Piazza and Palazzo del Quirinale site features

The Palazzo del Quirinale is an extremely long, low, pale orange-ochre building standing along one side of a wide open square at the top of a hill, and the first surprise is how little it performs: three storeys, rows of identical windows with green shutters, a plain roofline, stretching far enough that you cannot take it in without turning your head.

Scale is hidden rather than displayed. At 110,500 square metres this is the sixth largest palace in the world, twenty times bigger than the White House — but almost all of it lies behind the frontage, in courtyards and wings and 4 hectares of garden you cannot see from the street.

Two features break the long front. At one end rises the Torrino, a small tower carrying flags; at the centre, above the main portal, is Bernini's Loggia delle Benedizioni, a deep-set balcony framed in travertine, with the Italian and European flags hung beneath it.

The square in front is enormous and almost empty. It sits on the summit of the Quirinal, the highest of the seven hills, open on one side so that the city falls away beneath. At its centre, on high pedestals, stand the colossal marble Dioscuri — Castor and Pollux, two nude youths holding rearing horses by the bridle, each group far larger than life — flanking an obelisk.

The right-hand side is a second palace. Palazzo della Consulta, erected in 1732 by Ferdinando Fuga, presents a sumptuous facade of a quite different temperature from the Quirinale's: more sculptural, more baroque, and today the Constitutional Court.

Inside the gardens the character changes completely. Geometric flowerbeds, a rich collection of tree species, high hedges and even a dense wood with broad avenues and pergolas; at a panoramic point stands the elegant Coffee House, and from its terrace you look across at the sixteenth-century Fontana dell'Organo.

The Dioscuri

Colossal statues of Castor and Pollux on high pedestals, holding their rearing horses by the bridle; Roman imperial reworkings of a Greek original of the 5th century BC, from the Temple of Serapis built by Caracalla in 217 AD.

Palazzo della Consulta

Erected in 1732 by Ferdinando Fuga for Clement XII's tribunal of the Sacra Consulta; today the Constitutional Court.

The Loggia delle Benedizioni

Created here by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The porcelain

About 38,000 pieces, a collection that can be considered among the most prestigious internationally.

The clocks, tapestries and carriages

Tapestries of inestimable value, carriages of fine manufacture, and precious clocks whose oldest examples go back to the age of Louis XIV.

Quirinale Contemporaneo

Since 2019: hundreds of paintings, sculptures and installations by the great names of the twentieth century placed stably in the courtyards, halls and gardens, at the Tenuta di Castelporziano and at Villa Rosebery — de Chirico, Lucio Fontana, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giacomo Manzù, Afro, Alberto Burri, Carla Accardi, Giosetta Fioroni, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pino Pascali, Mimmo Rotella.

The design collection

Creations of Gio Ponti, Piero Fornasetti, Franco Albini, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti, Carlo Mollino, Gae Aulenti, Gaetano Pesce, Alessandro Mendini, Cini Boeri, Paola Navone and others.

The gardens

About 4 hectares, going back to the 16th century, with geometric beds, a rich collection of tree species, high hedges and a dense wood with broad avenues and pergolas.

The Coffee House

Built by Ferdinando Fuga in the 18th century at a panoramic point of the park.

The Fontana dell'Organo

Sixteenth-century, and its mechanism, though modernised, is still perfectly working.

The changing of the guard

Every Sunday, by the Corazzieri, with the band of the Guardia di Finanza.