Palazzo Sorbello House Museum

Palazzo Bourbon di Sorbello stands in Piazza Piccinino in the historical centre of Perugia. Following its original construction in the 16th century it belonged to various local noble families until it was acquired by Marchesi Bourbon di Sorbello in 1780.

The Palazzo’s entrance area features an unusual external wooden parquet which is rare in Italy and the only one of its kind in Umbria. This type of wooden flooring, composed of small blocks of turkey oak with bevelled edges, was used to muffle the sound of carriage wheels entering the palace.

At the top of the great staircase you gain access to the piano nobile (Italian for noble or principal floor) of the Marchesi residence featuring frescoed vaults, exquisite furnishings with 18th century chandeliers and housing a rich variety of artworks and collections of rare books. The paintings on view include landscapes, family portraits and notable works by great foreign and Italian painters such as Carlo Labruzzi, Francesco Appiani, Pietro Benvenuti e François-Xavier Fabre. There are also a variety of prints from different periods depicting a range of subjects among which you may remark a series of rare 18th century etchings of Tuscan proverbs by the engraver Carlo Lasinio.

The library hosts more than twenty-five thousand volumes including rare editions such as Spera Mundi, an astronimcal treatise dated 1478, and the 1770 edition of the Encyclopédie française by Diderot et d’Alembert. The extensive porcelain collection includes a 19th century Ginori table service and an original set of Qianlong Chinese porcelain (approx. 1775) bearing the family crest. Also on display are a number of embroidered textiles from the Scuola (Umbrian Embroidery school) founded by Marchesa Romeyne Robert Ranieri di Sorbello in 1904 at the Villa del Pischiello, on the shores of Lago Trasimeno.

Touring the collections provides a privileged apercu of the tastes and intellectual life of the Umbrian aristocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries. Visitors enter via an elegant salon with frescoed vaults and thence an outdoor terrace providing a wide and enthralling panorama of the lower city, hills and environs of Perugia.