Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna

Everyone comes to Rome for ancient art and Renaissance masterpieces, which means almost nobody visits the national gallery of modern and contemporary art, and that is a mistake. This museum, housed in a beautiful Belle Epoque building in the Villa Borghese park, holds the most important collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian art in existence, and it is routinely empty. You can stand alone in front of a Modigliani here. Try that at the Tate.

The collection tells the story of Italy finding its artistic voice after unification in 1861. The Macchiaioli painters — Italy's answer to the Impressionists, who actually predated them — are represented in depth. Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Telemaco Signorini: these artists were painting light and everyday life with visible brushstrokes in the 1850s, before Monet picked up a brush. Art history has given the French credit for a revolution the Italians started, and this museum is the evidence.

The twentieth-century collection includes major works by Giorgio de Chirico, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and the Italian Futurists — the art movement that celebrated speed, technology, and unfortunately, war. The Futurists' enthusiasm for Mussolini has complicated their legacy, but their art was genuinely revolutionary. Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space — the striding figure that appears on the Italian twenty-cent coin — has a plaster version here.

The building itself is worth the visit. The entrance hall has a vaulted glass ceiling that floods the space with natural light, and the garden out front is scattered with sculptures. After the compressed intensity of the Vatican Museums or the Borghese, the space and silence here feel almost therapeutic. Admission is modest, and the cafe in the garden is one of the nicer museum cafes in Rome.