What is the Colonna family worth?
Why there is no number
Nothing here has to be declared. There is no listed company, no annual report, no prospectus, no public valuation of a collection that has never been for sale. A family that has owned the same building since the thirteenth century and lives in part of it today generates no document anybody outside it is entitled to read.
That is not secrecy. It is the ordinary condition of private property, and it is worth saying because the alternative explanation — that the figure exists somewhere and is being hidden — is what makes the invented ones plausible.
Why I will not quote the figures that circulate
You will find numbers. They appear on sites that compile net worths for a living, they appear without a source, and they appear in each other. None of them can be traced to a filing, a valuation or a statement by anyone in the family.
The tempting move is to print one and then explain that it is unreliable. I have watched what happens next: the sentence gets quoted, the caveat does not travel with it, and within two hops there is a figure attributed to a site that only ever mentioned it to say it was unverifiable. So this page does not do it. If that feels evasive, hold it against the alternative, which is putting a number I cannot stand behind next to the dates on this site that I can.
What is checkable, and all of it is
Four things, and the last one is the one that actually answers the question people are asking underneath the question they typed.
How long they have held the palace. Since the 1200s — the oldest section of the building is 13th century. English Wikipedia puts the tenure at “over twenty generations”. Those are two different claims from two different sources and this site prints whichever it is citing rather than converting one into the other. There was a break: the palace went to the Della Rovere and returned by marriage.
What titles survive. The family holds Prince of Paliano, carried since 1556. Don Prospero Colonna, born 1956, heads the main line; Prince Marcantonio Colonna di Paliano, born 1948, is Prince and Duke of Paliano.
Which one ended. The office of Prince Assistant to the Papal Throne, held from 1514, was abolished in 2018 — five hundred and four years. That is a documented loss with a date on it, which is more than any wealth estimate about this family can say for itself.
How the collection is shown. Through a foundation, to the public, for eight hours a week, at about fifteen euros for the short ticket and about twenty-five for the complete one. The full published tariff is in a table on the tickets page.
What the ticket price is not evidence of
People do arithmetic on the door price and I would rather they did not. A ticket of about fifteen euros for a building open two mornings a week tells you how the collection is shown. It tells you nothing about what the collection is worth, what the building is worth, or what anybody who owns either is worth, and the multiplication people reach for — visitors times price — needs a visitor figure that nobody publishes either.
There is a big number attached to this palace on the booking platform, and it is worth naming so it does not get misused: the most-rated listing on Palazzo Colonna’s own page there is a Colosseum tour with 89,202 ratings, against 898 on the palace ticket. That is a fact about how a platform files this place. It is not a count of anybody’s visitors and it is not money.
If you came here from a wealth list
Then you have already seen a figure and you are checking it, which is the right instinct. What I can tell you is that the page you saw it on had access to exactly what I had: a family that publishes no accounts, a foundation that publishes a tariff, and an encyclopedia that counts generations. If it printed a number anyway, it made one.
The checkable version of “how rich are they” is “what have they kept”. A city palace held since the 1200s, a princely title since 1556, and a papal office lost in 2018. Those are three dates and they can each be looked up.
Read next
- The family, and who lives there now.
- The Colonna and the Orsini.
- What a ticket costs and what it covers.
- Whether the visit is worth it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the net worth of the Colonna family?
No net-worth figure is published anywhere checkable — not by the family, not by the foundation, not in any filing. The figures circulating on wealth-list sites are not auditable, and this site does not repeat them.
How rich is the Colonna family?
There is no verifiable answer. What can be checked is that they have held Palazzo Colonna since the 1200s, hold the title Prince of Paliano from 1556, lost the office of Prince Assistant to the Papal Throne in 2018, and show the collection two mornings a week.
Why does this site not give a figure?
Because none exists that can be traced to a filing or a valuation. Printing an unsourced figure in order to doubt it still puts it into circulation, and the doubt is the part that gets dropped when it is quoted.