Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

Museum · Esquilino (Largo di Villa Peretti, beside Termini)Rome,Italy

A quiet Rome museum of what the city dug out of itself, its top floor holding Roman rooms rebuilt with their painted walls.

Palazzo Massimo alle Terme holds the paintings, mosaics and sculpture dug out of Rome itself, and the top floor is the best of it: whole rooms have been rebuilt indoors with their painted walls back around them. The finest is a windowless dining room from a villa that Livia, the wife of Augustus, owned north of the city. The paint was lifted off the walls in 1951 to save it. All four sides are painted as one unbroken orchard, with a low fence across the front and a wood behind, and nothing marks the corners, so the room seems to have no edges. Botanists have counted more than twenty species in that garden, and every one of them is in flower and in fruit at the same time, which no real garden manages. Downstairs the collection turns to bronze and marble: a boxer sitting on a rock after a fight, his ears swollen and his hands still bound; a discus thrower; rows of emperors. The building is a Jesuit college of the 1880s with lifts to every floor, and it stays quiet even in the weeks when the rest of Rome is at its most crowded.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Keep this one for a hot afternoon or a rainy one — it is the great Roman collection you can walk into without queueing in August, and the painted rooms are cool and dim.
Give your eyes a minute in the garden room — the light is kept very low to protect the pigment, and the depth in the painting only becomes visible once your eyes have adjusted.
Look closely at the boxer's cuts — the wounds and the blood are inlaid in a different, redder copper alloy, so they stand out slightly from the skin around them.
Start at the top and work down — the painted rooms are on the top floor and take the most attention, and the sculpture on the lower floors is easier to enjoy afterwards than before.

Things to do

1
Stand in the middle of Livia's garden
The room is rebuilt at its true size, so you can stand where the couches once were. Work outward from the low fence at the front: past it to the fruit trees, then up to the birds, some perched and some in flight, then back to the dark wood behind.
2
Circle the seated boxer
The bronze boxer is on the ground floor, on a low base, so you can walk around him. Start at the back and come round to the front slowly, looking at the swollen ears, the broken nose, the cuts on the cheek. His head is turned up and to one side, as though someone has just spoken to him from above.
3
Walk the mosaic floors laid out flat
The lower gallery has whole floors from Roman houses set out at ground level rather than hung on walls. Walk along the edge of one and follow the pattern the way a guest would have crossed it, and look for the patches where an old repair used slightly the wrong colours and stands out from the background.