Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica di Palazzo Corsini

The rooms of Palazzo Corsini look much as a Roman cardinal meant guests to see them in the 1700s. Paintings climb the walls frame against frame, hung densely in the taste of the time, and it is one of the very few 18th-century picture collections in Rome still kept in its own palace and in its old arrangement.

The house had a famous earlier resident. Queen Christina of Sweden, who gave up her throne and became a Catholic, lived in the older palace on this site and died there in 1689. In 1736 the Corsini family bought it, while their relative reigned as Pope Clement XII, and the architect Ferdinando Fuga rebuilt it along Via della Lungara in Trastevere. Cardinal Neri Maria Corsini, the pope's nephew, filled it with pictures. In 1883 the Italian state bought the palace with its collection, and the building is still shared with the Accademia dei Lincei, Italy's historic academy of sciences.

Among the paintings to look for is Caravaggio's St John the Baptist, a brooding young man half lost in shadow, wrapped in a red cloak. Look also for Fra Angelico's small triptych, with the Last Judgement in the centre and the Ascension and Pentecost on its wings. Rubens is here too, with St Sebastian being tended by angels who draw the arrows from his body.