An Unknown Jewel Near Via Veneto, Rome

The Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum for Decorative Arts, Costume and Fashion of the 19th and 20th century.
When you visit Rome, you'll certainly go to the Capitoline Museums, the Vatican Museums, Galleria Borghese, perhaps also the Modern Art Gallery... but  you'll probably miss a marvellous experience if nobody tells you...
A few steps from the famous street of the Dolce Vita, via Veneto, at the number 18 of via Boncompagni, don't be afraid to enter in the courtyard of an Art Nouveau villa that looks like a private property. You understand that you are in the right place just for some photos on the left wall. Opposite, the entrance door seems closed, but it is not. Just push it and you’ll enter in the hall of a beautiful villa of the beginning of the 20th century, with the original furniture: some precious antiques mixed with "modern" design peaces.  Princess Alice Blanceflor (a fairy tale name!) Boncompagni de Bildt (her father was a Swedish diplomat) will receive you in one of the drawing rooms and you'll certainly have a "coup de foudre" for her amazing full-length portrait. But this is only the beginning.

The Boncompagni Ludovisi Museum

Portrait of the Princess Alice Blanceflor

The Princess who lived in that house for half a century gave it to the Italian State in the 1972 to make it a centre of cultural activities. In the 1995, the villa, built in 1901, became a museum, as a part of the Modern Art Gallery. The collection of paintings (Belle Epoque but also Futurism), sculptures, tapestries, ceramics and other objects, high fashion clothes and refined accessories, bags, shoes etc... became more and more important, thanks to different donators. Amongst them, an extraordinary and beautiful woman, Palma Bucarelli, who ran the Museum of Modern Arts for decades, beginning from 1941, when she was only 31!  She gave to the new little museum her own collection of magnificent dresses and elegant accessories.

Palma Bucarelli

Dresses Collection

In one of the second floor rooms (that was opened recently), between an impressing stained glass window of the roman artist Duilio Cambellotti of the beginning of the century and a portrait ("The Girlfriends") from the thirties of an unusual Giorgio De Chirico, you can also admire four of the eighteen paintings of Galileo Chini called "La Primavera" (the spring), inspired by a travel in Siam and, even more, by the Viennese Gustav Klimt. These paintings decorated the room where the sculptures of a talented young Dalmatian artist, Ivan Mestrovic, were exposed, at the Venice Biennale of 1914.
You find all this and so many other splendid objects - from the end of the 19th and the 20th century - in the villa of the princess Blanceflor that, in front of a classical museum, is a sort of delicious "chamber music" that you can't miss during your Roman holidays.

"La Primavera" - Galileo Chini

"Le Amiche" - Giorgio De Chirico