Historical background of the palace
Palazzo Besso is located in an area of particular historical and monumental importance in the town, where life has been uninterrupted from Roman times to the present day. We have news of the presence of the Rustici family houses on the site of the current Besso Palace since the 15th century. This important Roman family can be traced back to the Middle Ages, but seems to have assumed particular importance in the early Renaissance with the notary Cencio, who was a learned humanist and a man in the service of the Curia. In the 16th century the Rustici family began to get into debt. At the end of the century, only Francesco was left of the Rustici family, without heirs, and he was helped to cope with the growing economic difficulties by his brother-in-law Marcello Vestri, an important Curia figure with the post of Secretary of the Briefs. He took control of the building, in which Francesco also continued to live, and had important masonry work carried out by the Lombard master builder Battista Mola. Francesco Rustici's indebtedness to Ottaviano Vestri, Marcello's son, was such that in 1606 he had to sell the old palace, which had been bought by Cardinal Ottavio Paravicini for a considerable sum.
Immediately after he bought it, he enlarged it and had it transformed, certainly in the rooms facing what is now Via dei Cestari. Some documents tell us that Father Domenico Paganelli, a Dominican architect who was also active in the apostolic palace in those years and who had already worked for Marcello Vestri in his Tuscolan villa, worked for him. The important Carlo Maderno appears as an expert witness for the cardinal in a deed of purchase, so that one may wonder if this architect had executed the portal to the Church of the Stigmata for Paravicini, which Baglione refers to him, although linking it to the commission of the Olgiati family, the subsequent owners of the building. In this case too, the original work has been greatly altered in the following centuries.
Paravicini also had some rooms of his residence decorated, which already had several other painted rooms, in particular the gallery towards the Church of the Stigmata. In 1620 the palazzo was purchased by Settimio Oliati, an important banker, and then passed to his son Giovan Battista. As early as 1636, he rented it to the Strozzi family, who bought it in 1649. The palace remained in the hands of this famous Florentine family for more than two centuries, becoming larger and more ornate.
Luigi di Giovan Battista, the first owner of the palace, greatly enriched his family's fortunes through two marriages to rich heiresses.
The family's considerable wealth meant that between the 17th and 18th centuries the building was further enlarged, transformed and sumptuously decorated. One of the architects who worked on the building was Sebastiano Cipriani, who reconstructed the external facades to give a unified appearance to the facades of two palaces that had been merged at the end of the 17th century. The building then reached its final, highly complex structure, as the old plans show, articulated around four courtyards, with a long wing extending northwards, where Largo Argentina now stands.
The architectural structure was not distinguished for its elegance and design rigour, but the building was admired for its interior decorations and sumptuous furnishings.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the palace housed a famous museum created by Leone Strozzi, who had acquired the collection of Francesco Corvino, a man linked to the Lyncean entourage, mainly based on naturalistic finds but also containing ethnographic objects and antiquities. The museum was famous above all for its gems, coins and marbles, but also for shells and other natural finds, as well as many scientific and archaeological curiosities, including an Egyptian sistrum, a nail from the Pantheon and Christian antiquities.
Among the countless works of art that crowded the luxuriously furnished rooms of the residence, one must at least mention the famous early sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicting Saint Lawrence on the gridiron, which was brought here in the 18th century after having been in the family's villa on the Esquiline for about a century.
In the nineteenth century, in the absence of the owners, and emptied of most of its treasures, the building was subdivided and rented out, and in 1877 also hung in the area towards Via dei Cestari.
In 1882 the Strozzi family sold it to the Banca Tiberina, which transformed the palazzo with major works that were completed in 1886.

In 1905 Marco Besso bought the entire building and adapted the first floor as a home for his family, organising life around the library, which he then left, together with the property of the palazzo, to the Foundation he created in 1918.