The Best Parks in Rome

The undisputed jewel in Rome’s park crown, the Villa Borghese is one of the great urban green spaces of the world. Located at the heart of the city with access from Piazza del Popolo, the Spanish Steps, and Via Veneto, it began its life as the private estate of Cardinal Scipione Borghese — the art-obsessed nephew of Pope Paul V — in the early 17th century.

Scipione’s stated ambition was to create the largest and most magnificent garden complex seen in Rome since the height of the Empire. He and his architect Flaminio Ponzio largely succeeded.

Today the park is an utterly democratised space: tree-lined avenues shaded by pines and ilex oaks, a boating lake overlooked by a faux-ancient Doric temple, an outdoor cinema, a hippodrome that hosts equestrian events each May, a progressive zoo, and everywhere the sense of a great city exhaling its tensions into greenery.

But the park’s greatest jewel is, of course, the Galleria Borghese, which contains one of the finest collections of Baroque art on earth — concentrated most dazzlingly in the Bernini sculptures that fill its ground-floor rooms.

The Villa Doria Pamphilj is Rome’s largest park at over 180 hectares, spreading across the Janiculum hill west of the Tiber, above Trastevere.

It was created in the 1640s by the same Pamphilj family who transformed Piazza Navona, and the formal gardens around the central villa — designed by sculptor Alessandro Algardi and architect-painter Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi — retain much of their original Baroque grandeur, with clipped hedges, fountains and the haunting skeleton shape of the villa’s maze garden still visible.

Beyond the formal gardens, the park opens into a vast and partly wild landscape of meadows, pine groves, lake and woodland that is a genuine escape from the city.

On weekends the park fills with Roman families picnicking, cycling and running; on weekday mornings you can have whole acres of it to yourself. It is the most bucolic and the most generously proportioned of Rome’s parks.

Often overlooked due to the imposing presence of the immense Villa Doria Pamphilj a little further up the hill, the diminutive Villa Sciarra is an elegant jewel-box of a park set in the former grounds of the Colonna di Sciarra’s family estate, and became a public park in 1932.

Its 14 hectares are shaded by tall umbrella pines and dotted with an exceptional series of 19th-century fountains depicting mythological scenes — tritons, nymphs, satyrs — in a decorative programme of considerable charm.

The park is beloved by Trastevere residents and largely unknown to tourists. Plentiful benches set amongst the trees and fountains means there’s always a spot where you can sit to watch the world go by, and the views across Rome from up here are pretty stunning, too.

An oasis of swaying pines and palm trees, home to spectacularly exotic architecture, pink granite obelisks, and even a bunker belonging to Benito Mussolini during the second world war, the endlessly fascinating Villa Torlonia is full of surprises.

The park and spending Neoclassical villa at its centre were built for the fabulously wealthy banker Prince Giovanni Torlonia in the early years of the nineteenth century by the architect Giuseppe Valadier, but it was the prince’s successor (another Giovanni) who really elevated the Villa to one of Rome’s most enduring spaces when he had the whimsical Casino delle Civette built on the family estate.

A whimsical and fantastical reimagining of a medieval building complete with turrets, stained glass and crenellations, the owls that give the building its name crop up everywhere in its decorations and are testament to the prince’s mysterious and occult philosophical leanings. Located in eastern Rome, Villa Torlonia is well worth a detour from the city centre!

One of Rome’s best-kept secrets, the Parco di Torre Fiscale occupies a stretch of the southern outskirts that preserves a remarkably intact section of the ancient aqueduct system — specifically, the point at which the Acqua Claudia and the Acqua Felice cross over one another in a dramatic two-level junction.

The medieval tower that gives the park its name rises at the centre; ancient tombs and fragments of villa walls are scattered across the meadows around it; and the sheer visual strangeness of ancient Roman engineering rising from the pastoral landscape is genuinely affecting.

Before visiting, stop at the Casale Museum at the park’s entrance for context, and check whether the excellent farm restaurant is open — it serves produce grown on site.

If you want to understand something of what the Roman Campagna — the countryside surrounding ancient Rome — must have looked like two thousand years ago, the Caffarella park in the south of the city offers as close an approximation as you will find.

Located just off the ancient Appian Way, this 190-hectare park seems lost in time: shepherds still tend flocks among the meadows and archaeological remains, the 2nd-century nymphaeum of the water nymph Egeria still stands in a grove of trees, and a medieval mill built inside an ancient columbarium (a funerary ash deposit) serves as a reminder of the extraordinary continuity of use that characterises Roman sites.

Long protected from development by city ordinance, the Caffarella is the least curated and the most genuinely semi-wild of Rome’s parks. Its combination of pastoral beauty and dense archaeology is completely unique, and the experience of walking through it — particularly in spring when the wildflowers are in bloom — is unlike anything else the city has to offer.

On the quiet Caelian Hill above the Colosseum, the Villa Celimontana is an often-overlooked but thoroughly rewarding park that has been accumulating history since antiquity.

In the 1st century AD it was the headquarters of the Roman fire brigade and police force.

The medieval and Renaissance legend that the water nymph Egeria met the mythical king Numa Pompilius here — and taught him the laws and rituals that shaped Rome’s earliest social order — adds a layer of mythological resonance.

A 17th-century Egyptian obelisk (a genuine one, gifted by the city of Rome to the Mattei family) stands in the grounds, as does a neo-Gothic temple built by Baron Hoffman in 1880 — one of our favourite unexpected architectural surprises in the city.

The park fills with jazz music enthusiasts in summer during the Villa Celimontana Jazz Festival, which has been one of Rome’s most enjoyable outdoor cultural events for several decades.

Originally the private estate of King Vittorio Emanuele III, the picturesque and semi-wild Villa Ada spreads across 160 hectares of woodland and meadow in Rome’s northern suburbs.

Much of the park retains the character of the royal hunting grounds it once was: dense woodland, wandering trails and sudden open clearings that feel genuinely removed from the city. The king’s villa is home to the Egyptian Embassy and can be glimpsed through the trees.

A small artificial lake provides a focus for the central area of the park, and the estate’s wooded paths are popular with joggers and cyclists who prefer their urban parks on the wilder side.

Every summer the park plays host to the Roma Incontro il Mondo festival, when the Ada is transformed into a month-long outdoor concert venue.

Oh, and if you’re wondering who Ada is, she was the beloved wife of the Swiss aristocrat Count Tellfner, who briefly owned the estate in the late-nineteenth century.

Where the monuments of man meet nature…Nestled in the city’s southern outskirts, the magnificent Parco degli Acquedotti features dusty tracks winding though the remains of fantastically well preserved ancient aqueducts, brooding with the silent grandeur of the classical world.

Sunsets here are to die for, when the imposing Claudian aqueduct (built by Caligula to bring life-giving water to the ancient world’s greatest metropolis way back in 38 AD) is bathed in tangerine light framed by soaring Roman pines swaying in the breeze.

Justifiably proud of these extraordinary testaments to Roman engineering, the ancient water commissioner Frontinus asked “will anybody compare the idle Pyramids, or those other useless though renowned works of the Greeks with these aqueducts, with these many indispensable structures?” in the first century AD – take a trip out to the Parco degli Acquedotti and you’ll see just what he meant!

What is the biggest park in Rome?

Villa Doria Pamphilj, at over 180 hectares, is Rome’s largest park.

Which park in Rome is best for families?

Villa Borghese is the most family-friendly, with a boating lake, miniature zoo, bike hire, and plenty of flat space for children to run around.

Which park is best for picnicking in Rome?

Villa Borghese, Villa Torlonia and Villa Doria Pamphilj are all excellent for picnics. The Caffarella park offers a more rustic, countryside experience.

Are Rome’s parks free to enter?

Yes — all of the parks listed here are free to enter. Some specific attractions within parks (such as the Borghese Gallery or the Casino delle Civette in Villa Torlonia) require paid tickets.

Which park is closest to the city centre?

Villa Borghese is the most centrally located, accessible from the Spanish Steps, Piazza del Popolo, and Via Veneto.

Is Villa Borghese the same as the Borghese Gallery?

The Villa Borghese is the park; the Galleria Borghese (Borghese Gallery) is the museum within it. The park is free; to visit the gallery requires you’ll need pre-booked tickets or to join a guided tour.