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Museo Boncompagni Ludovisi per le arti decorative

Museum · Sallustiano, Italy

A state museum of decorative arts, costume and Italian fashion, in the villino the Boncompagni Ludovisi princes built for themselves on via Boncompagni. It is the place where the family name on the street signs stops being an abstraction.

History

Italian Wikipedia gives the museum's full name as the Museo Andrea e Blanceflor Boncompagni Ludovisi, dedicated to decorative arts, costume and Italian fashion and housed in the Villino Boncompagni Ludovisi. The building was left to the Italian State in 1972 by the will of Princess Blanceflor de Bildt Boncompagni, to be kept and used "esclusivamente per scopi artistico-culturali di pubblica utilità", and it opened to the public in 1995. Administratively it is state-owned, formerly under the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, from December 2014 under the Polo museale del Lazio and from December 2019 under the Direzione Musei statali di Roma. The same article records 9.782 visitors in 2018, citing a MiBAC spreadsheet.

Italian Wikipedia describes five exhibition rooms holding the villino's original furnishings — furniture, tapestries, paintings and ceramics — alongside a collection covering Italian fashion, costume and design, with garments by Fausto Sarli, Fernanda Gattinoni, Valentino, Roberto Capucci, Raffaella Curiel, Lorenzo Riva, Renato Balestra, Mila Schön, André Laug and Angelo Litrico, and a group of dresses that belonged to Palma Bucarelli, director of the Galleria nazionale d'arte moderna from 1941 to 1975, added in 1996.

No sourced opening hours or admission price are given here. Italian Wikipedia states hours and prices for the museum but cites no source for them; they are not repeated. Check before travelling.

The building, according to Italian Wikipedia, which cites no source — the article carries the encyclopedia's own unsourced banner, dated November 2015 — was built in 1901–1903 by the architect Giovanni Battista Giovenale (1849–1934) for the Boncompagni Ludovisi princes, on a plot at the corner of via Boncompagni and via Quintino Sella that had been part of Villa Ludovisi and was subdivided from 1883. It has two storeys over a basement and mezzanine, crowned by a balustrade; the short side faces via Boncompagni and the other three façades face the garden; the manner is a sober barocchetto with rococo flourishes in the window frames and in the via Boncompagni portal.

A wording trap worth knowing about, because it will confuse you if you read around: that article's lead sentence places the villino in "Rione XVII Sallustiano, quartiere Ludovisi". The first is the rione, which is this one; the second is the neighbourhood-sense Ludovisi district, which is a different thing from the rione Ludovisi. The museum is in Sallustiano.

Visit

Via Boncompagni 18, Roma RM

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