"Where is the Palazzo Farnese (the Farnese Palace), in which, in Puccini's opera ""Tosca"", the heroine confronts Scarpia, the malevolent Chief of Police?"
Palazzo Farnese France; the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., USA; the Chief Secretary's Building in Sydney; and the Royal Palace, Stockholm. In England Charles Barry's great admiration for the building led him to use it as the model for London's Reform Club. In Puccini's opera "Tosca" (1900), set in Napoleonic Rome, the heroine's confrontation with the malevolent chief of police, Scarpia, takes place in Palazzo Farnese. The Palazzo was inherited from the Farnese by the Bourbon kings of Naples, from whom the French government purchased it in 1874. Though the government of Benito Mussolini ransomed it in 1936, the French Embassy
Palazzo Farnese completed for the second Cardinal Alessandro Farnese by Giacomo della Porta's porticoed facade towards the Tiber which was finished in 1589. Following the death of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese in 1626, the palazzo stood virtually uninhabited for twenty years. At the conclusion of the War of Castro with the papacy, Duke Odoardo was able to regain his family properties, which had been sequestered. The resulting inventory (see below) is the oldest surviving complete inventory of Palazzo Farnese. After Odoardo's death, Pope Alexander VII allowed Queen Christina of Sweden to lodge in the palace for several months, but she "proved a tenant