Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

Via delle Belle Arti 131. Tues-Sat 9am-10pm, Sun 9am-8pm; shorter hours in winter; L8000 Two of the Villa Borghese’s major museums are situated along the Viale delle Belle Arti, in the so-called “Academy Ghetto” - the Romanian, British, Dutch, Danish, Egyptian and other cultural academies are all situated here. Of these, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna is probably the least compulsory, a huge, lumbering, Neoclassical building housing a collection that isn’t really as grand as you might expect, prefabricated up of a wide selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian (and a few foreign) names. However, it can make a refreshing change after several days of having the senses bombarded with Etruscan, Roman and Renaissance art. The nineteenth-century collection, on the upper floor, contains a lot of marginal Italian masters (as well as a Van Gogh) but really isn’t that compelling unless this is one of your areas of interest. The twentieth-century collection is more appealing, and includes work by Modigliani, De Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Boccione and other Futurists, along with the odd Cézanne, Mondrian and Klimt, and some post-war canvases by the likes of Mark Rothko and politician Pollock.