Palazzo Colonna site features

From the street it is a wall, and it gives nothing away. Palazzo Colonna presents a long plain front near Piazza Santi Apostoli with a door in it, and no indication that one of the great rooms of Europe is on the other side. Round the back, on Via della Pilotta, four arched bridges cross the street overhead, carrying the palace to its garden on the slope of the Quirinal.

You climb a short flight of stairs, and something is lying on them. A cannon ball, iron, about the size of a grapefruit, sitting in the stone where it stopped. It came through in 1849, fired by the French during the siege of the Roman Republic, and nobody has moved it in nearly two centuries.

Then the door opens on the Great Hall, and the scale changes completely. It is a long gallery, perhaps seventy paces end to end, and every surface is working. The walls are hung frame to frame with paintings in heavy gilt, floor to cornice, with almost no wall left between them. Columns of yellow-veined marble stand out from the walls in pairs. Two rows of crystal chandeliers run the length of the room, and tall windows down one side throw light across a polished floor.

The ceiling is a battle. The whole barrel vault is frescoed with the Battle of Lepanto — ships, smoke, figures spilling over the painted architecture — so the room's single subject, overhead, is a sea fight a Colonna commanded.

Beyond are quieter rooms: the Princess Isabelle apartment in the older wing, lower-ceilinged and frescoed, and the gardens climbing the hill behind, reached under those bridges.

The Great Hall

The long gallery with its Battle of Lepanto vault, paired coloured-marble columns, two rows of chandeliers and walls hung frame to frame. The room from the end of Roman Holiday.

The cannonball

On the short flight of stairs up to the hall: a cannon ball that landed there in 1849, fired by French forces under General Oudinot during the Roman Republic. Still in place.

The Bean Eater

Annibale Carracci's Il Mangiafagioli — a man eating beans, painted with none of the flattery the rest of the house is built on.

Bronzino's Venus, Cupid and a Satyr

One of the collection's named highlights, alongside Guercino, Tintoretto, Salviati, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa and Lanfranco.

The Princess Isabelle apartment

The older wing, frescoed by Renaissance and Baroque masters. On the EUR 25 ticket, not the EUR 15 one.

The gardens

Climbing the Quirinal slope behind the palace, reached beneath the arches that carry the house over Via della Pilotta. Included in both Saturday tickets.