Nel 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 Napoleonic Museum of Rome, which gathers Napoleonic memorabilia, family memories, along with the ground floor spaces 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 greatness of the Bonaparte family, but from the will to tell the story of the Bonaparte family from a private perspective and to document the intense relationships that connected the Bonapartes to Rome.
The museum’s collections present three distinct periods:
- the true Napoleonic period, evidenced by large canvases and busts by the greatest artists of the time, portraying numerous members of the imperial family in lofty and conventional poses;
- 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 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 in the rooms, generally reflects 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, X date back to the early decades of the 19th century, when the palace had already passed into the possession of the Primoli family. The friezes of rooms III and V, as indicated by the “rampant lion” of the Primoli and the “eagle” of the Bonaparte, are subsequent to the marriage of Pietro Primoli with Carlotta Bonaparte, which took place in 1848.
