Inside the Extraordinary Secret Bathroom of Diana at Palazzo Doria Pamphilj

PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA

What does one give a princess who already has a palace? In 1840, Prince Filippo Andrea Doria Pamphilj gave Mary Talbot an extraordinarily beautiful bathroom. Opened to the public for the first time, the Bagno di Diana is a compact fantasia of allegorical décor hidden inside one of Rome’s grandest houses.

BY EMMA BECQUE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 18 MARCH 2026

Inside Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, among Caravaggios, Titians, Velázquezes, the room that now catches the eye is not a gallery or grand hall but a petite bathroom © Isabel Bronts.

The Nymphaeum of Diana, or Bagno di Diana, newly opened to the public, was commissioned in 1840 by Prince Filippo Andrea Doria Pamphilj for his wife, Mary Alethea Beatrix Talbot, whom he had married the previous year. Daughter of the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, Mary arrived in Rome with English lineage, Catholic credentials, and, by all accounts, considerable charm. 

She was praised for her intelligence, piety, affability and philanthropy; she and her husband would later become known for hosting some of the city’s grander receptions. Simultaneously, Mary, alongside her sister, Lady Gwendoline (known as "the mother of the poor" in Rome), dedicated their short lives to aiding the less fortunate. 

Known as Princess Doria, Mary and her husband lived in the secret apartment within the family's Palazzo Doria Pamphilj. Along a corridor of masterpieces, the princess's bathroom is hidden, carved in white marble as a shell, so heavy it could not be safely installed upstairs. The room had to be built on the ground floor to avoid the structure above from being unable to bear it. That practical detail only improves the story, with the idea of architecture yielding to a husband’s overstatement. 

The sunken tiled bath is also coded as the palace’s own interpretation; it stands for the element of Water, but also for Venus, for love and for that antique ideal of beauty embodied by the bathing goddess: modestly shielding herself, emerging from the water, or washing the body that has already been made an object of admiration. So, this was not simply an aesthetic bathroom presented to a wife. It was a compliment in classical code shown through handcrafted commissions by the Prince.

Such metaphorical commissions include a series of static figures posing around the bath. Hand-painted Pompeian-style grotesques, antique statues and painted fruits of the four seasons are embedded with meaning and gesture © Isabel Bronts.

Overhead, within an elegant neoclassical framework, is an oil painting of Diana and Actaeon. The myth, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, supplies the room with its thread. So the story goes, Actaeon, the young hunter, catches sight of Diana bathing with her maidens and is punished for it by being transformed into a stag, only to be torn apart by his own pack of dogs.

Another unexpected narrative concerns the space's focus on nakedness, intimacy, and the danger of being seen. Shown through another theatrical fresco is the notion of stealing beauty by sight, with the teasing splash of water between lovers and hunting as both a noble pastime and a metaphor for erotic pursuit.

The bath below invokes Venus and ideal beauty, while the scene above warns against trespass. It is this tension between innocence and the lure of the male gaze that makes this small space all the more interesting.

What keeps the room from floating off entirely into allegory are the later family traces on display. Propped on a curtained silken dressing table are ivory-backed hair brushes belonging to Gesine Dyke, wife of Filippo Andrea VI Doria Pamphilj, and to their daughter Orietta, mother of the present heirs. 

Those brushes, therefore, bring another love story into the room, one less polished than Mary Talbot’s princely bathroom, perhaps, but no less enduring. In a small way, the room begins to hold several forms of female identity at once: the idealised wife, the abolished wife and the daughter who inherits both objects and myth.

Mary Talbot remains the first and clearest presence, probably meeting the Italian prince around Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, before marrying him in 1839.

After her premature death, he is said to have attended daily mass in her memory at Sant’Agnese, withdrawn many of his properties from social life and had box hedges clipped to spell out "Mary" at the Villa Doria Pamphilj on the Gianicolo.

The Bagno di Diana is not easily reduced, being at once a bathroom and a love token, expressed in decoration rather than jewels. In a palace of masterpieces and magnificence, it feels unusually private.