Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna

Start at the foot of the wide stone steps. Behind you, the trees of the Villa Borghese park move in the breeze, and traffic hums softly along the avenue. In front of you rises a long, pale façade with tall columns and a heavy cornice. It looks almost like a temple. Climb slowly. The stone is smooth from more than a century of footsteps, and the air grows cooler as you reach the doors.

This is the National Gallery of Modern Art. Romans often just call it the Galleria Nazionale. Its home is Italy's largest public collection of art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It covers paintings, sculpture, and installations from the decades after Italian unification up to recent times. If you came to Rome for ancient ruins and Baroque churches, this museum offers something different. It shows a young nation trying to picture itself, and then a century of artists questioning everything they were taught.

The museum was founded in 1883, only a few years after Rome became the capital of a newly unified Italy. The new state wanted a national collection of contemporary art. It wanted to show that Italy was a modern country, not only a land of old masters. At first the collection had no grand home. It moved between temporary spaces while the city around it was being rebuilt as a capital, with new ministries, new boulevards, and new neighbourhoods.

Here is the first thing many visitors miss. The building itself was a piece of a celebration. The architect Cesare Bazzani designed it for the International Exhibition of 1911. That exhibition marked fifty years since Italian unification. Rome filled this green valley, known as Valle Giulia, with pavilions and invited nations from around the world. When the crowds left, this palace stayed. Later, in the 1930s, it was enlarged to make room for the growing collection.

Look around the valley as you leave later. Several foreign academies stand on the nearby slopes, including the British School at Rome. Their presence here also traces back to the same exhibition era. Artists and scholars from many countries still live and work in these buildings. So this corner of Rome has a quiet, studious feel. It has gardens, scholarship residences, and students carrying portfolios, with almost no souvenir stalls.

Inside, the first impression is space. The halls are high and full of daylight. Many rooms have skylights, so the light changes as clouds pass over the city. The floors are pale, and the walls are often plain. Footsteps echo a little. Even on busy days, the museum rarely feels crowded the way the Vatican or the Colosseum can. You can stand in front of a painting for as long as you like.

In the mid-2010s the museum made a bold decision. It rehung much of the collection without strict chronological order. Works from different decades and movements now share rooms. A nineteenth-century marble might stand beside a twentieth-century abstract canvas. Some visitors find this confusing at first. Others love it. The idea is simple: you compare works directly, without a timeline telling you what to think. Let yourself wander, and notice which pairings surprise you.

One work that stops nearly everyone is Gustav Klimt's The Three Ages of Woman. Klimt was the Viennese painter famous for gold and pattern. The canvas shows a young mother holding a sleeping child, with an older woman bowed beside them. Here is the second surprise. This painting came to Rome for that same 1911 exhibition. The Italian state bought it soon afterwards. So the building and the painting arrived in this city together.

Keep an eye out for sculpture too. One of the most dramatic pieces is Antonio Canova's Hercules and Lichas. Canova was the great Italian sculptor of the Neoclassical age, a style that looked back to ancient Greece and Rome. The marble shows the hero, in a rage, about to hurl a young man through the air. Walk all the way around it. The twisting bodies change completely from each side.

The international names are a pleasure to find. The collection includes works by Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Edgar Degas. But the real strength of this museum is Italian art that many visitors have never seen. Look for the Futurists, such as Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni. In the early twentieth century, they tried to paint speed, noise, and electric light. Their canvases seem to vibrate with movement.

Then the mood changes. Giorgio de Chirico painted empty squares, long shadows, and strange silent arcades. These dreamlike works later influenced the Surrealists in Paris. Giorgio Morandi spent his life painting a few bottles and bowls in soft, dusty colours. After the Second World War, Alberto Burri worked with burlap sacks and burned plastic. Lucio Fontana slashed his canvases with a blade. Stand close to these later works. Their surfaces are as important as their images.

There is one more object that sparks debate. The collection holds a version of Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, the factory-made urinal he presented as art in 1917. The original was lost long ago. Later, Duchamp authorised replicas, and this museum has one of them. Watch people's faces as they meet it. Some laugh, some frown, and some lean in close. That reaction is part of the point.

When your feet need a rest, there is a café at the side of the building with tables outside. Afterwards, you can walk back into the Villa Borghese park, which climbs gently behind the museum. The Etruscan museum at Villa Giulia is also just down the road. If you have energy left, you could move from modern Italy to ancient Italy in a few minutes on foot.

Before you go, stop at the top of the steps again and turn around. The trees, the columns, the avenue below — this view has barely changed since 1911. Think about the paintings you have just seen. They span nearly two centuries of argument about what art should be. Then walk down slowly, into the green shade of the park, and see what the city looks like to you now.