Giorgio de Chirico House Museum site features

There is nothing on the street to tell you it is here. The address is a door on Piazza di Spagna, in a block of the kind that has shops at pavement level and shuttered windows above, a few steps from the foot of the Spanish Steps. You are let in at a fixed time with a small group.

Inside it is somebody's flat, not a gallery. The rooms are domestic in scale and still furnished — chairs, tables, lamps, the arrangement of a household rather than a hang. Paintings are on the walls where a person would put paintings, at the heights a person would choose.

It goes up three floors. The apartment-studio climbs rather than spreads, and the sequence of rooms gets more private as you go — reception space below, working space above.

The windows do a lot of the work. They look out over the square he moved to in 1948, and they are the view he had at his desk for thirty years.

The top is the studio, and it is the quietest room in the building — the one place where the apartment stops being a home and becomes a workplace.

The three-floor apartment-studio

The foundation's own description: an appartamento-studio a tre piani, lived and worked in for thirty years, now the house-museum.

Piazza di Spagna 31

The address itself — a working studio on one of the most-walked squares in Europe, a hundred metres from the Spanish Steps.

The 1948 arrival

He moved in at sixty, after a life of movement through European cities and New York, 1936 to 1938.

Guided visits only

Fixed times on each opening day: Mon/Thu/Fri 10.30, 11.30, 14.15, 15.15; Tue 9.30, 10.30, 11.30; Sat 11.00, 12.00, 14.00, 15.00, 16.00; last Sunday of the month 10.00, 11.00, 12.00.

The Wednesday closure

The house is closed on Wednesdays — the detail most likely to cost you the visit.