Palazzo Falconi

Built by a wealthy local dynasty in the early eighteenth century, Palazzo Falconi still anchors the medieval quarter of Fiuggi Alto. Its place in local memory comes from a mischievous fresco: a painted silhouette of Napoleon Bonaparte, brushed in 1810 for an imperial visit that never arrived.

Why it matters

Fiuggi splits its life between two levels: the thermal quarter down by the springs, and the steep hilltop town where the community lived for centuries before the waters made it famous. Palazzo Falconi belongs wholly to the upper world. Raised in the early 1700s by the richest family of what was then Anticoli di Campagna, it stands out among the fortified lanes of the borgo as a house built to display wealth rather than to withstand siege. Its claim on local memory, however, is not architectural grandeur but an anecdote with a punchline. In 1810 word spread that the Emperor Napoleon might grace the hilltown with a visit; townspeople gathered in expectation; and a painter at work nearby decided to immortalise the suspense. The emperor never came, yet the painted silhouette he left behind turned the palace into the setting of Fiuggi's best-known story.

What to notice

The palace stands in Fiuggi's upper town, where the medieval street plan survives. Tradition associates one room with an anecdote from 1810, when a painter remembered as Mastro Ubaldo, then working on chapels in the church of San Pietro, painted an outline of Napoleon Bonaparte after an anticipated imperial visit failed to take place.

Context and history

The palace belongs to the generation of comfortable patrician houses that went up in the hilltown once its medieval fears had faded. The Falconi were among the leading families of Anticoli di Campagna, the name Fiuggi carried until 1911, and their residence dates from the opening decades of the eighteenth century. The Napoleonic episode is set in 1810, when the Pontifical States had been absorbed into Napoleon's empire and anticipation of an imperial itinerary through the provinces was plausible enough to gather a crowd. The painter Mastro Ubaldo, engaged that same year on the aristocratic chapels of San Pietro, translated the town's flutter into a silhouette of the emperor painted on the palace walls. The anecdote remains part of local memory.