Castles · Tour

Six Hundred Paintings, an Art Historian, and Velázquez's Innocent X

The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj holds the art collection of the aristocratic family whose name it carries, and the guide here is an art historian rather than a general one. The route goes through the halls and ballrooms and along the gilded galleries, where the chandeliers hang between paintings by Caravaggio, Bernini, Velázquez, Titian and Raphael. One picture is the reason many people come. Velázquez painted Innocent X, the pope this family produced, and the portrait is still in the house he belonged to. The rooms around it were walked by popes and princes, Innocent X among them. The gallery holds more than 600 works, running from the Italian Renaissance through to the French Romantics, and it is quieter than the Vatican for looking at any of them. The tour ends in the courtyard, where there is a café and a shop.