Villa Pignatelli

Villa Pignatelli tickets, and the days it’s free

A ticket costs €5, or €2 for EU citizens aged 18 to 24, and under-18s go in free. You can buy it from the machine at the entrance, on the Musei Italiani website or app, or at the ticket office of the Royal Palace, which runs the villa. Booking is optional, and the date on the ticket doesn’t tie you to that day: it works on any ordinary opening day.

Everyone gets in free on the first Sunday of the month, at the usual hours.

Villa Pignatelli with the Campania Artecard, and the Royal Palace too

The Campania Artecard includes the villa on the 365 Lite and the 365 Gold, or as one of five picks on the 7-day card. The same card covers the Royal Palace and, up on the Vomero, Villa Floridiana, which helps if you’re planning several of Naples’s palaces and villas. It’s the one card we sell with Villa Pignatelli on it, and the others are on Naples Pass and Naples city passes.

Inside the villa: the drawing rooms and the private rooms upstairs

The villa is a house museum, and you come in through a round hall under a dome in the manner of Palladio. The blue drawing room opens into the ballroom, and the red one, all white and gold stucco, dates from the Rothschild years. The green drawing room sits between the library, its walls covered in leather tooled with gold, and the dining room, where the table is laid with the house’s own china.

The private rooms on the first floor have been open since late 2015: the prince’s bathroom, with its Carrara marble tub, his study and the princess’s boudoir. The collections include silver, 19th-century furniture, Chinese and Japanese ceramics, porcelain from Sèvres, Meissen and Capodimonte, and bronzes, among them a Narcissus by the sculptor Vincenzo Gemito.

The garden, and the crochet reef in the Casa della Fotografia

The English garden, laid out by Guglielmo Bechi in 1830, has winding paths, a fountain, an araucaria, a grevillea, magnolias, strelitzias, palms and cycads. The princess grew her orchids in its glass and iron greenhouse, and at the north end stands the Palazzina Neoclassica, which also hosts photography shows.

Your ticket covers the current exhibition in the Casa della Fotografia, the villa’s first-floor rooms for photography. Until 12 April 2027 they hold Crochet Coral Reef, by Margaret and Christine Wertheim with the Museum Frieder Burda: a reef crocheted in wool by more than 4,000 people, two of whose six islands are here in Naples.

Older guides send you to the Carriage Museum in the old stables, where 34 French, English and Italian carriages stand in a space designed in 1975 by Ezio Bruno De Felice, but for now it’s shut.

Who built Villa Pignatelli, and who lived there

Pietro Valente designed the villa in 1826 for Ferdinando Acton, son of Sir John Acton, prime minister to King Ferdinand IV of Naples, and gave it a neo-Doric colonnade and entrance turrets of lava stone.

The Rothschild bankers bought it in 1841 and remade the interiors, and after the unification of Italy it was sold to Prince Diego Aragona Pignatelli Cortes. In 1955 Princess Rosina Pignatelli gave it to the state.

On the Riviera di Chiaia: getting to Villa Pignatelli

Look for number 200 on the Riviera di Chiaia. The closest metro stop is Piazza Amedeo, on line 2.