Villa Farnesina

Palace · Trastevere (Via della Lungara)Rome,Italy

A banker's garden villa on the Tiber frescoed by Raphael and Peruzzi, built to impress the people he did business with, and almost always empty.

Villa Farnesina is a small frescoed villa on the Trastevere bank of the Tiber, and it is almost always empty. Raphael painted Galatea riding the sea on a shell in a ground-floor room, and designed the loggia next door, where Cupid and Psyche float across a ceiling made to look like an open pergola. Giovanni da Udine painted the garlands framing it in 1518, packing about a hundred and seventy identifiable plants into them. Upstairs Peruzzi painted a room whose walls open into a colonnade with views of Rome beyond. Baldassarre Peruzzi built the house between 1506 and 1510 for Agostino Chigi, a banker from Siena who lent to popes and kings, laying it out as two low wings around a loggia open to a garden. It went up on a brand-new street the pope had just cut along this bank. Chigi hired the best painters alive because the house was built to be seen by the people he did business with. The garden it opens onto is still there, and you can sit in it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Mornings, and not on a Sunday — this villa closes in the early afternoon and shuts on most Sundays, which is when people assume it will be open.
Expect to be alone in the loggia — one of the best-known Renaissance interiors in Rome routinely has fewer people in it than a quiet church, and you can stand where you like.
Read the garlands as a botanical record — the fruit and vegetables painted around the ceiling include American plants that had reached Europe only a generation before they were painted here.
Photograph the loggia ceiling from the threshold, not the middle — from the doorway the painted pergola lines up with the real beams above you, which is the position it was drawn for.

Things to do

1
Stand in the loggia and look up
The entrance loggia is painted to look like a garden pergola open to the sky, with painted tapestries hanging between the beams and figures moving through the air above them. Stand in the middle and read the ceiling in parts: the story of Cupid and Psyche runs across the top, and the border framing it is made entirely of painted fruit and vegetables.
2
Find the charcoal head high on the wall
In the room upstairs with the painted colonnade, look high on one wall for a large head drawn straight onto the plaster in charcoal. It has been attributed to Michelangelo, who is said to have come to see Raphael's work and to have left this drawing as his comment on it. Scholars still argue about whether he really drew it, but the head itself is easy to find once you look up.
3
Sit in the garden the villa was built for
The small garden between the villa and the river wall is included in the ticket and is usually empty. Sit facing the house: the loggia opens straight onto the garden, because a suburban villa like this one was designed so that its main rooms and its garden worked as a single space. Before the embankment walls were built in the nineteenth century, the water came almost to where you are sitting.