Museo Pietro Canonica a Villa Borghese
Museum · Pinciano, Italy
The sculptor Pietro Canonica's museum, in the building called the Fortezzuola, on Piazza di Siena. Its own site gives the address as Viale Pietro Canonica (Piazza di Siena) 2, 00197 Roma, with the Roma Capitale call centre on 060608, daily 09.00 to 19.00. Winter hours, from the last Sunday of October to the last Saturday of March, are Tuesday to Sunday 10.00 to 16.00, with last admission at 15.15, an hour earlier if the visit takes in the private apartment on the first floor and the Villa Borghese sculpture store; 24 and 31 December are 10.00 to 14.00 and 1 January 2026 is 11.00 to 16.00. Summer hours, from the last Sunday of March to the last Saturday of October, are Tuesday to Friday 10.00 to 16.00 and Saturday and Sunday 10.00 to 19.00, with last admission forty-five minutes before closing and an hour earlier for the apartment and the store. It is closed on Mondays, 1 May and 25 December. Tickets are 7.50 euro full and 6.00 euro reduced, or 11.00 and 7.50 when an exhibition is running, with a presale charge of 1.00 euro online and none at the desk; the MIC card at 5.00 euro gives twelve months' free entry across the civic museums. The private apartment and the sculpture store are visitable in museum hours, accompanied by room staff.
History
Seventeenth-century documents call the building the Gallinaro, where ostriches, peacocks and ducks were raised for the Borghese family's hunts. Its present name comes from the medieval-looking turreted enclosure added in the late eighteenth century and attributed to Antonio Asprucci. Felice Giani decorated the facade with eight caryatid heads over the doors and windows in 1793. In 1919, when it was in use as administrative offices, a fire led to its abandonment. In 1926 it was given over to the sculptor Pietro Canonica, who fitted out the building and turned the stables into exhibition rooms; after his death in 1959 the collection of his works formed the first nucleus of the museum, and his widow, who died in 1987, left the comune the furnishings of the apartment they had lived in. In the courtyard stands a fifteenth-century octagonal well-head carrying Cardinal Rangoni's arms, from one of the demolished cloisters of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and moved here in 1960, and a white-marble mascaron fountain on the east wall.
Visit
Viale Pietro Canonica 2, 00197 Roma RM
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