms: whoever enters the museum today walks in corridors designed for kids in line.

Even earlier, a pope had passed over the ground. Felice Peretti, the Franciscan from the Marche who became Sixtus V in 1585, had made the Villa Montalto his residence on the Esquiline Hill, and as pontiff he was the man who redesigned Rome with straight streets, obelisks, and the Felice Aqueduct. That garden, where the cardinal strolled among ancient statues and fountains, was exactly this piece of the city.

Among the moderns, the name that weighs most is that of Rodolfo Siviero, who brought the Lancellotti Discobolus back to Italy in 1948 after the cession of 1938. And that of Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, the greatest Italian archaeologist of the 20th century, whose reading of the Acilia Sarcophagus and of late antique Roman art shaped all later studies: many of the things you read on the labels of this museum derive from his way of looking. I add Rodolfo Lanciani, who stubbornly documented the excavations of Rome as the capital and without whom we wouldn't know where half of what you see here comes from. And Costantino Dardi, who transformed the college into a museum.

Then there are those who never set foot here but who are here in person, in marble and in bronze. Augustus is present twice: young and idealized in the Julio-Claudian room, and veiled as pontifex maximus in the statue from Via Labicana. Livia Drusilla is here as a portrait and here as the lady of the house, because the painted garden on the second floor decorated a room of hers. There are Agrippa, Tiberius, Germanicus, Caligula, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Antinous, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Gordian III. There is Alexander the Great in gilded bronze. There are Socrates, Epicurus, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, and Menander in the copies that cultured Romans kept at home.

And there is a girl of eight, without a name, who died in the second half of the second century AD and was found at Grottarossa in 1964. In a museum full of emperors, she is the person you take home.

Quick Questions About Palazzo Massimo alle Terme - National Roman Museum

Where exactly is Palazzo Massimo alle Terme?

Largo di Villa Peretti 2, 00185 Rome, on Piazza dei Cinquecento side of Termini Station, across from the Baths of Diocletian complex.

How much is the ticket for Palazzo Massimo alle Terme?

The full ticket costs €15.00, the reduced €2.00. There's also a ticket for the Octagonal Hall alone at €5.00 and an annual MNRCard pass at €30.00 full and €20.00 reduced. Check the rates on the official site before you go.

Is the ticket also valid for the other sites of the National Roman Museum?

Yes. It's a single ticket that allows one entry to each site of the circuit within a week of the first access. Keep in mind that the Crypta Balbi is temporarily closed to the public.

What are the opening hours?

Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 19:00, with ticket office and last entry at 18:00.

What is the closing day of Palazzo Massimo alle Terme?

Monday. It's the weekly closing of all the sites of the National Roman Museum.

Is admission free on the first Sunday of the month?

Yes, on the first Sunday of the month admission is free at all state cultural sites, and so here too. The advice remains to avoid it, because the small rooms of the second floor become unlivable.

Do I need to book to visit Palazzo Massimo alle Terme?

No, booking is not mandatory: you buy the ticket at the box office. Online purchase is made on the Museiitaliani portal indicated by the museum.

How long does the visit take?

Between two and a half and three hours for a complete visit. With 90 minutes you see a reasoned selection, provided you don't sacrifice the second floor.

How do I get there by metro?

Termini stop, the shared terminus of lines A and B. From the exit on Piazza dei Cinquecento it's three minutes on foot.

Can you get the combined ticket with the Baths of Diocletian?

It's the same ticket: the Baths of Diocletian are one of the sites of the circuit, and with the €15.00 ticket you enter within the week of validity.

What are the most important things to see at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme?

The Boxer at Rest and the Hellenistic Prince in bronze, the Niobid from the Sallustian Gardens, the Lancellotti Discobolus, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, the Portonaccio Sarcophagus, the painted garden of the Villa of Livia, the stuccoes of the Villa della Farnesina, and the Grottarossa mummy.

Where is the Discobolus?

On the first floor, in the room dedicated to the sculptures of the gymnasium spaces. In the same room there is also the Discobolus from Castelporziano, headless, which allows a comparison between two replicas of the same original by Myron.

Is the museum wheelchair accessible?

Yes. The museum declares elevators, ramps, wheelchairs available, marked routes, and assistance. For the entrance and for the narrower passages of the second floor, it's best to notify or ask the reception.

Can you take photographs?

Photographs without flash and without a tripod are generally allowed. The flash is forbidden, in particular on the second floor where there are ancient paintings. The instructions of the room staff prevail over everything.

Is there a coat check?

Yes, at the entrance, where large backpacks and umbrellas are left. It's the right museum in which to get rid of your luggage if you have a train in the afternoon.

Is Palazzo Massimo alle Terme suitable for children?

Yes, if you focus on the right pieces: the Boxer, the Hermaphrodite to walk around, the animals of the painted garden, the coins and the little ivory doll in the basement. The mummy's display case can upset the youngest and can be skipped.

Is there a line to get in?

Practically never, except on the first Sunday of the month and on the occasion of major temporary exhibitions. It's one of the few major museums in Rome where you get in when you arrive.

What's the difference between Palazzo Massimo and the Baths of Diocletian?

Palazzo Massimo is a 19th-century building that houses sculptures, paintings, mosaics, and the Medagliere. The Baths of Diocletian are an ancient archaeological complex that houses the epigraphic and protohistoric section and a large cloister. They are 200 meters from each other and they are two different visits: don't combine them in the same morning.

What's the difference between Palazzo Massimo and the Capitoline Museums?

The Capitoline Museums are the oldest public collection in the world, born of papal collecting and arranged by taste. Palazzo Massimo is an excavation museum, arranged by chronology and by context of discovery. If you want to understand Roman art as history, come here. If you want the symbol masterpieces of the city, go up to the Campidoglio.

Can you visit Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in the evening?

The ordinary schedule closes at 19:00 with last entry at 18:00. Extraordinary evening openings are organized on some occasions during the year and are announced on the official site.

Where do you buy tickets online?

On the Museiitaliani portal, indicated by the museum as its sales channel. At the box office you can also buy without problems on the same day.

How much time do you need to see only the second floor?

40 minutes if you want to really look at the Garden of Livia and the stuccoes of the Farnesina. 20 if you rush, but it's a pity.

Is it worth visiting Palazzo Massimo alle Terme if you've already been to the Vatican Museums?

Yes, and they are two opposite experiences. At the Vatican you see ancient sculpture as papal collecting saw it, amid enormous crowds. Here you see ancient sculpture as the excavation gives it back, almost alone. Whoever has done only the Vatican has seen half the story.

Is there a cafeteria or a place to eat nearby?

There's a refreshment point in the entrance area. Outside, the advice is to move at least three blocks away from the station: toward Via Palestro and the Castro Pretorio or toward Monti you eat much better.

The Last Word

If I had to recommend just one museum to someone coming back to Rome for the second time, I would recommend this one without hesitation, and I've been doing it for years. Not because it's the most famous, which it isn't, but because it's the only place in the city where in three hours you go from the face of an old farmer turned senator to the garden painted for the wife of Augustus, from the melee of a battle sarcophagus to the ivory doll of a girl who died at eight. It's the museum that gives the people back to the statues.

Go on a Tuesday morning, get the €15 ticket, ask right away how the second floor works, and don't plan anything else until the afternoon. Leave around noon, cross the square, and go into Santa Maria degli Angeli Church for 10 minutes, just to gauge by eye how tall the baths you saw on the plan were. Then go eat somewhere far from the station. It's one of the best-spent Roman days I know, and it costs as much as two pizzas.

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

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