Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi

Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi is primarily a private noble palace, and home to one of the few paintings by Caravaggio still in private hands. It faces the Basilica of the Santi Apostoli across a long square near Piazza Venezia. What you see from the square is largely the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor and architect, brought in during the 1660s by the Chigi, the family of Pope Alexander VII. He gave the older Colonna house a single new front, with giant pilasters rising through the two upper storeys, a scheme widely copied for palaces across Europe. After the Odescalchi bought the palace in 1745, Nicola Salvi, the architect of the Trevi Fountain, stretched Bernini's front to twice its length.

The painting is Caravaggio's first Conversion of Saint Paul, painted on cypress wood in 1600 for the Cerasi chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. It never went up in the chapel, and the canvas that hangs there today replaced it. In this earlier panel Christ, held by an angel, reaches down toward the fallen Saul in a crowded scene. It later belonged to the Balbi family of Genoa and came to the Odescalchi by inheritance. The interiors are not regularly open to visitors, so the panel is seen mostly when it is lent, as in summer 2025, when it hung at Palazzo Barberini.