Borghese Gallery Faces Pushback Over New Building Plan

Rome's Borghese Gallery is weighing whether to add a new building beside its 17th-century villa, a proposal that has quickly become a test case for how a historic museum balances access, preservation, and growth. The institution has commissioned an engineering firm to assess the feasibility of the project, which would allow it to display more of its collection and admit more visitors.

The gallery's current system is tightly controlled. Capacity is limited to 360 visitors, who enter in two-hour time slots. Even so, the museum welcomed more than 630,000 people in 2025, about 25 percent more than in 2015. That increase reflects both the gallery's appeal and Rome's broader tourism surge in the years after the 2020 pandemic.

The museum also says the expansion would address a practical problem: a significant portion of its holdings remains in storage. A spokesperson said by email that the process is, at this stage,“purely administrative in nature.” The Borghese Gallery is scheduled to hold a press conference on May 19 to provide further details.

The idea has already met resistance. Italian heritage groups and art historians argue that a new structure could disrupt the villa's carefully composed relationship to its gardens and the surrounding English landscape garden. Tomaso Montanari, the art historian and frequent defender of Italy's cultural patrimony, criticized the logic of perpetual enlargement in an op-ed for Il Fatto Quotidiano, warning that it could overturn the site's centuries-old aesthetic identity.

Rome City Council, which has jurisdiction over the Borghese Gallery, approved an initial feasibility study in January, but officials insist no final decision has been made. Massimiliano Smeriglio, Rome's culture councilor, said the proposal remains at an early stage and still requires technical and economic review.

The Villa Borghese was built in the first decades of the 17th century by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V and a devoted collector. Its holdings include works by Bernini, Caravaggio, Correggio, Raphael, and Titian - a collection whose scale and prestige now sit at the center of the debate over how much a historic site can change before it becomes something else.

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