Borghese Gallery

Borghese Gallery tickets: entry alone, audio guide or guided tour

Every visit to the Borghese Gallery, the Galleria Borghese in Italian, has a booked time, because the gallery lets visitors in only at the start of each slot. That goes for under-18s, who go in free, and for everyone on the free days listed below. A free entry is still booked with the museum and carries its €2 booking fee, except for children up to 5 and visitors with disabilities, who book without paying it.

The ticket we sell includes the booking and comes on your phone: reserved entry from €35. It’s one ticket with several options, chosen at checkout, and that starting price is for entry alone, with no guide or audio guide. The other options add an audio guide, a guided tour or a three-hour bus tour, and every option’s price changes with the date and time you pick.

If you’d like a guide, the two-hour guided tour below includes the booking, keeps groups to 15 and gives you a headset to hear the guide, in English, French, Italian or Spanish; you meet outside the gallery. The other ticket pairs a reserved entry with a full day on the hop-on hop-off sightseeing bus. Its starting price can be lower than entry alone, but it’s sold on only a few dates, with entry around midday. Neither can be refunded.

How the Borghese Gallery’s two-hour time slots work

The gallery lets in 180 people at the start of each slot, and each visit lasts two hours, so there are at most 360 visitors inside at a time. Everyone needs a time, Roma Pass holders included, and the gallery is closed on Mondays, so fix your Borghese day first and fit the rest of Rome around it.

In a wheelchair, use the rear entrance, which has no steps and leads to the sculpture floor, all of which you can visit. The front entrance has a lift platform to the left of the stairs. The lift up to the paintings is too tight for large wheelchairs, so the gallery lends a smaller one for the ride, with bigger ones waiting upstairs.

Bernini and Canova in the Borghese Gallery’s sculpture rooms

Once you’re through the door, the gallery has 20 rooms on two floors. The ground floor, rooms 1 to 8, holds the sculpture and a room of Caravaggios, and the floor above, rooms 9 to 20, is the picture gallery.

Room 1 belongs to Canova. His Paolina Bonaparte as Venus Victrix shows Napoleon’s sister, who had married Camillo Borghese in 1803, as the goddess Venus on a couch, and the couch hides a mechanism that turns the statue a full 360 degrees.

The next three rooms each hold a statue by Bernini. His David, in Room 2, is set so that you stand where Goliath would be, and the face, so the story goes, is Bernini’s own. Look at the cithara at his feet: it ends in an eagle’s head, one of the Borghese family’s heraldic emblems.

Apollo and Daphne, in Room 3, is a scene from the Roman poet Ovid, in Carrara marble 2.43 metres high.

In Room 4, the Room of the Emperors, Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina is the statue where Pluto’s hands sink into Proserpina’s flesh. It stood at Villa Ludovisi from 1622 and was bought for the gallery in 1908.

Caravaggio and Titian: the paintings at the Borghese Gallery

From the statues, Room 8, the Room of Silenus, closes the ground floor with six paintings by Caravaggio. The Boy with a Basket of Fruit is from about 1595, and in David with the Head of Goliath, the giant’s face is the painter’s own. The Madonna dei Palafrenieri, from 1605, hangs here too.

Upstairs, Room 20 has Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, painted around 1515, whose meaning is still argued over. Until 8 December 2026 the room also hosts an exhibition for the 450th anniversary of the painter’s death, Titian. Dialogues between Sacred and Profane.

The Borghese Gallery with the Roma Pass, Omnia Card or Go City

With a Roma Pass, the gallery can be one of the card’s included entries, of which the 48-hour card has one and the 72-hour card two, and you choose where to use them. If you’ve used them up, or would rather spend them elsewhere, the card gets you the reduced ticket. Either way, the booking is yours to make.

The 24-hour Omnia, the Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass and the Turbopass don’t include the Borghese Gallery.

Without a booking, the Roma Pass won’t get you through the door. You book on Ticketone’s Roma Pass page, romapass.ticketone.it, where the entry is already paid for and you pay only Ticketone’s €2 fee per ticket, or by email to romapass@tosc.it, which is free and answered within 48 hours, Monday to Friday.

You can book before you buy the card, with just the names of the people going, so you can check your day has a slot first. Anyone going in free with you, such as your children, books a time of their own with the museum.

The 72-hour Omnia Card works the same way here, because its Roma Pass is the one that gets you in. With the Go City Explorer Pass, the audio guide is in the Go City app, in English, French or Italian, and the ticket you collect has a time on it, so the two-hour slot applies to you too.

How Cardinal Scipione Borghese built the Borghese Gallery’s collection

The villa was begun in 1607 for Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, and his uncle helped fill it. In 1607 the pope gave him 107 paintings confiscated from the painter Cavalier d’Arpino, the Boy with a Basket of Fruit among them, and in 1608 Raphael’s Deposition, which had been removed illegally from the Baglioni chapel in Perugia.

Much of the family’s ancient sculpture is elsewhere: in 1807 Camillo Borghese, Paolina’s husband, had to sell a large part of the antiquities to Napoleon, and they went to the Louvre. In 1902 the gallery, the villa and the park passed to the Italian state, and the gallery has been a state museum since.

Walking or taking the bus to the Borghese Gallery

The gallery is inside the Villa Borghese park, at Piazzale Scipione Borghese 5, with no metro station next to it. The simplest ways there are bus 910 or 92 from Termini station, to the Pinciana/Museo Borghese stop, or a walk of 15 to 20 minutes through the park from Spagna, on metro line A.

From Barberini, also on line A, buses 63, 83, 52 and 53 go to the same stop. There are taxis on Via Pinciana and Via Vittorio Veneto.