On the top floor of the Palazzo Primoli, the same building (separate entrance) that houses the Museo Napoleonico, is one of Rome’s most unusual museums.

Mario Praz was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature.

As if in preserved in amber, the apartment in which the famous Italian essayist Mario Praz lived survives intact, decorated with a lifetime’s accumulation of delightful Baroque and Neoclassical art and antiques, arranged and rearranged to create symmetries that take the visitor by surprise like the best trompe-l’oeil.

As author of The Romantic Sensibility and A History of Interior Decoration, Praz was fabled for his taste for the arcane and the bizarre; here his reputation for the same lives on.