Drawn From Life

When you've had enough of Rome's ancient ruins, Caravaggio paintings and Bernini buildings, drop into the De Chirico House-Museum for a bracing look at the life and work of a 20th century master. Giorgio de Chirico fused a classical eye with a disquieting imagination to create Metaphysical art—like the eerie Melancholy and Mystery of a Street (1914), which depicts the shadowy figure of a girl rolling a hoop into a piazza—and later breathed new life into the Baroque.

De Chirico's pristinely preserved two-level apartment in Rome's splendid Piazza di Spagna, where he lived for more than 30...