Galleria Borghese site features

The Galleria Borghese is a single villa, not a wing of a larger museum, and it holds the number of people it was built for. A maximum of 180 visitors enter per slot, on the hour, for a two-hour visit — so the rooms are quiet enough to walk right round a statue, which in Rome is close to unique.

The building began as a garden house outside the city. The Casino Borghese was put up in an area that in the seventeenth century lay outside the walls of Rome, the nearest way in being the Porta del Popolo. By 1644 John Evelyn called it "an Elysium of delight" with "Fountains of sundry inventions, Groves and small Rivulets of Water".

Inside, the sculpture stands free in the middle of the floor and the ceiling above it is painted with the same story. Hall III holds Bernini's Apollo and Daphne beneath a vault painted with Apollo and Daphne, made at the end of the eighteenth century. In Hall VIII the group of Silenus carrying the infant Bacchus was set at the centre — which is why the room is called the Room of Silenus.

The walls are worked into perspective and the niches are full. Antique statues stand in them, among them the Artemis Borghese, a Greek original of the fourth century, framed by perspective architecture of grotesques painted by the Sienese Giovan Battista Marchetti (1730–1800).

Look down, because the floors are part of the collection. Three mosaic fragments show mascarons of Ocean and other marine personifications, and a mosaic Roman calendar dates from the first half of the third century. Elsewhere a second-century Roman mosaic of a fishing scene and second-century Greek sarcophagi.

One room is deliberately foreign to the rest. The Egyptian Hall VII was made between 1778 and 1782 to Antonio Asprucci's design; his whole decorative campaign ran from 1778 to 1780, mixing precious materials and the most advanced techniques of the time.

Upstairs the register changes from marble to canvas. Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of a Gentleman of 1535, Bassano's Last Supper of 1546, Domenichino's Hunt of Diana of 1617, Annibale Carracci's Samson in Prison, and a self-portrait by Bernini.

The family is present as faces. Portrait busts include one of Pope Paul V and two of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, of 1632 — the cardinal, nephew of Paul V, who began the collection.

And there are absences you can feel. In 1808 Prince Camillo Borghese, Napoleon's brother-in-law, was forced to sell the Borghese Roman sculptures and antiquities to the Emperor. What is here is a substantial part of the collection, not all of it.

Bernini's sculpture groups, in the rooms they were made for

Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), The Rape of Proserpina and David were commissioned by Scipione Borghese for this building. They are carved to be walked around, and the intended approach matters — Apollo and Daphne is composed so that the transformation reveals itself as you move, not from a single viewpoint.

Six Caravaggios

Including the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, the St Jerome and the late David with the Head of Goliath. Scipione Borghese was an early and aggressive collector of a painter who was, at the time, in legal trouble.

Canova's Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix. Napoleon's sister, married into the family that sold the antiquities to her brother, reclining as Venus. The biography and the marble are inseparable here.

Raphael and Titian upstairs

Raphael's Deposition and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love anchor the painting floor, alongside Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of a Gentleman (1535), Bassano's Last Supper (1546) and Domenichino's Hunt of Diana (1617).

The antique sculpture that stayed

The Artemis Borghese, a Greek original of the fourth century BC, stands in a wall niche of Asprucci's design; the Lysippus group of Silenus carrying the infant Bacchus gives its name to Hall VIII. A second-century Roman mosaic of a fishing scene and Greek sarcophagi of the same century are set into the fabric of the rooms.

Bernini's self-portrait

Easy to walk past among the seventeenth-century paintings, and worth not walking past: the sculptor of the three groups downstairs, painted by himself.