Palazzo Tozzoni is a rather rare case of a noble residence excellently preserved not only in its architectural consistency but also in its furnishings and objects, the palace offers a rich exhibition path that includes an important art gallery, applied art objects, furnishings, family memorabilia and a collection of ethnographic materials, allowing appreciation, in a substantially intact context, of the dialogue between the rooms and the furnishings, between the structures and the decorations. A relationship now of interpenetration, as in the alcove room or in the Empire wing, now of layering, as in the late nineteenth-century environments, through a proposal of the ways of living that have succeeded over time. The palace of the Counts Tozzoni became a civic museum in 1981, at the behest of the last descendant, Sofia Serristori, who wanted to donate to the city of Imola, in this way, an intact and precious testimony of the life of a noble family in a provincial city. The ancient Tozzoni houses were transformed into a palace between 1726 and 1738 by the architect Domenico Trifogli, probably following designs by Alfonso Torreggiani following the examples of the noble Bolognese eighteenth-century building, the Counts Tozzoni equipped their residence with a representative hall and a noble staircase embellished by the sculptures of the Fleming Janssen. The hall is enriched by paintings from the family’s rich collection, among which stand out the ovals of Donnini and the works of Beccadelli, it separates the two apartments of the noble floor, both rare and well-preserved examples of the ways of living that have succeeded over time. The Empire apartment maintains the appearance that Giorgio Barbato Tozzoni wanted to give it between 1818 and 1819 on the occasion of his marriage to Orsola Bandini, when he commissioned the Faentinian Pasquale Saviotti and Angelo Bassi respectively for the decoration and the cabinetry of the rooms. The Pope’s sitting room and the Red sitting room of the Barocchetto apartment have furnishings partly from the seventeenth century and stuccos and carvings inspired by the taste of the early eighteenth century; in the alcove instead, set up in 1738 for the wedding between Giuseppe Tozzoni and Carlotta Beroaldi, the room and the furnishings together dialogue according to the graceful taste of the Emilian barocchetto. In the eighteenth century, presumably around 1780, the acquisition of a private art gallery, the Pighini, increased the palace’s collections which, partly dispersed, currently amount to about two hundred paintings from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The collection is dominated by the Bolognese component, Cesi, Passerotti, Lavinia Fontana, and the Romagna one, Fenzoni, Giani. However, Venetian presences such as Giovan Battista Langetti, Pietro Liberi and Antonio Zanchi are not lacking. The showcases of the collection rooms gather prints, medals, ceramics, terracotta, family memorabilia and liturgical furnishings from the various family altars. Noteworthy are also the kitchen and the cellars where the tools of peasant work related to the cycle of wheat, hemp and grapes have been collected, some of which come from Tozzoni possessions, source of their wealth.
Information about Palazzo Tozzoni
Via Garibaldi, 18,
40026 Imola (Bologna)
0542602609
musei@comune.imola.bo.it
Source: MIBACT
