The Most Beautiful Sculptures in Lazio
7 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful sculptures in Lazio are Trajan's Column, Column of Marcus Aurelius and Moses. The list covers 7 sculptures. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Rome has two great ages of sculpture layered on top of each other. The emperors filled the city with carved monuments that told their victories in stone, and fifteen centuries later popes and cardinals hired Michelangelo and Bernini to make marble move. Because both ages worked for the same city, ancient reliefs, Renaissance figures and Baroque fountains sit within walking distance, often in the churches and palaces they were made for.
Trajan's Column, dedicated in 113, wraps a continuous spiral frieze of the Dacian Wars around its shaft, with thousands of carved figures marching, building and fighting up to the top. Michelangelo's Moses, made for the tomb of Pope Julius II and now in San Pietro in Vincoli, sits with a coiled energy and the famous horns that came from a medieval reading of scripture.
Bernini dominates the rest. In the Galleria Borghese, his Rape of Proserpina shows Pluto's fingers sinking into the marble of her thigh as if it were skin, and Apollo and Daphne catches the moment her fingers turn into laurel leaves. In the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is staged like a scene in a theatre, lit from a hidden window. The Trevi Fountain, completed by Nicola Salvi's design in 1762, turns the end of an ancient aqueduct into a palace facade of rock, water and sea gods.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Trajan's Column | Sculpture | |
| 2 | Column of Marcus Aurelius | Sculpture | |
| 3 | Moses | Sculpture | |
| 4 | Trevi Fountain | Sculpture | |
| 5 | Ecstasy of Saint Teresa | Sculpture | |
| 6 | Apollo and Daphne | Sculpture | |
| 7 | The Rape of Proserpina | Sculpture |
01 Trajan's Column
Colonna Traiana
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.896° N 12.484° E
Raffaele pagani · CC BY-SA 4.0 The column originally stood between the Greek and Latin halls of the Ulpian Library, whose upper floors gave readers a closer view of the reliefs. After Trajan's death in 117 the Senate had his ashes placed in golden urns inside the base. His statue on top vanished in the Middle Ages, and since 1587 the column has been crowned by a bronze Saint Peter placed by Pope Sixtus V. Because pollution has blurred the marble, plaster casts made in the 19th and 20th centuries are sometimes easier to read: complete sets can be seen in Bucharest and in the Cast Courts of London's Victoria and Albert Museum.
Did you know? The carved band is not uniform: it widens from about 1 metre near the bottom to about 1.2 metres higher up, helping viewers read the upper scenes.
02 Column of Marcus Aurelius
Colonna di Marco Aurelio
Italy · 0.3 km from Rome41.901° N 12.480° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 By the 16th century about six metres of the monument lay buried under the rising ground level and the emperor's statue had long vanished. In 1589 Pope Sixtus V had the architect Domenico Fontana restore it: he dug out the base, repaired the cracks and crowned it with the bronze Saint Paul that still stands on top. Fontana also reclad the pedestal with marble and new inscriptions, one of which wrongly credits the column to Antoninus Pius.
03 Moses
Mosè
Italy · 1.1 km from Rome41.894° N 12.493° E
Luciano Tronati · CC BY-SA 4.0 The church itself is worth the visit. It was built in the 5th century to house the chains said to have bound Saint Peter, which are still kept in the church and give it its name, Saint Peter in Chains. Julius II, as Cardinal della Rovere, paid for a major rebuilding before he became pope. The Florentine sculptor Antonio del Pollaiuolo, who is thought to have added the twins to the Capitoline Wolf, is buried to the left of the entrance.
Did you know? Popular tradition holds that profiles of Julius II and of a woman are hidden in the beard beneath Moses' lower lip.
04 Trevi Fountain
Fontana di Trevi
Italy · 0.4 km from Rome41.901° N 12.483° E
Image by jdegheest from Pixabay Those coins aren't just souvenirs of the ritual — city workers sweep or vacuum roughly €3,000 out of the basin every day, and the annual total, somewhere around €1.4 to €1.5 million, is handed over to the Catholic charity Caritas, which uses it to help fund a soup kitchen, a food bank and welfare programs across Rome. Every wish thrown away here is, in a very literal sense, paying for somebody else's dinner.
Did you know? Salvi is said to have placed a large stone vase on the right side to block a barber's sign he disliked; Romans call it the 'Ace of Cups'.
05 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
Estasi di santa Teresa d'Avila
Italy · 1.3 km from Rome41.905° N 12.494° E
Livioandronico2013 · CC BY-SA 4.0 That contrast is the point of the chapel. The coloured marble frame and the spectators belong to the visitor's world, while Teresa and the angel, in white stone and lit from above, float in a zone of their own. A small terracotta study for the group, still bearing marks of the sculptor's fingers, is now in the Hermitage.
Did you know? The Cornaro onlookers in the side boxes are all men of the family, including the cardinal himself and the Venetian Doge Giovanni I Cornaro.
06 Apollo and Daphne
Apollo e Dafne
Italy · 2 km from Rome41.914° N 12.492° E
Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Galleria Borghese holds the other great early Bernini groups too — the Rape of Proserpina and David — displayed in the rooms for which many of them were made.
Did you know? The marble stands 243 cm high, making both figures roughly life-size.
07 The Rape of Proserpina
Ratto di Proserpina
Italy · 2 km from Rome41.914° N 12.492° E
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · CC BY-SA 4.0 The work was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Bernini's early patron, and was the first in the series of great Borghese sculptures that went on to include his David and Apollo and Daphne. In 1623, however, the cardinal gave it to Ludovico Ludovisi, nephew of the new pope Gregory XV, possibly to win favour with a rival family. It stayed with the Ludovisi for nearly three centuries, standing for a time at the foot of the grand staircase of Palazzo Piombino, until the Italian state bought it in 1908 and returned it to the villa for which it was made. It now stands in the centre of the Salone degli Imperatori on a plain marble base carved in 1911.
Did you know? Its original pedestal carried a Latin couplet by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, written a few years before the statue was carved.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful sculptures in Lazio?
- On our list, Trajan's Column ranks first, followed by Column of Marcus Aurelius and Moses.
- Why does Michelangelo's Moses have horns?
- The Latin Vulgate translated the Hebrew word for the rays of light on Moses' face after Sinai as 'horned'. Artists followed that reading for centuries, and Michelangelo gave his Moses two small horns.
- What does Trajan's Column depict?
- Its spiral frieze tells the story of Emperor Trajan's two wars against the Dacians in the early second century, from crossing the Danube to the final defeat of King Decebalus.
- Where are Bernini's most famous sculptures in Rome?
- Apollo and Daphne, The Rape of Proserpina and his David are in the Galleria Borghese, made for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa is in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.
- How many sculptures are on this list in Lazio?
- The list covers 7 sculptures.