Two Private Palaces: Inside Doria Pamphilj and Colonna
Rome’s most famous galleries belong to the state. Its most intimate ones still belong to families. Behind unremarkable façades on two of the city’s busiest streets stand two private palaces — Doria Pamphilj and Colonna — where princely collections hang exactly where they have hung for centuries, in rooms the same families have inhabited for hundreds of years. To step inside is to be a guest, not a tourist.
Doria Pamphilj: the family that never left
On the Via del Corso, behind a wall that thousands pass each hour, the Galleria Doria Pamphilj opens into a still-inhabited palace of gilded halls. More than 650 paintings hang floor to ceiling here, in the dense, glittering arrangement recorded in an eighteenth-century family inventory — a way of seeing art almost extinct everywhere else.
Its treasure sits alone in a small cabinet: Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, so piercingly alive that the pope himself is said to have murmured “troppo vero” — “too true.” Beside it stands Bernini’s marble bust of the same pope, a dialogue between two geniuses across a single room. Elsewhere hang works by Caravaggio, including the tender early Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the Penitent Magdalene, alongside the dazzling Gallery of Mirrors. The audio guide, unusually, is narrated by a member of the family — so you tour the house in the voice of the people who still live in it. The gallery opens daily except Wednesday.
Colonna: one morning a week
A few minutes away, the Galleria Colonna guards its splendour more jealously still: it opens to the public only on Saturday mornings, from 9:00 to 13:15, with its entrance at Via della Pilotta 17. The reward for arriving on the right morning is one of the most breathtaking rooms in Rome — the Great Hall, a riot of gold, marble and ceiling fresco, where the final scene of Roman Holiday was filmed.
Look closely at the marble staircase and you will find a cannonball, lodged there since 1849, when Rome was bombarded during the defence of the short-lived Roman Republic — left exactly where it fell. Beyond lie the apartments of Princess Isabelle and a collection assembled by a family that has held this palace for some twenty generations. For those who cannot be in Rome on a Saturday, private guided visits can sometimes be arranged on other days, by appointment — which is precisely where local relationships matter.
Seeing them properly
These are not places to rush. Their pleasure lies in knowing which canvas to linger before, which story unlocks a room, and — at Colonna — how to be there when the doors are open at all. A private visit arranged with Olga Golubeva turns a gallery into a conversation, led at your own pace and entirely on your terms.
To see Rome’s private palaces as their families intended, you are warmly invited to begin a conversation.
