Palazzo Altemps (Museo Nazionale Romano) site features

Palazzo Altemps is a plain, heavy fifteenth-century palace on a narrow street a couple of minutes north of Piazza Navona, and from outside it gives almost nothing away: flat ochre walls, regular windows, a corner tower, and a door that could belong to an office.

Inside, the organising space is a courtyard. Arcaded porticoes run round it on more than one level, in pale travertine, and antique sculpture stands directly under the arches of the northern portico — white marble against grey stone, in daylight.

The rooms are painted, and the paint is part of the display. Walls carry frescoed architecture, landscapes and friezes in faded reds, ochres and greens, often damaged and patched, under beamed timber ceilings. The sculptures stand free on plain plinths down the middle of these rooms, lit from tall windows on one side, so you walk round each one with painted wall behind it.

The sculpture is mostly life-size and mostly white. Standing figures, groups, portrait heads and a famous carved three-sided block — the Ludovisi Throne — in marble that ranges from sugary white to warm grey.

The scale is domestic, not monumental. This is a family palace adapted to hold a museum: doorways, window embrasures and fireplaces are all where a household put them, and the circuit runs through the porticoes of the courtyard and the rooms of the first floor rather than along a designed gallery.

And one section looks entirely different. The Egyptian material — from the sanctuary of Isis and Serapis of the Campus Martius and the Syriac sanctuary of the Janiculum — brings in dark stone, obelisk fragments and a sculptural language with nothing Roman about it.

The Ludovisi Throne

The famous Greek original of the 5th century BC, the single most important object in the palace.

The Galata suicida

Among the sculptures of the Boncompagni Ludovisi collection the State acquired.

Orestes and Electra, Ares, the Head of Juno

Three more of the 104 sculptures now displayed in the rooms of the Palace.

The northern portico

Four of the fifteen surviving sculptures of Cardinal Marco Sittico Altemps's collection stand under its arcades.

The Mattei collection

In the porticoes of the courtyard and the rooms of the first floor; gathered to decorate Villa Celimontana and previously at the Museo delle Terme di Diocleziano.

The Del Drago collection

Going back to the 17th century.

The Egyptian section

Material from the sanctuary of Isis and Serapis of the Campus Martius and finds from the excavation of the Syriac sanctuary of the Janiculum.

The palace itself

Fifteenth-century, built for Girolamo Riario, to the Altemps from 1568.