The story
On the top floor of Palazzo Eroli in Narni, a hill town in southern Umbria, hangs a large altarpiece by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the Florentine master in whose workshop the young Michelangelo trained. Finished in 1486, it shows the Coronation of the Virgin with rows of saints gathered on either side, and below runs a strip of small scenes, among them Saint Francis receiving the stigmata and Saint Jerome doing penance in the desert. It was painted for the church of San Girolamo in Narni and commissioned by Cardinal Berardo Eroli, who did not live to see it finished.
The palace was the Eroli family's own house. Today the town library fills the ground floor, an archaeological section the floor above, and the picture gallery the top. The gallery's other prize is an Annunciation by Benozzo Gozzoli, another Florentine, where ivy leaves worked into the decoration point to the Eroli coat of arms. Downstairs, the archaeology rooms keep an Egyptian mummy with its decorated wooden coffin, given to the town by a collector and traveller in the 1930s.
