Where the Borghese Collection Started: A Private Two Hours

The Rape of Proserpina was the first. Cardinal Scipione commissioned it, it arrived, and everything else in this building followed from that decision. Two hours with a private guide, starting where the collection started. The ground floor is sculpture: after the Proserpina, Canova's Pauline Borghese, and Bernini's Apollo and Daphne and David. Twenty rooms and several hundred works across two floors, which is why an in-depth private visit covers what a general one skims. The first floor is almost entirely painting. Raphael's Deposition and his Portrait of a Man. Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, the Boy with a Basket of Fruit, and the Young Sick Bacchus. What a private guide gives you here is the ability to stop. In a collection this dense the temptation is to keep moving, and the works that reward standing still are not always the ones with a crowd in front of them. Fast-track entry. Your guide waits outside the main entrance with an Inside Out Italy sign.