Palazzo Eroli

Palazzo Eroli is Narni's museum house: an aristocratic residence assembled from older buildings on the cliff edge, now holding the city's archaeological collection, a picture gallery with Ghirlandaio and Benozzo Gozzoli, and the municipal library on its ground floor. Its collections form a major part of Narni's civic heritage.

Why it matters

For a hill town of its size, Narni keeps an unusually complete civic museum in this palace. The picture gallery preserves two altarpieces commissioned in the fifteenth century by a Narnese cardinal, Benozzo Gozzoli's Annunciation — counted the first certain work of that Florentine master — and Domenico Ghirlandaio's Coronation of the Virgin of 1486. The floors below trace the Narni area from prehistory through Roman Narnia to the Middle Ages, and the building itself, home to the Eroli family into the late twentieth century, is the last great private residence in the historic centre to have kept its name.

What to notice

• Benozzo Gozzoli's Annunciation includes small black-and-white dogs in the Virgin's carpet, a pun on Domini canes for the Dominicans, and ivy leaves that quote the Eroli family emblem.
• Ghirlandaio's Coronation of the Virgin, finished in 1486 for the church of San Girolamo, has a predella depicting Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, a merciful Christ and the penitent Jerome.
• A double-sided panel of 1409 by the Master of Narni and a fourteenth-century wooden Madonna enthroned with Child, saved from the country church of Santa Pudenziana.
• The archaeological section includes tusks and finds of Elephas antiquus recovered in the early twentieth century, a display on the Narnese condottiero Erasmo da Narni, the Gattamelata, and an Egyptian mummy with sarcophagus donated in the 1930s.
• The building's own logic: several houses of the Eroli and their neighbours knitted together down the slope of the rock, which is why the floor levels shift from wing to wing.

Context and history

The palace took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Pietro Eroli and his son Silvio combined buildings the family already owned with others they bought, exploiting the sheer drop towards the Nera gorge. The official sources differ on the exact century of the final campaign — the operator's page says seventeenth, the tourism portal eighteenth — and the discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved here. What is certain is the family's longer shadow: in the second half of the fifteenth century Cardinal Berardo Eroli commissioned the Gozzoli and the Ghirlandaio for the city's churches, and the municipal library on the ground floor is dedicated to the Narnese scholar Giovanni Eroli. The family kept the palace until the end of the twentieth century; ownership then passed to the Province of Terni, which restored it for museum use. Until 2007 the Ghirlandaio hung in the council hall of the neighbouring Palazzo Comunale before moving here.