Palazzo Altemps Palace

Address: Piazza Sant’Apollinare 46, 00186 Rome, Italy

Website: https://museonazionaleromano.beniculturali.it/en/venues/palazzo-altemps/

Hours: Tue-Sun 9am-7pm, closed Mondays

Palazzo Altemps is a Renaissance palace in central Rome that now forms one of the venues of the National Roman Museum, specialising in Greek and Roman sculpture from private collections. The building contains galleries that display statuary, reliefs and funerary monuments collected by noble families.

Collections include large-scale marble statues and portrait busts that were assembled during the Renaissance and later centuries, with installations arranged to reflect original private display. The palace itself is part of the museum experience, with historic rooms and a courtyard integrated into the exhibition route.

The palace dates to the 15th and 16th centuries and was remodeled and embellished by successive owners; its conversion to museum galleries followed 19th and 20th-century efforts to centralise Rome’s classical collections. The building preserves Renaissance architecture alongside the ancient works on show.

Located close to Piazza Navona in Rome’s historic centre, Palazzo Altemps is within easy walking distance of many central landmarks and public transport.

• Visit tip: Part of Rome’s network of antiquities museums; combine with nearby sites such as Piazza Navona and the Roman Forum for a full day of classical art.

What to See#

• Palace building: Renaissance palace structure dating to the 15th-16th centuries that houses galleries and exhibition rooms displaying classical sculpture.
• Sculpture galleries: Principal sculpture galleries arranged across multiple rooms presenting Greek and Roman statues from private Renaissance collections.

• Go early or late in the day to avoid the midday rush around Piazza Navona; Palazzo Altemps' rooms feel much quieter outside peak visiting hours.
• Use the entrance on Piazza di Sant'Apollinare and follow the sequence of galleries upward-the upper rooms and the courtyard sculpture displays are easy to miss when people linger only in the ground-floor halls.
• Take time with the portrait sculpture rooms and the small chapels inside the palace-these intimate spaces are less crowded than the main halls but contain important pieces.