In 1927 Giuseppe Primoli, son of Count Pietro Primoli and Princess Carlotta Bonaparte, donated his art collection to the city of Rome: thus the Napoleonic Museum of Rome was founded, which gathers Napoleonic memorabilia, family mementos, along with the ground floor rooms of his palace that still house them today.
The collection was born not so much from a desire to offer a testimony to the imperial greatness of the Bonaparte family, but from the will to tell the story of the Bonaparte family from a personal perspective and to document the intense ties that bound the Bonapartes to Rome.
The museum’s collections present three clearly distinct periods:
- the true Napoleonic period, evidenced by large paintings and busts by the leading artists of the time, depicting numerous members of the imperial family in formal and conventional poses;
- the so-called “Roman” period, from Napoleon’s fall to the rise of Napoleon III;
- the Second Empire period, with paintings, sculptures, engravings, furniture, and objects all relating to that era of French history dominated by Napoleon III.
The current arrangement of the museum, the result of recent restoration work on the rooms, largely follows the guidelines left by Giuseppe Primoli. Some rooms preserve 18th-century painted beam ceilings, while the friezes running along the walls of rooms VIII, IX, and X date back to the early 19th century, when the palace had already become Primoli property. The friezes in rooms III and V, as indicated by the “rampant lion” of the Primoli and the “eagle” of the Bonaparte, date after the marriage of Pietro Primoli to Carlotta Bonaparte, which took place in 1848.
