Galleria Borghese

The state museum inside the Villa Borghese Pinciana, the casino Scipione Borghese built for himself, holding the collection he began. Its own site gives the address as Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, 00197 Roma, the telephone number +39 06 8413979, a booking line on +39 06 32810 and the address ga-bor.info@cultura.gov.it. No source states its opening hours, so none are given here. It recorded 590,891 visitors in 2023. Among the works are Bernini's David and Apollo e Dafne and Canova's Paolina Borghese come Venere Vittoriosa in the Sala della Paolina; the collection also holds Bronzino, Caravaggio, Raffaello, Perugino, Lorenzo Lotto, Antonello da Messina, Cranach, Annibale Carracci, Rubens, Bellini and Tiziano.

History

The house is the one Flaminio Ponzio began in 1606 from Scipione Borghese's sketches and Giovanni Vasanzio finished after Ponzio's death, complete in 1633; its facade was originally set with 144 bas-reliefs and seventy busts, Lodovico Cigoli frescoed a Story of Psyche inside, and the windows and the sequence of rooms were laid out to show the sculpture and painting well. The Borghese picture gallery, until then in via Ripetta, moved up to the piano nobile in 1891. In 1902 the Italian state acquired the Fidecommisso Borghese collections and the villa, and the museum opened under its first director Giovanni Piancastelli, succeeded in 1906 by Giulio Cantalamessa. It closed in 1983 and reopened in June 1997 after a fourteen-year restoration, has held special autonomy among Italy's state museums since 2014, and has been directed by Francesca Cappelletti since November 2020.

History

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