About palazzocolonna.com
An independent guide to one building: the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, which is a private house that opens to the public for eight hours a week, has been one family’s since the 1200s, and still has a French cannonball lodged in its staircase. It is independent of the palace and its foundation.
Who writes it
I am Chiara Fioravanti, an art-history guide based in Rome, Italy. I take people round this city’s palace galleries on the two mornings a week this one lets anybody in, and that is where this site’s knowledge comes from. Facts here draw on the operator’s own pages, the city’s tourism authority, encyclopedias and reviewers. Where sources differ — on the date the gallery was finished, and on which Fontana worked on it — both versions are given.
How this site is put together
What a listing crosses out counts as much as what it promises. The booking platform shows inclusions and exclusions in one block, and every page here was written from both lists. For example, the listing titled “Colonna Palace Guided Tour” has inclusions that read “Guided tour (if option selected)”: that page explains it, and all tours prints every listing’s exclusions verbatim in a column.
Prices and entrances are set out clearly. The platform price is about twice the door price at both tiers, and the operator sells no ticket on its own website — it names Ticketone, Roma Pass, the phone, email or the Saturday ticket office. So the cheaper figure is the price at a desk in Rome on one of two mornings, and the dearer one holds that morning from anywhere. Both tariffs sit side by side on tickets.
Reader reviews are quoted for detail. Of the 188 written reviews across the catalogue, 184 are five stars, while the listings themselves average 4.0 to 5.0 across far larger rating counts. The two measure different things, and what the written ones carry is detail rather than sentiment — they are what the platform shows first. So star averages are shown with their rating counts, and written reviews are quoted for what somebody actually saw. The reviews hub covers each of the four palace listings.
For the Great Hall, that page focuses on what can be described about the room rather than its measurements. No net-worth figure for the family is published, so that page covers what is on record instead. Annual visitor numbers for the palace are not published, so the booking platform’s rating counts are shown as rating counts.
How it pays for itself
Booking links go to GetYourGuide, which pays a commission on bookings made through them. You pay the same price either way. The booking widgets on this site point at the plain entry ticket, the cheapest of the four palace listings, and the tickets page notes that the palace sells its own ticket for roughly half. The affiliate disclosure is the long version.
Corrections are welcome and get acted on. Contact is the way in, and if you have found a figure here that is wrong I would rather know than not.