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My 5 Favorite Places for Art in Rome

July 31, 2025
in News
My 5 Favorite Places for Art in Rome
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Compared to Europe’s statelier cultural capitals, Rome retains its seamy side: “a stupendous and miserable city,” as the film director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini had it, whose gods and temples arose from a swamp. My own Roman fixations are similarly high/low, tumbling from the refined geometry of 16th-century courtyards to the down-and-dirty streetscapes of postwar cinema. No point denying it, this place is crowded — especially this year, when the 2025 Jubilee has supersaturated the capital’s museums, churches and Paul Mescal-approved amphitheaters — but it’s so rich in art and architecture, so dense with public monuments and private gardens, that the savvy cultural visitor can always find something to see. Grand or gritty, Renaissance or Rationalist, these are the sites I think you shouldn’t miss.

Find these five and discover more art on our Google map of Rome.

1. High Fascist camp on the playing field

With Jannik Sinner sitting at the top of the world rankings, Italian tennis is back in the spotlight — but there’s a more sordid side to the country’s sporting history. The Foro Italico, which hosts the Italian Open and other sports events north of the capital, is one of the most iconic sites of Italian Fascist architecture, and a reminder that not all reinterpretations of the classical tradition shared the Renaissance’s humanist impulses.

The Foro Italico — originally named Foro Mussolini — brought together some of the most significant artists, architects and designers of interwar Italy to concoct a cult of Roman virility. The artist Gino Severini designed acres of black-and-white mosaics of wrestlers, horsemen and the neurotically repeated word DUCE. The indoor pool is festooned with propagandistic mosaics of swimming gods.

My favorite bit is the recently refurbished Stadio dei Marmi, a track that opened in 1932 and is ringed by five dozen huge statues of burly boxers, wrestlers, discus throwers and even tennis players in blazing white Carrara marble. (Up here you will also find the jagged Mussolini Obelisk, made of the same Carrara marble, the only remaining commemoration of the dictator in the capital.) There’s a comic incongruity that undercuts the enduring creepiness of these statues; today Romans get in a workout beneath these Fascist muscle men, and anyone can visit for free.

Foro Italico, Viale del Foro Italico.

2. The little tomb where Renaissance architecture began

Who was the greatest creative power of the High Renaissance? Michelangelo? Raphael? That guy who wrote backward and invented a helicopter? I bow to all of them, but my all-time Rinascimento hero is Donato Bramante (c. 1444-1514), an architect, and painter too, who was the first to truly channel the Greek and Roman tradition in the service of a new humanism.

Under Pope Julius II, Bramante was responsible for the initial layout of St. Peter’s Basilica (though Michelangelo would revise the design after his death), but I would direct you to a much smaller and certainly less crowded site, up on the Janiculum hill. His Tempietto (“little temple”), begun in 1502, is less than 15 feet in diameter, jammed into a little courtyard where St. Peter is said to have been crucified upside down. But as soon as you see it you will feel awe at its perfect proportions: the simple peristyle of 16 columns, topped by a drum and a dome, the whole thing precisely bisected by a marble balustrade.

Almost every monumental domed building, including the Capitol in Washington, traces its DNA to this tiny monument. It’s hard to express how much grandeur it packs into such compact form — and how, as you orbit its rhythmic colonnade, you discover just how much dignity architecture can bring to a city. It may be the most beautiful building in Rome per square meter.

Tempietto del Bramante, Piazza di S. Pietro in Montorio, 2.

3. Ancient Roman marbles in a modern power station

Not enough visitors get out to the southern and eastern stretches of the city, where the tourist track runs out and lowlife Rome begins. Down in Garbatella, a formerly industrial neighborhood with a bunch of good wine bars, is one of the most unlikely museums in Italy: the Centrale Montemartini, formerly the capital’s first public power plant, which was refurbished in 1997 to house works of Roman art. Unlike at Tate Modern in London, the era’s other power plant-turned-museum, here the architects retained the old boilers and turbines during its conversion — which means the smooth marble of 20 centuries past comes right up against contraptions of iron and steel. (Also unlike Tate Modern, this place is criminally undervisited.)

A headless statue of the draped Venus stands in front of a condenser machine dating to 1915. Busts of gods and heroes commingle with gas meters and valves. A downcast Antinous, deified after his death by the Emperor Hadrian, mopes against the dark gray expanse of the boiler. All very steampunk, all good for Instagram. But it’s worth pointing out that, more than a century after the construction of this thermoelectric plant, the machines that once powered Rome’s street lamps are just as foreign and inaccessible to us as the gods of cold stone. Here are two overlapping forms of archaeology, displaying a vanished Roman antiquity but also the relics of our own lapsed industrial age.

Centrale Montemartini, Via Ostiense, 106.

4. An old basilica with a gruesome fresco cycle

Pope Leo’s new hometown contains nearly a thousand churches, but I always direct friends visiting Rome to seek out a minor basilica near the Colosseum, whose ancient walls of stone were spiced up, centuries after its construction, by some of the goriest frescoes in Italian art.

Santo Stefano Rotondo, built as far back as the fifth century A.D., is the first circular church in Rome, dedicated to St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. But toward the end of the 16th century, at the height of the Counter-Reformation, church authorities redecorated Santo Stefano with a wonderful, and wonderfully explicit, cycle of the sufferings of the saints by the Mannerist painter Niccolò Circignani.

His colors are all coral pinks and sea foam greens, a palette for bridesmaids’ dresses — but his depictions are closer to “Mortal Kombat” than holy matrimony. Saint Cecilia, submerged up to her chest in boiling water, looks heavenward with a beatific stare. Saint Ignatius joins his hands in prayer as lions maul his flesh; Saint Erasmus lies still as his torturers pour molten lead into his wounds. Flaying, roasting, beheading, exsanguination, and the gore goes on; the obscure Saint Artemius is being crushed to death between two marble slabs, and his eyeballs have popped loose from their sockets. (Do I have to add that this place is great for children, who will love counting the headless bodies in the backgrounds?)

Definitely not the Roman church to visit, then, if you are seeking inner peace. Nor where you should look for true masterpieces of Italian painting. But there’s something gripping about how Santo Stefano puts artistic vision and religious didacticism into the greatest tension, and models the play and counterplay of body and soul.

Chiesa di Santo Stefano Rotondo, Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 7.

5. An underappreciated villa still revealing its secrets

Some advice regarding Roman ruins: Touch grass! While the tour buses disgorge visitors at the Forum, you can visit Rome’s largest archaeological site — a rather well-preserved complex of houses from the second century A.D. — in relative peace in lush fields to the south of the capital. The Villa dei Quintili belonged to two brothers who were consuls under the Emperor Commodus, and who set up in the Roman suburbs a sprawling compound of fountains, banqueting halls and their own private theater, adorned with mosaics and equipped with the hottest new thermal bath technology. The house was so lavish, in fact, that Commodus decided he wanted it for himself, and promptly had its owners assassinated.

A little museum on site houses the bearded gods and commemorative stelae that archaeologists have found at the villa. But the real pleasure here is outdoors, among the ruins and the wildflowers. For this is still very much an active archaeological site, and in 2023 researchers announced their discovery that the villa had housed a winery, whose dedicated chambers for grape pressing and fermentation adjoined what was essentially a tasting room or nightclub. The past, in Rome, is still a work in progress.

Villa dei Quintili, Via Appia Nuova, 1092.


More Art to Discover

Find all of these on our Google map of Rome.

  • Palazzo Massimo, Termini: museum of ancient art and home of the “Boxer at Rest,” a Hellenistic bronze that might be the greatest of all surviving sculptures.

  • Domus Aurea, Colle Oppio: Nero’s golden house, or what’s left of it, equipped with a very handsome new steel entranceway designed by Stefano Boeri.

  • Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Campo Marzio: well-stuffed museum and library, right next to the Spanish Steps. A must for true believers in Romantic poetry; John Keats died in this house at 25, in a bedroom that’s been preserved.

  • Cemitero Acattolico, Testaccio: Keats is buried here, in the shadow of an ancient Roman pyramid. Instead of his name, the tombstone bears the epitaph: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.

  • Museo Ebraico di Roma, Sant’Angelo: the city’s Jewish museum, whose ancient tombstones and medieval manuscripts document the oldest community outside the Levant. It’s housed beneath the Great Synagogue, constructed at the turn of the last century in the former Ghetto.

  • Cinema Troisi, Trastevere: historic movie theater, built in 1933 by Luigi Moretti, that reopened in 2021 and has become one of the hippest revival houses in the city.

  • Istituto Svizzero, Ludovisi: reliably smart venues for contemporary art, run by the Swiss cultural services, housed in the spectacular hillside Villa Maraini. The belvedere is the second-highest point in Rome; to get any higher you’ll need to climb St. Peter’s.

  • Libreria Marini, Pigneto: all the rarest modern art publications, the coolest photography books and the most obscure artist zines, housed in an airy space in a neighborhood you must not call “the Brooklyn of Rome.”

Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.

The post My 5 Favorite Places for Art in Rome appeared first on New York Times.

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