Palazzo Barberini Tickets

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Bernini’s square staircase takes you up to the piano nobile. In the early rooms, Filippo Lippi’s Annunciation is the painting that stops people, two maids halted in surprise behind the angel, whose hair alone repays a close look.

Then comes the room most people came for. Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes shows the moment itself, Judith’s face concentrated rather than triumphant, her maid already holding the sack for the head. Narcissus hangs nearby, a young hunter locked onto his own reflection in dark water. The third Caravaggio, Saint Francis in Meditation, holds a skull and wears a torn habit. Artemisia Gentileschi’s self-portrait keeps them company, painted in the same darkness she learned from him.

Raphael gets a smaller room and a bigger legend. La Fornarina, the baker’s daughter from Trastevere believed to be Margherita Luti, wears a bracelet signed RAPHAEL URBINAS. He loved her, painted her, and kept this picture in his house until his death. And in a twist nobody expects in Rome, the most famous portrait of Henry VIII, by Hans Holbein the Younger, hangs a few rooms away. London doesn’t have it. This palace does.

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The great hall is the room the palace was built to show off. Pietro da Cortona spent seven years, 1632 to 1639, frescoing The Triumph of Divine Providence across its ceiling, and the illusion still works: the roof seems to open to the sky, Divine Providence rides a throne of clouds at the centre, and giant bees swarm towards her. It’s frenetic and theatrical and you won’t know where to look first. The enormous canvases on the walls are the preparatory cartoons for the Life of Urban VIII tapestries, back on view under the fresco after decades in storage.

Until 11 October 2026 the palace also holds a rare guest: Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, on loan from the Rijksmuseum. Around thirty authenticated Vermeers exist. Not one of them lives in an Italian collection.

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The palace has two grand staircases, one by Bernini, one by Borromini, built by rivals whose feud Roman guides trace back to this very building site. Bernini, a sculptor by trade, got the chief architect’s job. Borromini did much of the hard architectural work under him and felt he got neither credit nor fair pay for it.

You climb Bernini’s square-shafted staircase on the way in. Borromini’s answer is an oval spiral behind the large wooden door on the right of the portico, twelve pairs of twisted columns per turn, tiny bees carved into the capitals. It comes at the end of the route, and it is the finish the building deserves. Short on time? Peek through that wooden door without doing the full visit.

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Behind the palace, the restored garden is free to walk, with the greenhouse bar at the far side. Under the back of the property sits something much older: a Mithraeum, an underground temple from the third century AD, found by accident during building work in 1936. Its red, white and blue fresco of Mithras killing the bull survives remarkably intact. Visits run only on occasional guided-tour dates, in Italian, booked separately. Check the gallery’s calendar rather than counting on it.