Villa Torlonia Museums

Villa Torlonia museums tickets: one building, a pair, or all four

The Villa Torlonia museums are four buildings on the Torlonia princes’ old estate on Via Nomentana, now a 12-hectare park. The main villa, the Casino Nobile, was Mussolini’s family home from 1929, and under it is the wartime bunker you can visit on a guided tour. The Casina delle Civette, the House of the Owls, is a prince’s Swiss-style cottage full of Liberty stained glass, and the other two are the Casino dei Principi, next door to the Casino Nobile, and the Serra Moresca, a Moorish greenhouse.

You buy a ticket per building, with the Casino Nobile and the Casino dei Principi sold as a pair, and the tickets for the two Casinos and the Casina include the exhibition on show inside. The combined ticket for all four is only sold at the ticket office, and it costs less when the Serra Moresca is closed.

The reduced price is for visitors aged 6 to 25 who don’t live in Rome, groups of 20 or more, and holders of an annual ATAC or Metrebus pass, Rome’s public transport season tickets. Children under 6 go in free, and so do visitors with a disability and one companion. On the first Sunday of every month, entry is free for everyone.

If you’ve read that Villa Torlonia is free, that’s the rule for residents: since February 2026, people who live in Rome and its metropolitan area go in free with an ID. Booking isn’t needed for the museums. If you’d rather skip the queue, buying online or on 060608, the city’s call centre, costs €1 more and takes you straight to the till, and tickets for a later date take credit cards only.

Villa Torlonia museums on the Roma Pass: one entry per ticket

The Roma Pass covers the Villa Torlonia museums, and every ticket on its list counts as a single entry, the combined ones included. The 48-hour card comes with one included entry and the 72-hour with two, and at the museum you decide whether to spend one here or pay the reduced price and save it for somewhere else.

The choice matters here because the entry is worth very different amounts: on the Roma Pass price list the tickets run from €8 for the Serra Moresca alone to €17 for all four buildings. We’d spend it on the combined ticket, which is sold only at the ticket office. Booking a time is free, and the Roma Pass strongly recommends it, by phone on 060608.

The Rome Tourist Card, the Vatican City Pass, the Turbopass, Go City and the 24-hour Omnia Card don’t include Villa Torlonia. The 72-hour Omnia Card does because there’s a Roma Pass inside it, and our page on Roma Pass and Rome’s other city passes compares them all.

What no card includes is the bunker under the Casino Nobile. It has a ticket of its own, and the Roma Pass gets you its reduced price of €6.

Mussolini’s bunker at Villa Torlonia: guided tours and tickets

Benito Mussolini, Italy’s Fascist dictator, moved into the Casino Nobile with his family in 1929. In 1941 an air-raid shelter was built inside the villa, and the bunker came after it. Rome was bombed 51 times between July 1943 and May 1944. The bunker lies 6 metres below the villa and reopened in April 2024 with projections and a sound simulation of a bombing raid, and at the end of the tour you come out into the park.

You can only go down with a guide, at weekends, and the ticket, €12 or €6 reduced, has to be bought ahead. Online it costs €1 more, with up to five tickets per purchase. The reduced price is for ages 6 to 17, Roma Pass holders and visitors with a disability and their companion, and under-6s go free. Places left over are sold at the ticket office, by credit card only.

With one English tour a week, book the Saturday 11:00 slot first if you don’t follow Italian, and fit the museums around it.

Villa Torlonia opening hours, and the Serra Moresca’s shorter day

The three museum buildings keep the same hours all year, Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 to 19:00, with last entry at 18:00. Everything closes on Mondays, 1 May and 25 December, and on 24 and 31 December the hours are 9:00 to 14:00, with last entry at 13:00.

The Serra Moresca runs on a timetable of its own and shuts for the summer. From October to March it opens from 10:00 to 16:00, with last entry at 15:20, and from April to September until 19:00, with last entry at 18:20, apart from July and August, when it’s closed. So in winter, start with the greenhouse, since it closes three hours before the museums.

You visit its Moorish tower with a member of staff, in groups of up to 20 that go up every half hour for 10 to 15 minutes. The tower stays shut on the first Sunday of the month. Until 22 November the Serra also hosts an exhibition, The Props Assist the House.

The Casino Nobile, the Torlonia villa where Mussolini lived

The Casino Nobile is the estate’s main house. Giovanni Torlonia bought the property in 1797, and between 1802 and 1806 the architect Valadier turned its house into this palace. Today it holds the Museo della Villa, with the ballroom and the reception rooms, and a collection of Scuola Romana art on the second floor.

Valadier also remade the building next door, the Casino dei Principi, which now keeps the Scuola Romana archive and the temporary exhibitions. The two go together on one ticket, so you walk from one to the other.

The Casina delle Civette, the prince’s House of the Owls

Out in the park, the Casina delle Civette began as the Capanna Svizzera, a Swiss-style hut the architect Giuseppe Jappelli designed around 1840. Prince Giovanni Torlonia the younger turned it into the House of the Owls and lived there until he died in 1938.

The house is now a museum of stained glass, and its own windows are Liberty, the Italian name for Art Nouveau.

The Serra Moresca, Villa Torlonia’s Moorish greenhouse

Jappelli built the Serra Moresca as well, together with a grotto and the Torre Moresca, all finished in 1841. It’s a greenhouse of peperino stone, iron and cast iron, lit by coloured glass, in a Moorish style the museum traces to the Alhambra in Granada.

It was rescued between 2007 and 2013, and a second phase fitted it out as a museum. The tower comes with the Serra’s ticket.

How the Torlonia princes made Villa Torlonia

When Giovanni Torlonia bought it, the estate was Villa Colonna, and the Pamphilj’s before that. In the 1830s Alessandro Torlonia filled the grounds with garden buildings: in 1832 he had the architect Caretti build fake ruins and a Temple of Saturn, then brought in Raimondi and Jappelli.

In 1842 Alessandro added two pink granite obelisks dedicated to his parents. On 22 July 1925 the villa was handed to Mussolini as his residence, which is how a prince’s palace ended up with a bunker beneath it.

Villa Torlonia’s entrance on Via Nomentana

Guided tours of the museums in several languages are paid and booked on 060608, and there are guided tactile tours for blind visitors as well.