★★★★★ 5.0
Discover
Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme
19 billion lira. That's what Italy paid in 1981 to rescue this abandoned palace from ruin. Standing before you on Largo di Villa Peretti, this Neo-Renaissance beauty was born from heartbreak... when Italy's new government evicted the Jesuits from their ancient college in 1871, Prince Massimiliano Massimo built them this refuge between 1883 and 1887, designed by Camillo Pistrucci in the style of Rome's grandest 16th-century palaces. But here's what the elegant facade hides... you're standing on the ghost of Pope Sixtus V's Villa Montalto-Peretti, completely erased to make way for this building. These walls once echoed with Latin prayers from Jesuit students, then with the cries of wounded soldiers during World War II, then fell silent for decades. Step inside, and the second floor reveals Rome's most jealously guarded treasure... the Villa di Livia frescoes from 20 BC, Augustus Caesar's wife's private garden room, transported here leaf by painted leaf. They're so perfectly preserved you can still see the dewdrops the artist imagined on branches 2,000 years ago... paradise frozen in plaster and pigment.
Did You Know?
- Palazzo Massimo alle Terme is not just a museum—it’s a treasure chest of ancient Rome’s artistic and daily life, featuring some of the best-preserved Roman frescoes in the world, including entire rooms of wall paintings from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta and the Villa Farnesina, transported and reconstructed inside the museum so visitors can walk through them as if in an ancient Roman home.
- The building itself has a fascinating second life: designed in grand neo-Renaissance style by Camillo Pistrucci in the 1880s, it originally served as a Jesuit college until 1960, was acquired by the Italian state in 1981, and after careful restoration, reopened in 1995 as the flagship site of the National Roman Museum—a true transformation from sacred education to secular celebration of antiquity.
- One of the museum’s most intriguing sculptures is the Sleeping Hermaphrodite, a Roman copy of a famous Greek original that plays a visual trick: from one angle, the figure appears as a graceful, reclining woman, but from the other side, the true nature of the mythological character—Hermaphroditus, child of Hermes and Aphrodite—is revealed, blending male and female features in a single, thought-provoking masterpiece.