Galleria Borghese is a garden villa built to hold one cardinal's private collection, and the rooms stay deliberately small, so you meet each work almost face to face. Frescoed ceilings of gods and chariots sit directly above the sculptures. Scipione Borghese, a pope's nephew, put it up in the early 1600s to display marble he wanted so badly that rivals' collections were confiscated to feed it. He gambled on a barely twenty-year-old sculptor, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and that bet helped define the Baroque.
Bernini's Apollo and Daphne freezes the instant her fingers sprout laurel leaves; his Proserpina shows a stone hand denting a marble thigh as if it were skin. His David, biting his lip mid-throw, stands a room away, and the reclining Venus near the entrance is Napoleon's sister. A few rooms on, Caravaggio's dark canvases hang close together, as they do almost nowhere else. Entry is capped and booked in advance for a fixed two-hour slot, so the villa never fills up. Everyone in a slot arrives at the same minute, though, so the first rooms jam and then empty out.