The Great Hall at Palazzo Colonna: what is known, and what is not published

Why there is no measurement on this page

People arrive at this question from a search box, and a search box will hand them a figure whether or not one exists. I could do the same. I could stand in the room, pace it, and write the result down as though I had read it somewhere, and nothing would happen to me. It would also be a number I had invented, printed next to numbers I had checked, in a typeface that makes them look alike.

So: the operator does not give the Great Hall’s dimensions. Nor does the city. Nor does the encyclopedia entry on the palace. If you find a figure elsewhere, ask it where it came from before you repeat it, because I could not get an answer to that question and I tried.

What can be described instead

It is one room, and that is the whole design. The gallery was built as a single space to be seen whole, which is a different ambition from a suite of rooms with things in them, and it is why the Great Hall reads as an event rather than as a stop on a route. You come up a short flight of stairs, past a cannonball lodged in the masonry, and the building opens.

That single-room design is also why a film crew could put a press conference in it in 1953 without dressing anything — the ending of Roman Holiday is this room, and it is the only scene the palace claims.

Who built it, and where the sources disagree

The gallery was established in 1654 by Cardinal Girolamo I Colonna and his nephew Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna. The architect was Antonio del Grande. After his death in 1671 the work was, in the city’s phrase, “integrated by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Johan Paul Schor and Carlo Fontana”.

Two disagreements live in those sentences and this site carries both rather than picking a winner quietly.

The ceiling, and the battle on it

The vault was completed in 1702 and painted by Schor, Coli, Gherardi, Ricci and Chiari. What it shows is episodes from the life of Marcantonio II Colonna — including the Battle of Lepanto of 1571, at which he commanded the papal fleet.

That is the thing to look up at and know before you do. A family painted its own ancestor’s sea battle across the ceiling of the room it received people in, and then received people in it. The family page has the rest of them.

Where it falls on the route

Second. You come through the Hall of the Colonna Bellica, up the stairs with the cannonball in them, and into the Great Hall; the Room of the Throne, the Tapestry Room, the Yellow Room, the Chapel Room, the Primitive Room and the Embroidery Room follow, and the gardens come after those. The full route is here.

Read next

• The cannonball on the stairs below it.
• The film scene shot in this room.
• What hangs around it.
• When you can stand in it.

Frequently asked questions