Villa Medici site features

Stand with your back to the gardens and the villa is a long, pale two-storey block with a square belvedere tower at each end, the ground floor opening in a run of arches and the upper wall rising flat above it. That flat wall is the thing to look at, because it is not blank: ancient Roman bas-reliefs and whole statues are set into it, bedded in the plaster at the height of a first-floor window and in the bays between them, so the elevation reads at a distance as pattern and at twenty paces as carved stone — chariots, figures, borders of acanthus. The same building seen from the street outside is almost severe, with scarcely any decoration at all. The two faces belong to one house.

In front of it the ground is flat and laid out as a formal parterre: low clipped box in geometric compartments, gravel walks between them, and a single obelisk standing on the central axis so the eye runs straight out from the middle of the facade and stops on it. Beyond the parterre the garden rises through walks and trees to the Belvedere at the top, which is where the ground gives out and the view opens — rooftops, domes and the whole historic centre spread below and to the west, with the villa's own encrusted wall behind you in the same turn of the head.

Inside, the route is a sequence rather than a hall: an entrance hall, a staircase going down to the garden level, the cardinal's small private studiolo, and the gypsotheque — a room of plaster casts, chalk-white figures standing close together, which is what remains in Rome of a sculpture collection that left for Florence.

The garden facade

The elevation set with Roman bas-reliefs and statues, described as a virtual open-air museum. The single reason to come.

The historic gardens

The formal parterre, the obelisk and the walks, all part of the guided visit.

Ferdinando's studiolo

The cardinal's small private study — the Académie names it among the hidden corners the visit reaches.

The gypsotheque

The collection of casts, which is what remains in Rome of a sculpture collection that went to Florence.

The Belvedere

The high point of the gardens, and the Académie's own reason for including it in the route: it looks out over the historic centre of Rome.

The entrance hall and the garden staircase

Both named by the operator as part of what the 90 minutes covers.

The temporary exhibitions

Included in the guided-visit ticket rather than sold separately.