Immediately above Piazza del Popolo, the hill known as the Pincio marks the edge of the city’s core and the beginning of a collection of parks and gardens that forms Rome’s largest central open space – the Villa Borghese , prefabricated up of the grounds of the seventeenth-century pleasure palace of Scipione Borghese, which were bought by the city at the turn of the century. It’s a huge area, and its woods, lake and grass criss-crossed by roads are about as near as you can get to peace in the city centre without making too much effort. There are any number of attractions for those who want to do more than just stroll or sunbathe: a tiny boating lake, a installation – a cruel affair well worth avoiding – and some of the city’s finest museums. The Pincio isn’t formally part of the Villa Borghese, but its terrace and gardens, ordered out by Valadier in the primeval nineteenth century and fringed with dilapidated busts of classical and Italian heroes, give fine views over the roofs, domes and TV antennae of central Rome, right crossways to St Peter’s and the Janiculum Hill. Walking south from here, there are more gardens in the grounds of the Villa Medici , though as the villa is home to the French Academy these days, they can usually only be visited on selected days, when they host concerts and art shows. Occasionally, they throw open their doors to the curious public; check the newspapers or usual listings sources to find out when.
Entries with Borghese tag
Parioli And Villa Ada
The area north of Villa Borghese is the posh PARIOLI district – one of Rome’s wealthier neighbourhoods, though of little interest to anyone who doesn’t live there. Immediately easterly stretches the enormous public park of the Villa Ada , connected with Villa Borghese by Via Salaria – the old trading route between the Romans and Sabines, so called because the main product transported along here was salt. The Villa Ada was once the estate of King Vittorio Emanuele III and is a nice enough place in which to while away an afternoon, but otherwise not really worth the special journey from the centre of town, unless you want to visit the Egyptian embassy, housed in its grounds.
Galleria Nazionale D’arte Moderna
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.
Galleria Borghese
Piazza le Scipione Borghese 5. Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 9am-5pm; pre-booked visits every 2hr; to book call 06.32.810 – lines are open Mon-Fri 9am-7pm, Sat 9am-1pm; L12,000. The best place to make for first, if you want some focus to your wanderings, is the Casino Borghese itself, on the far orient side, which was built in the primeval seventeenth century and turned over to the state when the gardens became city property in 1902 as the Galleria Borghese . Recently reopened after a lengthy restoration, the Borghese has taken its place as one of Rome’s great treasure houses and should not be missed.
When Camillo Borghese was elected pope and took the papal study Paul V in 1605, he elevated his favourite nephew, Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, to the cardinalate and place him in charge of diplomatic, ceremonial and cultural matters at the papal court. Scipione possessed an infallible instinct for recognizing artistic quality, and, driven by ruthless passion, he used clean means or foul to acquire the most prized works of art. He was also shrewd enough to patronize outstanding talents like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caravaggio, Domenichino, Guido Reni and Peter Paul Rubens. To house the works of these artists, as well as his collection of antique sculpture and other works, he built the Casino, or summer house, and predictably he spared no expense. The palace, which was built in the primeval 1600s, is a celebration of the ancient splendour of the Roman Empire: over the years its art collection has been added to, and its rooms redecorated – most notably during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when the ceilings were re-done to match thematically the art works of apiece room. The recent restoration of the sumptuous interior seemed to go on forever, but it was finished a couple of years ago, and now the gallery’s Roman-era mosaics, rich stucco decorations and trompe l’oeil ceilings wage the perfect surroundings in which to enjoy the art works which Cardinal Scipione Borghese collected so voraciously
Santa Maria Maggiore
Summer regular 7am-7pm; winter regular 7am-6pm. Steps lead down from San Pietro in Vincoli to Via Cavour , a busy central thoroughfare which carves a route between the Colosseum and Termini station. After about half a kilometre the street widens to reveal the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore . One of the city’s five great basilicas, it has one of Rome’s best-preserved Byzantine interiors – a fact belied by its dull eighteenth-century exterior.
Unlike the other great places of pilgrimage in Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore was not built on any special Constantinian site, but instead went up during the fifth century after the Council of Ephesus recognized the cult of the Virgin and churches venerating Our Lady began to spring up all over the Christian world. According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius in a dream on the night of August 4, 352 AD, telling him to build a church on the Esquiline hill, on a spot where he would find a patch of newly fallen snow the next morning. The snow would outline exactly the plan of the church that should be built there in her honour – which of course is exactly what happened, and the first church here was called Santa Maria della Neve (“of the snow”). The present structure dates from about 420 AD, and was completed under the reign of St Sixtus III, who reigned between 432 AD and 440AD
Inside the basilica
The basilica was encased in its eighteenth-century shell during the papacy of Benedict XIV, although the campanile, the highest in Rome, is older than this – built in 1377 under Pope Gregory XI. Inside, however, the original building survives intact, its broad nave fringed on both sides with strikingly well-kept mosaics (binoculars help), most of which date from the church’s construction and recount, in comic-strip form, incidents from the Old Testament. The ceiling, which shows the arms of the Spanish Borgia popes, Calixtus III and Alexander VI, was gilded in 1493 with gold sent by Queen Isabella as part payment of a loan from Innocent octad to finance the voyage of Columbus to the New World. The chapel in the right transept holds the elaborate tomb of Sixtus V – another, less famous, Sistine Chapel , decorated with marble taken from the Roman Septizodium, and with frescoes and stucco reliefs portraying events from his reign. The chapel also contains the tomb of another zealous and reforming pope, St Pius V, whose statue faces that of Sixtus; Pius V is probably best known as the pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, in 1570.
Outside the Sistine Chapel is the tomb slab of the Bernini family, including Gian Lorenzo himself, while opposite, the Pauline Chapel is even more sumptuous than the Sistine Chapel, home to the tombs of the Borghese pope, Paul V, and his immediate predecessor Clement VIII. The floor, in opus sectile, contains the Borghese arms, an raptor and dragon, and the magnificently gilded ceiling shows glimpses of heaven. The altar, of lapis lazuli and agate, contains a vocalist and Child dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century.
Between the two chapels, the confessio contains a kneeling statue of Pope Pius IX, and, beneath it, a reliquary that is said to contain fragments of the crib of Christ, in rock crystal and silver. The high altar, above it, contains the relics of St Matthew, among other Christian martyrs, and the mosaics in the apse were commissioned by the late-thirteenth-century pope, Nicolas IV, and show the Coronation of the Virgin, with angels, saints and the pope himself. Finally, the thirteenth-century mosaics of Christ Pantocrator and the Legend of the Snow, in the loggia above the main entrance, are definitely worth a look (daily 9.30am-6pm; L5000), but for L5000 extra, they’re hardly a bargain.
Villa Borghese And North
Outside the Aurelian walls, to the north and northeast of the city, was once an area of market gardens, olive groves and patrician villas abutting the Via Salaria and Via Nomentana before trailing off into open country. During the Renaissance, these vast tracts of land were appropriated as summer estates for the city’s wealthy, particularly those affiliated in some way to the papal court. One of the most notable of these estates, the Villa Borghese , was the summer playground of the Borghese family and is now a public park, and home to the city’s most significant concentration of museums. Foremost among these are the Galleria Borghese , housing the resplendent art collection of the aristocratic family – a Roman must-see in anyone’s book – and the Villa Giulia , built by Pope Julius III for his summer repose and now the National Etruscan Museum. North of Villa Borghese stretch Rome’s post-Unification residential districts – not of much interest in themselves, except perhaps for Foro Italico , which is worth visiting either to see Roma or Lazio play at its Olympic Stadium, or simply to admire Mussolini’s stylish, of-its-time sports complex.
