Visit the Borghese Gallery in Rome: Tickets, Art & Tips

Buy tickets online to visit the Borghese Gallery in Rome’s Villa Borghese Park and book tours well in advance for obligatory time-slot admissions to see the wonderful art, including many sculptures by Bernini and paintings by Caravaggio.

The Borghese Gallery is one of Rome’s top art museums. The art is of the best quality, and the small, almost intimate villa is much easier to enjoy than the vast, packed exhibition halls of the Vatican Museums. Admissions are limited, with time-slot reservation tickets essential to secure admission to the villa. Highlights include the largest single collection of Caravaggio paintings in the world, several Bernini sculptures, Canova’s Pauline Borghese as Venus, and paintings by top artists such as Raphael, Titian, Correggio, Domenichino, Rubens, and Cranach.

Jump to:
Art Highlights · Opening Hours · Tickets · Tours · Tips

Art Highlights in the Borghese Gallery in Rome

The Borghese Gallery (Museo e Galleria Borghese) is in the early 17th-century summer house of Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome’s Villa Borghese Park. The cardinal had exquisite taste in art with a keen eye for the best works from antiquity to contemporary art. Contemporary art in his lifetime was the early Baroque, with the young Bernini and Caravaggio amongst his favorite artists.

The early Baroque art and exuberant decorations of the villa are often secular in nature, some even slightly erotic. Even when religious works were acquired, the aesthetics probably appealed more to the cardinal than the biblical message.

Top art highlights in the Borghese Gallery include:

• Gian Lorenzo Bernini — several Bernini sculptures including David; Apollo and Daphne; The Rape of Proserpina; Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius; and Truth Unveiled by Time.
• Caravaggio — the world’s largest collection of his paintings, including Young Sick Bacchus, Boy with Fruit Basket, St Jerome Writing, St John the Baptist, David with the Head of Goliath, and Madonna of Palafrenieri.
• Canova — Paolina Borghese as Venus
• Raphael — The Deposition and Lady with a Unicorn.
• Titian — Sacred and Profane Love and Venus Blindfolding Cupid.

In 1807, Camillo Borghese sold some of the finest works from his antiquities collection to the Louvre under pressure from his brother-in-law, Napoleon Bonaparte. These are still in the Louvre, including, among others, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite on a Bernini-carved mattress and the Borghese Gladiator.

Borghese Gallery Tickets and Visitor Information

Borghese Gallery Opening Hours

The Borghese Gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 19:00 with final admissions at 17:45.

Admission to the Borghese Gallery is strictly by time-slot reservations. You have to enter within the first 15 minutes, or your time slot may be resold.

Visits are limited to a maximum of two hours, as fewer than 400 people are allowed inside the villa at any given time. The final admissions are at 17:45 and slightly cheaper, as all visitors have to exit the villa by 19:00.

Tickets for the Borghese Gallery often sell out well in advance, meaning visitor numbers are fairly constant throughout the day. Early morning and late afternoon tickets are the hardest to secure, with Saturday and Tuesday often the most popular days.

Tickets for the Borghese Gallery in Rome

Time-slot reservation tickets for the Borghese Gallery follow the same infuriating system as so many other top sights in Rome and Italy currently do. Resellers buy up tickets en masse and resell them, completely legitimately and above board, at their own prices and conditions. Prices go up with demand or in anticipation of demand.

Ticket prices for the Borghese Gallery are €16 for adults, €2 for EU citizens 18-25, and free for children under 18. Add a €2 reservation fee to every ticket plus the reseller’s commission or charges.

The Borghese Gallery’s current booking service is provided by TicketOne, which sells tickets for a fair €20 and official guided tours for €28 (great value and highly recommended). The final, shorter time slot is €5 cheaper.

Tickets are usually bookable around two months in advance. If not taking a tour, adding an audioguide is a good option (rent before passing the ticket scanners), as there is very limited information inside the museum. (This is somewhat balanced out by a very good official collection website.)

If TicketOne has no availability on selected days, other resellers may still have tickets from their own stock. Legitimate resellers include Tiqets, GetYourGuide, and Viator, but do compare prices and conditions in addition to availability. Tours are often available, but the price goes up with demand. In the high season, getting a ticket from resellers for below €30 is doing very well.

Buying Tickets in Person at the Borghese Gallery

It is possible to buy tickets in person at the museum under the following conditions:

• Buy a standard ticket — the next available time slot may be days later; no tickets are reserved for counter sales.
• Queue up for last-minute tickets — 20 minutes past every hour, time slots are resold if the original ticketholders have failed to enter the museum. There is, of course, no guarantee that such tickets will become available at all on any given day. The visits will be limited to 90 minutes.

Buying tickets in person at the Borghese Gallery is a gamble and not a sensible planning strategy. Booking a private tour or paying a reseller’s surcharge will at least ensure admission at a specific time.

Free Sunday Tickets for the Borghese Gallery

Admission to the Borghese Gallery is free on the first Sunday of each month. Time-slot reservations remain essential (and add a few euros charge per ticket).

Free Sunday tickets may be booked from 10 days in advance on the TicketOne website.

The Borghese Gallery is a great choice for free-Sunday visits, as the number of visitors allowed into the villa is exactly the same as on normal days. Queues will be online to buy time slots, not outside the museum waiting to get in.

Tickets and Tour Options to Visit the Borghese Gallery

Many ticket deals and tours are advertised for the Borghese Gallery, but there are really just three versions:

Tickets — all tickets are time-slot admission tickets, so be at the museum at the given time and follow the procedure on the reservation. (Scan at the gate, or pick up a paper ticket.) Tickets may be advertised as skip-the-line, VIP, priority entrance, fast track, etc., but all work exactly the same once at the gallery entrance.

Hosted Tickets / Escorted Entrance — travelers meet the representative of the reseller outside the villa to receive the ticket and may be pointed in the right direction once inside (but the process is hardly complicated). It adds no real value, but this is often the cheapest option when basic tickets are not available.

Tours — the official guided tours are good value and an audioguide is a good option (rent before passing the ticket scanners), as there is very limited information inside the museum.

Tickets and official tours sell out most days, but private tours often remain available at short notice even in the high season.

Tips for Booking Tours of the Borghese Gallery

A variety of guided tours are offered to see the art in the Borghese Gallery. Availability is probably the biggest deciding factor between the tours on offer. Tours are usually around an hour inside the museum with free time to explore more at the end. Small groups and private tours are more pleasant but more pricey too.

Resellers may add audioguides, but availability is the only reason to use these rather than the cheaper official versions.

Discounted tickets are more likely a few days than a few weeks in advance, but only if tour operators find demand lower than expected.

Tour operators are masters of advertising and the upsell, so compare the details rather than relying on promotional labels. Don’t fall for any of these:

• “Half price” is meaningful only if the tour is genuinely sold at the advertised full price at other times.
• “From prices” — a low price, but the tour is only available at the special price at one time slot months later in the year.
• “Small group” — maximum group size at the Borghese Gallery is 15 and earphones are obligatory.

Note that tours should be of the Borghese Gallery (Galleria) and not of the Villa Borghese, which refers to the large free park that surrounds the art museum. Some tours also add sightseeing or other activities in the Villa Borghese gardens. Combination tickets with other sights in Rome often give small discounts if booked at the same time — transportation is usually not included, and sights may be visited on different days.

Borghese Gallery Visiting Tips

The Borghese Gallery is inside a villa, but Villa Borghese is somewhat confusingly the name of the large park in which the museum is located. The art museum is a very short walk from Via Pinciana, or a pleasant longer stroll from other entrances. The park and much of the gallery’s gardens are open for free.

The Borghese Gallery entrance is through the basement — use the doors under the external flight of stairs. Here, it is sometimes necessary to exchange vouchers for tickets, and audioguides may be booked. Free toilets and a small cafe are before the ticket gate, so may be used before or after the timed two-hour museum visit period.

It is necessary to check in all bags and umbrellas, but no items of clothing are taken — coats must be kept on your person in the gallery, even when wet. You may only use the cloakroom for the duration of your visit.

Photos are allowed but may be restricted for temporary exhibitions.

Enter the gallery as soon as your timeslot is announced. The two-hour period is linked to the original time slot, not the actual time of entry. Time slots may be resold if you do not enter within around 15 minutes.

New batches of visitors enter every hour and are guided to visit the quieter areas first. Although visitors are recommended to move to different floors after an hour or so, you are rarely forced to move on at a set time. (The ground floor deserves far more time than the first floor.)

Transportation to the Borghese Gallery in Rome

Getting to the Borghese Gallery is slightly more complicated than the average museum visit in Rome. The Borghese Gallery, Piazzale del Museo Borghese 5, 00197 Rome, is in the northeastern corner of the vast Villa Borghese park. The closest entrance to the park is on Via Pinciana.

If taking a taxi, be sure to ask for the Museo e Galleria Borghese and not Villa Borghese, or the taxi may legitimately drop you off very far from the gallery. Even when taking a taxi, it is still a short walk through the park to the museum itself.

From Barberini, Spagna, or Flaminio metro stops, it is a pleasant walk in good weather — allow at least half an hour to reach the museum and to go through the entrance procedures. Several public and hop-on-hop-off buses also stop at the edge of the park near the gallery.

Visit the Borghese Gallery in Rome