Palazzo Massimo alle Terme (Museo Nazionale Romano) site features

Palazzo Massimo alle Terme is a large square-fronted palace facing a piazza beside Termini station, and the first thing to register is that it looks Renaissance and is not: built between 1883 and 1887 in neo-cinquecentesco style, it presents three storeys of pale ochre and travertine, a heavily rusticated ground floor, rows of identical pedimented windows, and a deep cornice, with a tall arched portal at the centre flanked by two palms.

Inside, the rooms are gallery rooms, not palace rooms. The building was acquired by the State in 1981 and given substantial restoration and consolidation to adapt it as an exhibition space, so what you walk through is plain, well-lit, white-walled, arranged for sightlines around freestanding sculpture.

The sculpture reads as a crowd of life-size figures in pale marble. Standing portraits, seated figures, torsos and heads, mostly of the late republic and early empire, at eye level and close enough to walk around. The famous ones announce themselves by their poses — Augustus with his head veiled as Pontifex Maximus, the Discobolus coiled at the moment before the throw, the Sleeping Hermaphrodite stretched along a couch.

The second floor is a different kind of space entirely. Here the museum has rebuilt whole painted interiors: rooms from the Villa di Livia at Prima Porta and four of the nine surviving rooms of the Villa della Farnesina, so you stand inside four walls of ancient painting rather than in front of a panel. The palette is deep reds and blacks, with fine white architectural lines and small figures, and in the Livia room a continuous painted garden runs around the walls.

Floors and smaller things fill the rest. Black-and-white republican mosaics with polychrome central panels, more articulated imperial floors, a 4th-century intarsia head of the Sun God in cipollino marble, and, down in the basement, a purpose-built vault for the coins.

Augustus as Pontifex Maximus

From via Labicana, among the most significant of the museum's classical sculptures.

The Fanciulla di Anzio

One of the headline works of the sculpture collection.

The Discobolus Lancellotti

A famous Roman copy of a Greek work.

The Sleeping Hermaphrodite and the Venus of Doidalsas

Also Roman copies of Greek originals; the Venus is the Venus about to bathe by Doidalsas.

The Apollo del Tevere

A copy of a 5th-century BC original, probably from the workshop of Phidias.

The bronzes

Works from the ships of Nemi and the Dionysus of the Tiber.

The Villa di Livia rooms

Paintings from rooms of the Villa di Livia at Prima Porta, on the second floor.

The Villa della Farnesina rooms

Decorations of a probable imperial property, of which four of the nine surviving rooms are reconstructed, datable to around 20 BC.

The mosaics

Republican-period black-and-white floors with polychrome central panels and more articulated imperial-period floors, spanning the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD.

The Sun God intarsia

A notable 4th-century AD inlay representing the head of the Sun God in cipollino marble; the intarsia panels of the Basilica of Junius Bassus are also here.

The coin vault

The numismatic collection, in a purpose-built basement caveau, with rare finds and many unique pieces.

The named collections

The former Museo Kircheriano, the Gnecchi collection, the medieval and modern collection of Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy, the Savoia collection and the Goldsmithing Section of jewels and gems, almost all funerary objects.