The story
On the staircase leading up to the Great Hall of Palazzo Colonna, a cannonball still rests where it landed in 1849. French troops under General Oudinot fired it from the Janiculum hill while besieging the short-lived Roman Republic, and it was simply left in place.
The hall above was begun in 1654 under Cardinal Girolamo Colonna, continued by Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, and opened around 1700. Its painted vault, finished in 1702, celebrates one ancestor, Marcantonio Colonna, who commanded the papal galleys at the Battle of Lepanto against the Ottoman fleet in 1571. Mirrors, tapestries and gilded furniture fill the rooms that run off it. In 1953 the hall appeared in Roman Holiday as the reception room where Audrey Hepburn's princess meets the press in the final scene.
The palace still belongs to the Colonna family, and the gallery opens to visitors mainly on Saturday mornings. Its best-known picture is The Bean Eater by Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese painter, from the 1580s, a man at a plain table looking up mid-mouthful with his spoon raised. Nearby hangs Venus, Cupid and a Satyr by Bronzino, the Florentine court painter.
