Palazzo Primoli

The construction of the palace dates back to the 16th century; it first belonged to the Gottifredi family - this ownership is still indicated in Nolli's 1748 plan - then, at the end of the 18th century, it passed to the Filonardi family. Between 1820 and 1828 it was bought by Count Luigi Primoli.
Following the radical changes in the area due to the construction of the Tiber embankments and the opening of Via Zanardelli, Count Giuseppe Primoli, who had remained the sole owner of the building in 1901, commissioned the architect Raffaele Ojetti to renovate the palazzo. The old façade on Piazza dell'Orso was demolished and a new building with corner loggias was added, while a monumental entrance was created on Via Zanardelli; the building was raised and had a new façade on Piazza di Ponte Umberto. Work was completed in 1911.
The ground floor houses a collection of Napoleonic objects (gathered in the Napoleonic Museum) donated by Giuseppe Primoli to the Municipality of Rome in 1927. In some rooms the floor preserves the 18th century ceilings with painted beams, while the friezes that run along the walls of the rooms VIII, IX, The friezes of the III and V rooms, as indicated by the "lion rampant" 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.

The early nineteenth-century Naples majolica - applied to the floors of rooms III, IV, V, IX, X - comes from the demolished Palazzo Porcari-Senni in Via Aracoeli; the portal of room III, dating from the late eighteenth century, was recovered from the demolition of the Chapel of the Ospedale di Pio VI in Borgo S. Spirito.

The Palazzo is also the seat of the Primoli Foundation, created by Primoli himself, and of the Primoli Library, which contains over thirty thousand volumes of literature, history and art.

Since 1 June 1995, the third floor of the building has been home to the Mario Praz Museum, which belongs to the National Gallery of Modern Art. It is a house-museum containing about a thousand works of furniture, paintings, drawings, terracottas, bronzes, miniatures and silver, dating from the late 18th century to the first half of the 19th century, collected by Mario Praz (1896-1982), an anglicist and art critic.
The coexistence of these institutions in the same palace creates a unicum of considerable interest for the study of art, literature and history relating to the 19th century.