Aldrovandi Palace (Palazzo Aldrovandi), also known as Montanari Palace, is a historic building in Bologna.
It was built in place of the fifteenth-century Casa Aldrovandi. The current residence was built at the behest of Cardinal Pompeo Aldrovandi, starting in 1725, based on a project by Francesco Maria Angelini, who however died in 1731. The works were completed in 1752 by Alfonso Torreggiani, who built the facade. The work is considered the best example of architecture of the period in Bologna: with great decorative imagination, Torreggiani inserted numerous curvilinear elements in the Rococo style, highlighting the white Istrian stone on the red brick masonry. The same architects also built a summer residence for the cardinal in those years, the Palazzo Sessa-Aldrovandi in Mirabello.
Shortly after its completion, around 1755 the noble floor was frescoed by Vittorio Maria Bigari together with his trusted quadraturist Stefano Orlandi. The works, still visible today in the atrium, on the vault of the staircase, in the "gallery of statues" and in the main hall, have as their subject the events of the Aldrovandi family, a renowned senatorial house for centuries. Inside there was also a collection of marble busts and reliefs, but in the second half of the nineteenth century they were sold to the British Museum.
In 1795 Filippo Aldrovandi Marescotti started a ceramic factory there. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the building was sold: it thus became the property of the Torlonia family and, in 1860, of Camillo Montanari, who had the merit, together with his son Francesco and the heirs, of preserving the rooms and the eighteenth-century works . During the twentieth century it housed the Municipal Popular Library, now in the Sala Borsa, the Cineteca, transferred to the former Tobacco Factory, and the Circolo della Stampa, which no longer exists. On the ground floor it housed the Bologna Women's Center, now moved to Santa Cristina
Aldrovandi Palace - Montanari Palace
Address: Via Galliera 8, 40121
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