Palazzo Sciarra Colonna di Carbognano

The palace complex presents a courtyard‑centred plan that grew by accretion as the family adapted two original houses into a single urban palace. The principal frontage faces a stretch of Via del Corso formerly known as the Piazza di Sciarra. The main façade is restrained and has been linked to a late Renaissance hand. Its high central portal, known as the portal of Carboniani, has long attracted attention because tradition held it to be carved from a single block of marble, and the doorway has been associated with the elevation of the Palestrina fief to a principality in 1571. The portal’s sculptural quality and its celebrated monolithic reputation are part of its recorded identity, though precise authorship remains uncertain.

The Sciarra Gallery is a striking later insertion that traverses an internal courtyard beneath a glass dome. Built in the late 1800s and physically attached to the palace, the passage functions as a covered urban walkway and is notable for the painted decoration that covers its courtyard walls. Upper‑floor decoration in the gallery follows the Liberty, or Art Nouveau, style and consists of frescoed scenes that portray everyday activities together with personifications of female virtues such as Prudence, Strength, Patience and Generosity. These wall paintings form the gallery’s principal decorative attraction.

Several interior rooms retain high‑style 18th‑century work. A Library and a Mirrored Cabinet were executed in the Rococo manner for Cardinal Prospero Colonna di Sciarra; other rooms were frescoed during the same 18th‑century refurbishment. These spaces display the palace’s period interior character and were later integrated into 19th‑century decorative schemes when the gallery and adjoining theatre were added and when upper‑floor fresco programs in Art Nouveau taste were introduced.

Archaeological remains associated with older Roman infrastructure have been found in and near the palace. Fragments of the Arch of Claudius, a structure tied to the Aqua Virgo aqueduct, were discovered in 1641; some of those fragments lay within the palace cellars until they were exposed again in 1897. At the north end of the site an 18th‑century Arch of Carbognano once provided a street entrance toward Via delle Muratte; that arch was removed in the 19th century during urban remodelling. The smaller palazzetto that once formed part of the complex was rebuilt after the 1788 fire and then taken down at the end of the 1800s to allow the opening of Via Marco Minghetti.

The complex underwent conservation and repair at the end of the 20th century, which restored and stabilised both the palace interiors and the attached gallery and theatre. The palace, the glass‑roofed passage and the theatre now stand as an integrated group that preserves elements from the late Renaissance through the Art Nouveau period, with archaeological fragments of the Roman aqueduct revealed in the palace cellars during the course of nineteenth‑century works.