HALLS OF HISTORY

This summer for the first time, travelers to Rome can explore one of the world's loveliest palaces: the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili, on the Corso. One picture gallery has long been public, but now on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, between 11 o'clock and noon, visitors are admitted to a whole succession of magnificent rooms in which every perfect detail seems to breathe history. The mid-18th century Venetian Room with its Murano glass chandelier may well surpass any interior of the same period remaining in Venice itself. The Grand Salon contains a golden cradle that bears eloquent witness to the natural expectations of a Doria-Pamphili heir: carved on the base are a bishop's staff, a doge's hat and a Pope's three-tiered crown.

There was a Pope on the Pamphili side: Innocent X, whose immortal portrait by Velasquez hangs in the picture gallery. The palace also contains a Claude Lorrain landscape, a Fra Filippo Lippi Annunciation, Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight into Egypt to see and admire. One of the most interesting pictures is a portrait by Sebastiano del Piombo of Admiral Andrea,* the greatest of the Dorias, a buccaneer of a man and a hero of history.

Before his death in 1560, at 94, the fleets of this fierce Genoese had many times confirmed his native city as master of the Mediterranean. Doria ships also helped Emperor Charles V in his struggles to win Italy. Charles rewarded him with a huge mastiff -- and then a princedom "for the dog to run in." The admiral kept his palace staff hopping to the tune of bosun's pipes, once exercised his princely humor by order ing all his silver flung into the sea at a banquet's end. Afterwards Andrea Doria hauled his silver up again, in nets previously spread for the purpose.

The Doria male line was broken last year with the death of Prince Filippo Andrea Doria-Pamphili-Landi, 71. The old prince was the only man in Rome who refused to put out a flag celebrating Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia, suffered 15 years' confinement under Mussolini, was Rome's first mayor after its liberation. He dreamed of opening his palace to the public, a task that his daughter, Princess Orietta, has now accomplished. Her husband, Britisher Frank Pogson, has traded his own name for Doria-Pamphili to carry on the noble line.

* For whom the Italian Line's ill-fated Andrea Doria was named.

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