A local legend, unsupported by any documentary evidence, says that during one of his stays in Pistoia Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi (Pope Clemente IX) chose as his residence the building now known as the palazzo Rospigliosi in via Ripa del Sale. The rooms of the museum named after the last descendent of the family, Clemente Rospigliosi, are in fact known in Pistoia as the Pope's apartment in spite of the fact that Giulio belonged to a different branch of the Rospigliosi family which owned the palazzo located in via del Duca.
Giulio Rospigliosi, Pope from 1667 to 1 669, is said to have lived in these rooms while he was still Cardinal during a brief stay in Pistoia on his way back to Rome from Spain. However, Giulio's physical presence in Pistoia was less felt than the great impact he exercised through important lay and religious commissions (vs35/37).
The apartment contains furniture like the canopy bed where the Cardinal may have slept as well as a rich picture, gallery in seventeenth century taste. The forty-eight paintings that hang on the apartment walls date mostly from the 1 600s, with just two exceptions: Bathsheba's Bath by Sebastiano Vini and The Forefathers of uncertain attribution but probably by Fra' Paolino (vs46).
Mostly in frames of the period,the pictures illustrate with particular accuracy the taste of the noble art patrons who entrusted the rooms' decoration to Giancito Gimignani (vs46)the Pistoian painter who was well-regarded by Cardinal Giulio. The palazzo belonged to the Rospigliosi family since the times of Captain Giovan Battista known as Bati who bought it in the mid sixteenth century. The building, in whose rooms the Diocesan Museum (vi), has found a worthy seat, is situated on an area of the first city wall (vs8) and is surely the result of the restructu.ring of several rnedieval houses. The main entrance has an elegant stairway with a doubleramp in the late Fiorentine Mannerist style.

(n.) refers to the number of the file-card (si) means see information inside

Unknown, (mid XVIII century)
Portrait of Clemente IX

The Diocesan Museum

This museum, established in recent years in some rooms next to the Rospigliosi Museum, houses objects and religious furnishings coming from the territory of the Diocese of Pistoia. The exhibition is not permanent but revolves around a stable nucleus of rare and finely crafted pieces; on display are a series of liturgical furnishings of various periods that show the ecclesiastical community's changing needs for worship and rites. Displayed alongside chalices, monstrances, crosses and reliquaries, we find some paintings of the Pistoian school from the sixteenth century and some chasubles with "bizarre-style'° drawings on them, dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century.