The two ancient “Tozzoni houses” were transformed into the present palace between 1726 and 1738. Probably the project was designed by the architect Alfonso Torreggiani from Bologna under the supervision of Domenico Trifogli, a Ticinese architect.

The building shows all the characters of the Bolognese architectural language: the façade with a huge doorway, the magnificent hall on the main floor which is accessed by the spectacular grand staircase. It is decorated by the “stucco” of Giovanni Battista Verda and embellished by statues of the Flemish Francis Janssens.

During this period it was also renovated the west wing: on the ground floor the rooms were resized and on the first floor it was built and decorated the “Late baroque Flat” according to the French taste of living of the early Eighteenth-century. This consists of three rooms and it was built for the marriage between Giuseppe Tozzoni and Carlotta Beroaldi, a relative of the future Pope Benedict XIV.

In 1818 the east wing of the first floor was restored in the occasion of the marriage between the Earl Giorgio Barbato and Orsola Bandini from Faenza. The “Empire flat” was created with a uniformity of taste, marked hereby the neoclassical style, thanks to two artists from Faenza: Angelo Bassi made furniture and Pasquale Saviotti decorated the walls, inspired by archaeological themes.

The public and private history of Tozzoni family is conserved in the Archive on the first floor , a treasure trove of the memory and the “secrets” of this family that lived for five centuries the palace in “Via della Fortezza” (now Garibaldi) , until 1978 when Sofia Serristori Tozzoni, the last heiress, donated the building and its collections to the city.

The Tozzoni family moved from Lucca in Tuscany to Imola during the Fifteenth century and immediately became the protagonist of the political city life as the jurist Pietro Paolo Tozzoni who was “gonfaloniere” of Imola, ambassador to the popes Giulio II and Leone X and judge of the Republic of Florence. The family increased its wealth thanks to important marriages. They are celebrated in the coats of arms that you can see on the walls and on the furniture of the palace. Here the rampant deer of Tozzoni family is flanked by the insignia of the most powerful families of Imola, Modena, Rome and Florence.

The earl title was acquired by Cyrus Tozzoni in 1666 and his son Francesco rebuilt the Tozzoni’s ancient houses on the basis of the changing demands of taste and prestige.

The futurePope Benedetto XIV, the Kings Carlo Emanuele III and finally in 1908 Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy were welcomed by Tozzoni family into the palace.

The Tozzoni’s house museum opened on 1981 and still retains the charm of a house inhabited by the same family for five centuries. Its perfectly conserved flats are a rare document of the ways of living over the time. The visit offers an untouched testimony of earls’ public and private life that here took place.

You can visit there presentation rooms as the great hall and the apartments on the first floor, the dining room, the library and the yellow lounge on the ground floor. There are also domestic spaces that tell about the daily life in the palace: you can see furnished kitchens and cellars and finally the courtyards with the wells and the big tank. The nearly two hundred paintings from the art collection (pictures of Passerotti, Fontana, Cesi, Donnini, Beccadelli, Viani, Stern, etc.) are displayed among the objects of applied art, furniture, family memories. In the cellars there is a ethnography collection made up of objects, tools and machineries that had come from the estates and farms of the earls. Everything talks about the tastes and stories of the family that characterized the architectural and furniture choises that changed the palace over the centuries.