Palazzo Merulana

Palazzo Merulana tickets, and the ground floor you don’t need one for

Palazzo Merulana lets you in without a ticket. The ground floor, with its sculpture hall, the CafeCulture café and its terrace, and the BookCulture bookshop, is open to anyone who walks in from the street. The ticket is for the floors above, where the Cerasi collection and the temporary exhibition hang, and the entry ticket we sell, at €15, covers both. There’s no audio guide or guided tour with it, and the museum’s own audio guide is suspended for now.

You don’t have to book, but the museum recommends buying ahead, because entry upstairs runs in hourly slots with a limited number of people in each. On our ticket there’s no time to pick, so you can come whenever suits you on the day.

The ticket we sell has a single adult price. Under-7s go in free, and so do the companion of a visitor with a disability, ICOM members and licensed tour guides. Under-26s, over-65s and teachers get a reduced ticket from the museum’s ticket office, and they’re asked for a document at the entrance.

Palazzo Merulana opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday only

The galleries open five days a week and close on Mondays and Tuesdays. From Wednesday to Friday they don’t open until noon, so if you’d like to see the paintings in the morning, go at the weekend, when the doors open at 10:00.

The one gap is the holidays: we haven’t found the museum’s closing dates for Christmas and New Year, so check before you plan a visit around 25 December or 1 January.

Palazzo Merulana is included in the Turbopass, not the Roma Pass

The Turbopass Rome City Pass includes Palazzo Merulana, one entry to the galleries upstairs with the temporary exhibition. The Roma Pass treats it differently: it’s listed among the card’s discounts, not its included entries, and we haven’t been able to confirm the reduced price, so leave it out of your sums for now.

The Omnia Card, Go City, the Rome Tourist Card and the Vatican City Pass don’t list Palazzo Merulana. The Turbopass page goes through everything else that card includes, and Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes sets all of them side by side.

The Cerasi collection: 20th-century Italian art at Palazzo Merulana

Upstairs is the private collection of Elena and Claudio Cerasi, about 90 works of 20th-century Italian art from the Scuola Romana and the Novecento. On the labels you’ll find Giacomo Balla, Mario Sironi, Giorgio de Chirico, Felice Casorati and Gino Severini, alongside Antonietta Raphaël, Mario Mafai, Antonio Donghi, Duilio Cambellotti and Giuseppe Capogrossi.

The gallery on the third floor holds the temporary exhibitions, and your ticket covers whichever one is on. Since the sculpture hall is part of the free ground floor, you can look round it and have a coffee on the café’s terrace before deciding whether to go up.

Palazzo Merulana’s story: a 1929 health office that stood empty for decades

The palace was built for the Ufficio d’Igiene, the City of Rome’s health office, and the museum now fills all four of its floors, 1,800 m² in all. Its route from offices to galleries took the best part of a century.

The palace still belongs to the city. The Cerasi foundation holds it on an 88-year concession, CoopCulture runs the museum day to day, and the paintings on the walls are the Cerasis’ own collection. Claudio Cerasi died in 2020, two years after the opening.

Getting to Palazzo Merulana on Via Merulana, near Santa Maria Maggiore

Palazzo Merulana stands at Via Merulana 121, on the corner of Viale Manzoni, in the Esquilino district near the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. From Termini station it’s under 15 minutes on foot, and from the Colosseum about ten, so you can walk over from either.