Museo Napoleonico

In 1927 Giuseppe Primoli, son of Count Pietro Primoli and Princess Carlotta Bonaparte, donated to the city of Rome his collection of works of art, Napoleonic memorabilia, family memories, together with the rooms on the ground floor of his building that still contain it. The collection was born not so much from a desire to offer a testimony to the imperial grandeur of the Bonaparte family, as the desire to tell the story of the Bonaparte family, according to private and a view of the close relationship between the Bonapartes in Rome. The collections of the museum have three distinct phases:

• The true Napoleonic period itself, witnessed by large paintings and busts of the greatest artists of the time, portraying in stately, conventional poses numerous members of the imperial family;
• The so-called "Roman" period, from the fall of Napoleon to the rise of Napoleon III;
• The period of the Second Empire, with paintings, sculptures, engravings, furniture, objects, all from that period of French history dominated by the figure of Napoleon III. The present layout of the museum, the result of the recent renovation of the rooms, reflects the general lines of the signs left by Giuseppe Primoli. The environments preserved in some rooms of the eighteenth century ceiling painted beams, while the friezes that run along the walls of rooms VIII, IX, X back to the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the palace was already owned by the Primoli. The ornaments of the III and V area, as indicated by the "lion rampant" of the Primoli and "eagle" of Bonaparte, are subsequent to the marriage of Pietro Primoli to Carlotta Bonaparte, occurred in 1848.