On the lungotevere, at the head of ponte Umberto I and three minutes from piazza Navona, there is a palace that the Tiber embankments and the opening of via Zanardelli forced its owner to rebuild from scratch, and on the ground floor the plaster cast of a woman’s breast is kept.
That woman is Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s favourite sister and for twenty years one of the most talked-about presences in Rome. The house is the Museo Napoleonico: the collection that Giuseppe Primoli, a Bonaparte on his mother’s side, gave to the city in 1927 along with the ground-floor rooms of his palace. There is no ticket to pay, and it is only a few rooms.
Six things are worth stopping for, and the sixth is not even in this museum: it is on the floor above, through the same door.
What was half the Bonaparte family doing in Rome, after Waterloo?
Let’s begin!
A palace cut through, and an heir who collected his own family
Count Luigi Primoli bought Palazzo Primoli between 1820 and 1828. Then came the river, or rather the embankments: the building of the Tiber walls and the opening of via Zanardelli forced radical changes on the palace. In 1901 Giuseppe Primoli, by then the sole owner, entrusted the rebuilding to the architect Raffaele Ojetti: the front on piazza dell’Orso was demolished, the building was raised and given a new front on piazza di Ponte Umberto and a monumental entrance on via Zanardelli. The work finished in 1911.
Giuseppe Primoli (1851-1927) was the son of count Pietro Primoli and princess Carlotta Bonaparte, great-granddaughter of Lucien, Napoleon’s brother. He spent his life gathering portraits, letters, furniture and objects belonging to his own relatives, and when he gave them to Rome he put his intention in writing: he did not want a museum of imperial relics, he wanted the private story of a family.
Keep that in mind as you go in, because it changes your expectations. There is no hat from Austerlitz here and no sword from Marengo. There is the expenses notebook of a villa, a handbag mirror and the portraits of relatives whom, outside Italy, nobody remembers.
1. The cast of Pauline’s breast, and the dormeuse
Walk into room VI, devoted to Pauline: the museum’s two best-known objects are there, a plaster cast of the princess’s breast and a replica of her head. Both refer to the sculpture Antonio Canova made between 1805 and 1808, on a commission that came in 1804.
Beside them there is a mahogany dormeuse, similar to the couch on which Pauline posed for that statue. The statue is the Venus Victrix and it is not here: you will find it in the first room of the Galleria Borghese, a quarter of an hour away by bus, lying in exactly that pose.
Why keep the cast of a piece of a body?
Because a scandal had been built around that statue, and casts were part of a sculptor’s working method. Pauline had married Camillo Borghese in 1803 and had been carved almost naked, in her own house, as a goddess: the Rome of the day talked about it for years, and the prince ended up keeping the statue locked away and showing it to few people. Looking at this plaster you grasp something the marble does not let you see, which is that under the goddess there was a person who had posed.
On the wall of the room there is also the portrait François Joseph Kinson painted of her in 1808: Pauline seated, in a red dress, with a band of jewels in her hair.
2. Villa Paolina in watercolours, and the mirror with the changed monogram
On the walls of the same room hang the watercolours that document Villa Paolina, the house the princess lived in in Rome between 1816 and 1825, near porta Pia. One is by Jodocus Sebastiaen van den Abeele and shows a drawing room of the villa with princess Zénaïde, her children and her sister Charlotte; another, by Giovanni Riveruzzi and datable to around 1828, shows the villa from the porta Pia side.
Look at them the way you would look at photographs of a house that no longer exists. They show what furnishing «in the French style» meant in nineteenth-century Rome: low furniture, light colours, plain walls, in a city that was still full of the baroque.
Then look for the portable mirror. It carried Pauline’s monogram, and somebody replaced it with Carlotta’s, the niece who inherited the villa. A letter scraped off and redone on a handbag object tells the story of a change of ownership better than a will does.
3. The Biennais toilet set
Still in Pauline’s room, look for the toilet set signed by Martin-Guillaume Biennais, the goldsmith who worked for Napoleon and for the imperial court.
Stop at the level of the workmanship, because this is where the museum stops being merely domestic. Biennais supplied the emperor, and his travelling sets were technical objects before they were precious ones: boxes that opened into dozens of compartments, each shaped around its own instrument, made for a court that moved with the armies.
Next to it the notebook of the villa’s running expenses is on show. Look at the set and the notebook side by side, because it is the cleverest choice in the display: the gold of the court and the household accounts, in the same case.
4. The lion and the eagle, on the friezes of the rooms
Raise your eyes to the friezes that run high up in rooms III and V. On one side there is a lion, the emblem of the Primoli; on the other an eagle, which is the Bonaparte one.
What is the imperial eagle doing on the ceiling of a Roman house?
The friezes were painted after 1848, the year in which Pietro Primoli married Carlotta Bonaparte, Lucien’s granddaughter. She is a different Carlotta from the one of the mirror: that was the niece who inherited Villa Paolina in 1825, when this one was not yet born. A frieze is not an official document, and precisely for that reason it says the thing plainly: a family of the Roman aristocracy and the dynasty that had overturned half of Europe were joining, and the news was written on the ceiling of the house.
It is also the reason this museum exists, and it is worth keeping in mind as you go through the rooms. Without that marriage there would have been no Giuseppe Primoli, and without Giuseppe Primoli the collection would have ended up scattered among heirs in three countries.
5. The Roman section: the Bonapartes after Waterloo
And here is the answer to the question at the top. The route is divided into three parts: the Napoleonic period proper, the Roman period, which runs from the fall of Napoleon I to the rise of Napoleon III, and the Second Empire.
The middle part is the one almost nobody knows about. After 1815 Rome became the refuge of the defeated Bonapartes, because Pius VII took them in. Napoleon’s mother, Letizia Ramolino, lived here and died here in 1836; so did his brother Lucien, prince of Canino; the uncle cardinal Joseph Fesch, who put together one of the greatest picture collections of the century; and Pauline. For thirty years the most feared imperial family in Europe lived between piazza Venezia and the Corso like any other set of wealthy foreign relatives.
Look for the portraits in this section and read the labels one by one. These are faces that do not appear in history books, and they are the reason a Napoleonic museum exists in Rome and not in Milan.
6. The Mario Praz Museum, upstairs
The sixth thing to see is not part of the Museo Napoleonico, but you go in through the same door. On the upper floors are the Fondazione Primoli, with a library of some thirty thousand volumes, and the house in which Mario Praz lived, the great scholar of English literature and collector who died in 1982, today a state museum under the National Gallery of Modern Art.
The apartment receives you as he left it: Empire furniture, wax reliefs, miniatures, paintings hung close together, in an order that was a system of thought before it was a way of furnishing. Praz wrote a book, The House of Life, which goes room by room through the house he lived in at the time, on via Giulia, and it is the best way to understand how he looked at objects before bringing them here.
Mind the calendar, because this is where visits fall apart. The Museo Napoleonico closes on Mondays and the Praz house closes on Tuesdays. The Praz house, what is more, is visited only with a guide, in groups of twelve and by booking. If you want to do both in the same trip, the only safe window runs from Wednesday to Sunday.
Practical information
Details checked on 17 September 2026 on the official website, museonapoleonico.it. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Admission to the Museo Napoleonico is free: it belongs to the group of small civic museums Roma Capitale has opened without charge. Temporary exhibitions can have a ticket of their own, so ask at the desk what the day’s visit covers. Opening hours. Tuesday to Sunday 10:00-18:00, with last admission at 17:15. The museum stays closed on Mondays, on 1 May and on 25 December. On 24 and 31 December it opens 10:00-14:00. The Mario Praz Museum. It is in the same building, entered from via Zanardelli 1, and it is visited only with a guide and by booking, in groups of no more than twelve, for about forty-five minutes. It closes on Tuesdays. You book on the Musei Italiani app or on museiitaliani.it, where you also find the current price. Getting there. The museum is at piazza di Ponte Umberto I, 1. Buses 30, 70, 81, 87, 492 and 628 all stop at Zanardelli, in front of the museum; from piazza Navona it is three minutes on foot. How long to allow. The rooms of the Museo Napoleonico need forty minutes. Allow an hour and a half in all if you add the Mario Praz house, and remember that this part has to be booked in advance.
Where to go from here
Two hundred metres away, on the other side of corso del Rinascimento, is the museum that tells the story of the same city from another point of view: the works are in Museo di Roma at Palazzo Braschi: 7 works to see, and together with this one it makes a single morning.
Canova’s Venus Victrix, of which you see the cast here, is on show at the Galleria Borghese: 10 works you must see. To find your way among all the collections in the city there is Museums in Rome: the 8 you should not miss.
Photo credits: Palazzo Primoli and the Villa Paolina watercolour by Lalupa (CC BY-SA 3.0); Mario Praz’s study by FrancescaEA (CC BY-SA 4.0), all from Wikimedia Commons. Kinson’s portrait of Pauline and Fabre’s portrait of Lucien are in the public domain.
