Palazzo Barberini

Palazzo Barberini tickets: one €15 entry for Barberini and the Galleria Corsini

Palazzo Barberini’s ticket is a combined one. For €15 it gets you into this palace and into the Galleria Corsini, the other seat of the same National Gallery of Ancient Art, in Trastevere, across the Tiber. The ticket stays valid for 20 days, so the Corsini can wait for another afternoon.

Tickets are sold by CoopCulture, the ticketing company the museum links to, and at the ticket office. You don’t have to book: the museum only recommends it on its free days, when everyone gets in without paying.

The Metrebus card is Rome’s public transport pass. Free entry also goes to EU students and teachers of architecture, the humanities, heritage, education and fine arts, to ICOM members, to tour guides with their licence and to journalists with a press card. The Bernini e i Barberini exhibition closed on 14 June 2026, so its €16 and €20 tickets, still in some guides, no longer apply.

One thing the €15 leaves out is the Barberini Mithraeum, a Roman shrine to the god Mithras next to the palace. It opens only for guided visits on Saturdays, at €7 on its own or €17 with the museum.

Palazzo Barberini on the Roma Pass: an entry worth the full €15

With the Roma Pass you choose at the door: use one of its included entries, one on the 48-hour card and two on the 72-hour, or pay the reduced price. Because Barberini and Corsini share a ticket, a single included entry covers both galleries, and here that entry is worth the full €15.

Once your included entries are used, the Roma Pass list gives the reduced ticket here as €2, a price we haven’t seen confirmed at the ticket office. Under-18s go in free and EU citizens aged 18 to 25 already pay €2, so neither needs a card for this palace. The 24-hour Omnia Card and the Omnia Smart don’t cover it, and no pass includes the Mithraeum tours.

The Turbopass page lists what else its City Pass includes, and Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes sets the cards side by side. The palace is free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month, 25 April, 2 June and 4 November. If you’re in Rome on 6 December, save the included entry for another site that day.

Palazzo Barberini opening hours: closed on Mondays, free on first Sundays

Palazzo Barberini opens from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 19:00, but the ticket office shuts at 18:00, so buy your ticket by then. The museum doesn’t list separate winter hours, and apart from Mondays it closes only on 25 December and 1 January.

Mondays are a little confusing, because the palace is closed while the Galleria Corsini runs its Monday at Corsini opening from 12 October to 28 December 2026. On a Monday, then, you can only use the Corsini half of your ticket.

Inside Palazzo Barberini: two staircases and Pietro da Cortona’s salon

Three architects worked on the palace: Carlo Maderno, who drew up its plan, then Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, two of the great names of Baroque Rome. The museum calls it the prototypical Baroque palace. From the ground floor two staircases go up, a square one by Bernini and an oval spiral with paired columns that the museum says is probably Borromini’s.

Either one takes you to the first floor, where the National Gallery hangs its paintings. The great salon is the room to stop in, under the ceiling fresco by the painter Pietro da Cortona, an allegory of Divine Providence painted for the Barberini.

Upstairs, on the second floor, is a rococo apartment from the mid-18th century, and the palace also has a garden.

The Barberini Mithraeum, on Saturday tours only

The palace’s other sight is next door. The Mithraeum turned up in the summer of 1936, during building work on the Savorgnan di Brazzà building just east of the palace, today the officers’ club of Italy’s armed forces. It shows Mithras slaying a bull, the scene known as the tauroctony.

The shrine stood in the Horti Sallustiani, the Gardens of Sallust, an ancient Roman estate on this side of the city. You can only go in with a guide. Wheelchair users can’t go down into the shrine itself, so they watch from a viewing area instead.

How Pope Urban VIII’s family made Palazzo Barberini their home

The palace began with an election. In 1623 Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, and two years later he bought a villa on the Quirinal, one of Rome’s hills, from the Sforza family for his nephews. Carlo Maderno folded the old villa into a new building laid out like a letter H.

The decoration took generations of painters and craftsmen, and the last of it came in the mid-18th century, when Cornelia Costanza, the family’s last direct heir, had the rococo apartment made. The Barberini kept living here until 1955, so the rooms you walk through were a family home well into the last century.

Getting to Palazzo Barberini on metro line A

Metro line A stops at Barberini, the station that shares the palace’s name, and from there you walk to the entrance on Via delle Quattro Fontane 13, through the portico. Buses 53, 61, 62, 63, 80, 81, 83, 160, 492 and 590 also stop in the area.

For the Corsini half of the ticket, the gallery is on Via della Lungara 10, on the Trastevere side of the river.