5 museums not to miss in Rome

June 06, 2026

Must-see museums and exhibitions in Rome: the Vatican Museums, Capitoline Museums, Borghese Gallery, National Roman Museum, and the Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition with the underground treasure of the Euripus.

Rome is not a city that is simply visited; it is a city to be experienced and crossed, where every street, square, and wall seems to carry a story older than the day before. If there is one way to truly enter the cultural heart of the Eternal City, it is through its museums and exhibitions. These are not merely exhibition spaces, but places where time layers itself and enters into dialogue, where Antiquity coexists with the Renaissance, archaeology with science, and spirituality with engineering. Choosing only five museums in Rome means creating an essential itinerary capable of conveying the complexity of the city without becoming overwhelming. It is a journey that leads from great universal collections to immersive experiences, from classical sculpture to hidden underground treasures, and finally to the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, whose ideas continue to speak to the present day.

Table of contents

• The Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel
• Capitoline Museums
• Borghese Gallery
• National Roman Museum
• Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition and the underground treasure

The Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel

The Vatican Museums are among the most visited museums in the world and represent one of the largest artistic collections ever assembled in Western history.

Their origins date back to the sixteenth century, when Pope Julius II began collecting ancient sculptures in the Courtyard of Statues. From this initial nucleus grew a museum complex that continued to expand over the centuries and today encompasses civilizations, artistic languages, and historical periods from around the world.

Visiting the Vatican Museums is like embarking on a journey that begins in Pharaonic Egypt and reaches the heart of the Italian Renaissance, passing through Classical Greece and Imperial Rome. Rather than a simple succession of masterpieces, the experience offers a coherent narrative about how humanity has represented itself, the divine, and political power.

The Raphael Rooms, frescoed between 1508 and 1524, represent one of the highest achievements of Renaissance painting, where art becomes visual philosophy. The School of Athens stages human knowledge as a harmonious space in which colors, painted architecture, and figures interact in perfect balance.

The route culminates in the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo painted both the ceiling and the Last Judgment, transforming a liturgical space into a monumental reflection on creation, human fragility, and greatness.

Capitoline Museums

If the Vatican Museums tell the universal history of art, the Capitoline Museums tell the specific history of Rome.

The museum dates back to the fifteenth century and is often considered the world’s first public museum. Its origins can be traced to Pope Sixtus IV, who donated a group of ancient sculptures to the Roman people, including the famous Capitoline Wolf.

This detail is significant because the Capitoline Museums were founded on the idea that cultural heritage belongs to the community rather than to a private court.

The museum complex occupies the palaces designed by Michelangelo on Capitoline Hill, one of the most symbolic locations of ancient Rome. Here visitors can admire imperial portraits, historical reliefs, statues of deities, and architectural decorations while gaining a deeper understanding of how Rome constructed its image over time.

The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, preserved because it was mistakenly believed during the Middle Ages to depict a Christian emperor, became the model for countless modern equestrian monuments and represents a meeting point between Antiquity, the Renaissance, and contemporary Rome.

Within the Capitoline Museums, visitors can experience the atmosphere of the Roman Empire and understand how Rome celebrated victories, represented authority, and shaped its identity.

Borghese Gallery

The Borghese Gallery is housed inside a seventeenth-century villa surrounded by greenery and was conceived as a place of wonder and aesthetic pleasure, where art becomes a sensory experience.

The undisputed protagonist of the collection is Baroque sculpture, especially the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. His sculptures do not merely represent bodies; they capture the precise instant of transformation. Apollo pursues Daphne as she turns into a tree, Pluto abducts Proserpina with fingers sinking into marble flesh, and David is depicted at the very moment of tension before releasing the stone.

Alongside Bernini, Caravaggio transports painting into a theatrical dimension characterized by dramatic light and deep shadow. His figures appear tangible, realistic, and often imperfect.

The Borghese Gallery is therefore a museum filled with masterpieces that demonstrate how art can engage the senses and emotions, not only the intellect. The intimate scale of the rooms creates a direct dialogue between visitors and works that have profoundly shaped the history of Western art.

National Roman Museum

Rome is not made only of emperors, temples, and monumental statues. It is also a city of homes, workshops, domestic objects, private portraits, and painted walls. The National Roman Museum, spread across several locations, is the institution that best restores the everyday dimension of the ancient city.

Here visitors discover how Roman families lived, how they decorated their houses, which symbols they chose for walls and floors, and how they portrayed themselves in sculpture and painting.

Decorations from Roman villas depict imaginary landscapes, painted architecture, and gardens that never fade. Mosaics narrate myths, hunting scenes, and marine subjects, while everyday objects testify to a refined and sophisticated society.

The value of this museum lies in its ability to present Rome as a living city rather than an archaeological postcard. After visiting its collections, one walks through Rome with the feeling that beneath every step there may still be a house, a room, or a personal story buried by time.

Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition and the underground treasure

The Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition, located inside Palazzo della Cancelleria, reconstructs Leonardo’s thought through working models of his machines, multimedia installations, and faithful reproductions of drawings taken from his codices.

The exhibition allows visitors to see how Leonardo imagined flying machines, hydraulic systems, optical instruments, theatrical devices, and engineering solutions that reveal the essence of his method: observing nature, understanding its laws, and transforming them into practical designs.

The experience becomes even richer because admission also includes access to the archaeological underground levels of the palace. The exhibition is therefore a double journey: on one side the Renaissance genius of Leonardo, on the other the buried remains of Republican Rome, connected by the same physical and symbolic space.

Below the palace lies the Euripus, the ancient monumental water channel of the Campus Martius, now transformed into a subterranean water-filled cavity. Within this environment stands the Tomb of Aulus Hirtius, the Roman consul who died in 43 BC and whose burial monument was erected by decree of the Senate.

The presence of water, ancient masonry, and reflected light creates an atmosphere suspended in time. Leonardo, who devoted a significant part of his studies to water and its movements, finds here a particularly meaningful resonance.

The Leonardo da Vinci Exhibition is one of the very few places in Rome where a contemporary museum opens the doors to an archaeological treasure that is normally inaccessible. It is a visit that successfully combines art, science, engineering, and archaeology into a single coherent experience.

You can read the Italian version of this article here >