PALAGI'S MUSEUM

Pelagio Palagi was a Bolognese painter, sculptor, architect – and a great interior designer who created extraordinary rooms and furniture in a sublime, post-Empire style for Carlo Alberto, King of Sardinia, in and around Turin, 1832-60. He was also a great collector, of manuscripts, medals, Egyptian antiquities and especially of Etruscan objects, both of the truly Etruscan and the Greek kinds, which were hugely inspiring in his work. Shortly before his death he willed his collection to the Comune of his home town, stipulating in vain that it should all remain together. It did not, of course, with the manuscripts and books going to the Archiginnasio university library, while his antiquities form the core of the Museo Civico Archeologico, opened nearby in 1881 in a 15thC hospital, fragments of whose original brick now peep out from beneath the stucco courtyard façade, below left; right, arcades filled with Roman inscriptions.

At the top of the entry stairs is a plaster cast of Giambologna’s bronze Neptune (from a famous Bolognese fountain) leaving poor Palagi more or less hidden, staring for eternity at the sea god’s backside. The museum’s upstairs galleries are wonderfully decorated, still much as they were in 1881, with objects massed together against walls paneled with painted decors in appropriate historic styles, all in the masculine, earthy palette typical of Bologna. Sadly, the Egyptian galleries, with objects from the famous 16thC collection of Ulisse Aldrovandi, were deemed too old-fashioned and replaced with modern rooms in the basement.

The collections include endless boxes of cameos, above right, and framed fragments of very modern-looking Roman mosaic floors, below right; but it’s the atmospheric setting more than the objects that is so outstanding, especially moments like this Roman corner, below, with busts on handsome brackets on a blue wall, painted below in Roman style, and a checkerboard terrazzo floor. It’s not Palagi, but it’s lovely.