Villa Borghese Park: What to See for Free (Lake, Pincio, Zoo)

Villa Borghese gets lumped in with the museum inside it, and that's a shame, because the park itself is one of the few genuinely free things left to do in central Rome. The Galleria Borghese requires a ticket, a timed entry slot, and a bag check at the door. The 200 acres around it require nothing but your legs, or a rented bike if you're feeling lazy. Inside those acres: a lake with a fake Roman temple, a terrace with one of the best views in the city, riding paths, running paths, and a zoo that's been there since before most of the neighborhoods around it existed.

The Pincio terrace

Head to the northwest corner of the park and you hit the Pincio, the raised terrace Giuseppe Valadier built in the 1810s as part of his redesign of Piazza del Popolo below. Stand at the balustrade around sunset and Rome lays itself out in front of you: the piazza's obelisk, the twin churches at its entrance, the dome of St. Peter's floating over the rooftops in the distance. It's free, it's rarely crowded before six, and it's a better sunset view than half the rooftop bars in this city charging fifteen euros for a spritz to go with it.

The lake and its fake temple

Walk south from the Pincio and you'll find the park's lake, the Laghetto del Giardino del Lago, an artificial pond dug in the late 1700s as the centerpiece of the English style garden Marcantonio IV Borghese commissioned for the estate. In the middle of it sits a round temple with columns that looks ancient and isn't. It's the Temple of Aesculapius, a folly built to look like something just pulled out of the ground, which was the fashionable thing for rich Romans to put in their gardens at the time. You can rent a rowboat and paddle around it for a few euros. That's not free, but it's one of the cheaper twenty minutes you'll spend in this city.

Bikes, quiet paths, and Piazza di Siena

The rest of the park rewards wandering without a destination in mind. There are bike and golf cart rental stands near several entrances if you want to cover more ground, and none of that is free, just cheap by Rome standards. On foot, follow the path south toward Piazza di Siena, an oval clearing ringed by umbrella pines that hosts Rome's international horse show every May. The rest of the year it's just grass, shade, and Romans jogging in circles, which after a few days of ruins and crowds is its own kind of relief.

The one exception: the Bioparco

One thing inside the park is not free, and it's worth knowing before you show up with kids. The Bioparco, Rome's zoo, sits in the northern section off Viale del Giardino Zoologico. It opened in 1911 for an international exposition and still has a handful of its original Art Nouveau enclosures, which at this point are more interesting than most of the animals inside them. It runs its own ticket line separate from anything else in the park, so budget for it on its own if the kids spot the elephants from the path and refuse to keep walking.

Villa Borghese won't hand you Bernini marbles or a Caravaggio the way the gallery will. What it hands you instead is two hundred acres of the one thing Rome usually makes you pay for: quiet. Skip the golf cart, bring a bottle of water, and just walk it.