In 1927 Giuseppe Primoli, son of Count Pietro Primoli and Princess Carlotta Bonaparte, donated his collection of artworks to the city of Rome: thus was born the Napoleon Museum of Rome, which gathers Napoleonic relics, family memories, together with the rooms on the ground floor of his palace that still house them today.
The collection was born not so much from the desire to offer a testimony of the imperial grandeur of the Bonaparte family, but from the wish to tell the story of the Bonaparte family from a private perspective and to document the intense relationships that linked the Bonaparte to Rome.
The museum’s collections present three distinct phases:
- the true Napoleonic period, testified by large canvases and busts by the greatest
artists of the time, depicting numerous representatives of the imperial family in lofty and conventional poses; - the so-called “Roman” period, from Napoleon’s fall to Napoleon III’s rise;
- the period of the Second Empire, with paintings, sculptures, engravings, furniture, objects, all referable
to that period of French history dominated by the figure of Napoleon III.
The current arrangement of the museum, the result of recent restoration works, generally reflects the indications left by Giuseppe Primoli. The rooms preserve in some halls the painted seventeenth-century beam ceilings, while the friezes running along the walls of rooms VIII, IX, X date back to the early nineteenth century, when the palace had already passed into the ownership of the Primoli. The friezes of rooms III and V, as indicated by the “rampant lion” of the Primoli and the “eagle” of the Bonaparte, are later than the marriage of Pietro Primoli with Carlotta Bonaparte, which took place in 1848.
