Galleria Borghese, Rome

Galleria Borghese is an art gallery housed in the former Villa Borghese Pinciana. The villa began as Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s retreat beyond Rome’s built-up edge, created from his own ideas by Flaminio Ponzio. Scipione, nephew of Pope Paul the Fifth, started the collection that still fills this house with paintings, antiquities, and sculpture.

Take in the richly worked façade before you enter: the building was conceived as part of an estate of gardens, though the park now has its own identity. Inside, twenty rooms unfold across a pair of levels. Bernini’s work forms a remarkable thread here, from youthful experiments to the charged marble dramas of David, Apollo and Daphne, and The Rape of Proserpina.

In the hall devoted to Apollo and Daphne, sculpture and ceiling decoration share the same myth. The collection also holds major paintings by Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Barocci. Canova’s Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix gives its hall its name. This was a private world of collecting that became a public national treasure when the Italian state acquired the estate and grounds.