Rome: MNR … Palazzo Altemps

Leaving Roma Termini Station, Mui programmed the Museo Nazionale into his phone and we followed a bunch of back streets to get there. Turns out the directions took us to a museum housed in Palazzo Barberini … one that we had visited in 2018.

What to do now? Why, visit the Museo Nazionale Romano instead. (That’s the MNR in the title of the footprint.) The museum, founded in 1899, is now made up of a number of locations. We’d been to Villa Giulia in 2018. Now to check out the site near Piazza Navona.

Plugging Palazzo Altemps into Google Maps, we got our bearings and figured we could walk the 20-minute distance instead of fiddling with metro tickets. It was a pleasant walk that took us along streets familiar to us … a fun, reminiscing-sort-of walk … one during which we stopped at a café for Mui to do as Italians do and grab an espresso while standing at the bar That the streets weren’t packed with tourists yet was a bonus.

Palazzo Altemps was designed in the 15th century for a relation of Pope Sixtus IV. In 1569, it was sold to Cardinal Altemps, who made further improvements to the palazzo. The family continued to live in the palazzo until it became a property of the Holy See in the 19th century. It was then used as a seminary for a short period of time. The palazzo was granted to the Italian state in 1982. Fifteen years later, after restoration work was completed, it was inaugurated as a museum in 1997

What I really like about the pallazos-turned-museums is that often, in addition to the art on display, there are beautiful ceilings and frescoed walls to enjoy. This palazzo was no different.

My favorite of the rooms at Altemps was actually the painted loggia. Commissioned in the mid 1590s, the ambiance of the loggia is of a secret garden … done in the trompe-l’oeil illusionistic painting style. The similarity between the frescoes here and the drawings Raphael made for tapestries commissioned by Pope Leo X would seem to indicate that the artist was inspired by Raphael’s work. The loggia was where the Altemps’s collection of the portraits of the Twelve Caesars was once displayed. Today, of the twelve busts on display in their place, only eight are thought to be actual representations of Roman emperors.

The exhibits at the Altemps were mostly large-scale statues … with a small collection of artifacts of antiquity in glass cases on the ground floor. That the next museum we visited leaned more towards paintings was not a conscious choice on our part, but served to balance our day nonetheless.Read more