Palazzo Farnese - Puccini's Tosca

Puccini's Tosca

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 remains, under a 99-year lease for which they pay the Italian Government a symbolic fee of 1 euro per month.