Palazzo Farnese site features

Palazzo Farnese presents one enormous flat front to its own square, and the whole design is about that frontality. Three storeys of pale wall rise above a rusticated base, with the windows set in regular bays across a façade wide enough to close the piazza completely.

The windows change character as they go up. The lower range sits in plain surrounds; the piano nobile above carries alternating triangular and segmental pediments on small columns; the top floor has its own, flatter treatment. The building states its hierarchy by window alone.

The top is the part that is Michelangelo's. A very deep projecting cornice runs the full width and throws a hard shadow across the upper wall — far heavier than the façade beneath it, and the single most assertive element on the building.

At the centre, the balcony carries arms. Above the main doorway a balcony breaks forward, and over it the Farnese arms are set against the wall. Today the flags of France and the European Union hang either side of them, which tells you what the palace now is before any sign does.

The entrance is a single deep arch, framed in heavy stonework and closed by blue-painted doors, giving onto a vaulted passage rather than directly into a hall.

Inside, the sequence is courtyard first. The visit goes through an arcaded court before reaching the stairs to the piano nobile, so the scale is established in the open before any painted room is seen.

The Gallery is the destination and it is a long, barrel-vaulted room. Its ceiling is painted so densely that framed pictures appear to rest on painted cornices, carried by painted figures, in front of painted sky: the Carracci scheme makes the vault read as a structure loaded with canvases rather than as a surface.

And below ground the register changes entirely. The Sotterranei are plain, low and archaeological, with the two black-and-white mosaic pavements laid out to be walked around.

The Carracci Gallery

Frescoed 1597–1604 by Annibale Carracci with Agostino Carracci, Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco, on subjects largely from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Michelangelo's cornice

The deep crowning projection added during his direction of the works, 1546–1549.

Vignola's rear façade

Designed 1569–1573 — the garden front, quite distinct from the one on the piazza.

The Camerino Farnese

The private study, also frescoed by Annibale Carracci.

The Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani

Painted by Francesco Salviati and the brothers Taddeo and Federico Zuccari.

The Sotterranei

Visitable since May 2024: archaeological finds from three periods of ancient Rome, with two black-and-white mosaics — animals and sea monsters, and the Desultores, circus acrobats on horseback.

The École française de Rome

A research institute and library sharing the building with the embassy.