After visiting the Mario Praz House, we went to see the Biblioteca Primoli. We were lucky that they were having an exhibition by Alice Pasquini called "Vestige." It was a collection of mixed-media paintings inspired by 19th-century Rome and because of that exhibition, we were able to visit the library. The bulk of the show is centered on portraits of women, drawn from Primoli's collection of photographs. Painted on fabric, they also incorporate architectural features found in some of Primoli's other imagery. By layering these images together, Pasquini found a way to make them her own and to give them a new life.
The library is located in Palazzo Primoli, a sixteenth-century building renovated at the beginning of the 20th century by Raffaello Ojetti following the construction of the Tiber walls. This historical library is made up of the collection which belonged to Giuseppe Primoli and consists of approximately 30,000 volumes. These include a Stendhal collection and the collection of Mario Praz. The library has also been enriched over the years with other smaller collections (Baye, Angeli, Prencipe, Ciureanu, and Gendel). The library has large and bright rooms, all covered with shelving surmounted by a series of views of Rome, eighteenth-century paintings of the Vanvitellian school, with "boiseries," loggias, balustrades, barriers, coffered ceilings, festoons and lists of names, in golden cubital characters, of writers and characters of all times and countries. Also on display is one of the twenty known versions of the "naked Mona Lisa," possibly created by Gian Giacomo Caprotti, and several ancient busts in marble or more modern in plaster. read more