Palazzo Barberini ai Giubbonari

History

The palace, in its residential phase, slowly took shape over the course of nearly eighty years (1581-1658) and four generations with numerous successive purchases of neighboring houses, enlarging in parallel with the growing fortunes of the Barberini family. The starting point for the construction was the purchase, on June 15, 1581, of a house with four stores on the ground floor owned by the Scapucci family by Monsignor Francesco Barberini (1528-1600), a protonotary apostolic and the prime mover in the incorporation of the household into Roman society. The monsignor, who in 1584 had his nephew Maffeo come to Rome to study at the Roman College, perfected the project in the following years by buying new houses bordering his own on Via dei Giubbonari, in the direction of what is now Piazza Cairoli, and entrusting Annibale Lippi with the arrangement of the first and second floors around a courtyard, with four rooms and a hall each.

When Francesco died, the property remained entirely in the hands of his nephew Maffeo, at that period a protonotary apostolic and chamber cleric and by then launched toward a rapid career as a prelate due in part to the considerable finances left to him by his uncle (calculated at more than 100,000 scudi of movable property, in addition to houses at the Giubbonari and two farmhouses near Rome). Monsignor Maffeo called his closest relatives to Rome and, between 1600 and 1603, commissioned work on the building to house them, under the direction of Flaminio Ponzio, valued at 2600 scudi. After his appointment as cardinal in 1606, Maffeo (who, engaged in diplomatic and government missions in Paris and Bologna, and residing in his diocese of Spoleto, rarely lived in Rome in the years between 1601 and 1617) rented other palaces for himself: first the one belonging to the Salviati family at the Roman College, then the one belonging to the Madruzzo family in Borgo; however, in order to provide his family with a residence appropriate to the new cardinal's rank, he continued his purchases of houses on Via dei Giubbonari, having their facades unified and rearranging the main floor into a unified apartment of eight rooms: to this phase, completed by 1612, dates the small chapel that still exists today, which was frescoed by Passignano, a painter the cardinal had also hired for the decoration of the family chapel in Sant'Andrea della Valle. …

Description

The building, which is of considerable size, occupies most of the block between Via dei Giubbonari, Via dell'Arco del Monte, Vicolo della Madonnella (which wedges into the lot by connecting a side entrance of the building to Via Capo di Ferro) and Vicolo delle Grotte; in particular, the building constitutes the corner part of the block facing with its two straight sides onto Via dei Giubbonari and Via dell'Arco del Monte, interrupted in the middle by Piazza del Monte di Pietà, corresponding to the two long main facades, composed of 16 and 18 windows, respectively. The building in its present facies is the result of numerous transformations and extensions, well disguised in its uniform exterior appearance those of the 18th century, more aesthetically cumbersome those of the late 19th century, such as the elevation and the creation of terraces, motivated by the numerous changes of ownership and use throughout its history, as well as by the state of degradation in which the palace often ran into and in which it still finds itself in many of its parts today. It is composed mainly of two bodies of the building, unified on the outside: the first, the Barberinian one, corresponds to the facades on Via dei Giubbonari and Piazza del Monte di Pietà, while the second, from the second half of the eighteenth century, corresponds to the continuation of the facade on Via dell'Arco del Monte towards Trinità dei Pellegrini; both have their own atrium, courtyard and staircase. …