This might seem incredible to readers outside Cuba. But Napoleon Bonaparte's mortuary mask is on this Caribbean island, brought by Dr. Francesco Antommarcci, the last physician of the Santa Elena's prisoner. And that's not the only artifact found in this blend of history and culture that makes Havana's Napoleonic Museum quite a stunning standout.

Napoleon Bonaparte is in itself a name teeming with different and estranged historic elements. Some loved him for imperial ambitions till the day they found death in the battlefield; others hated his guts for exactly the same reasons. Nobody ever passed up the man who buried the 1789 French Revolution, who built a new empire and paved the way for the resurrection of the French monarchy.

His legacy –regardless of all this and maybe as a result of it, too- outlives time and distance only to get realized in the Cuban capital in the form of a museum that introduces visitors to the realm of grandeur and self-conceitedness of the Great Corsican, let alone being a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take a closer peek at the European spirit of the early 19th century.

Absolutely none of Napoleon's contemporaries managed to ward off the influence of the man who won in Austerlitz. He oozed power, order and military mightiness. But above all, he left everlasting footprints in the arts and decoration of his time, objects that helped make his greatness as a politician and military genius who starred in so many crucial developments in the history of Europe prevail through the years for forever more.

The Napoleonic Museum, the only one of its kind in Latin America, is lodged in the classical atmosphere of a Florentine palace packed with lavish gardens, marble staircases, foyers, halls and columns on the corner of San Miguel and Ronda streets, right on the same knoll where the University of Havana campus is perched. More than 7,000 pieces related to Napoleon –including oleos, documents, books, robes, bronze works, porcelains, furniture and weapons- are scattered around the museum's four stories. Among the most valuable objects; a lamp that Napoleon himself gave Josephine as a gift, the portrait that Polish Countess Maria Waleska ordered to be painted when her lover was exiled on the island of Elba, and an exceptional piece: the mortuary mask that Dr. Antommarcci brought to Cuba after the former emperor passed away.

The eye-catching and intimate library has over 4,000 books on its shelves, many of them entirely devoted to Napoleon's life and military campaigns, plus an array of other volumes written between the 16th and 19th centuries that makes any researcher's delightful day. All by itself, the mansion housing the museum is an attraction, too. Its finesse features Italian marbles, lovely window panes, a magnificent ceiling and superb wrought-iron gates and graters. Built in 1928, the place was the home of Italian-born lawyer, politician and writer Orestes Ferrara. The memory of this man reeks of an ill-fated allegiance to the tyranny of former Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado, to whom he served as an ambassador and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

As an author, Mr. Ferrara wrote the biographies of Machiavelli and Pope Alexander VI, two works that gave him a name of sort. At least the latter –Pope Borgia- is a book that marked a literary event at its time for it provided a different look to what most scholars believed back in the 1930s about this controversial character of the Roman Catholic Church.

Havana's Napoleonic Museum –founded in 1961- was the very first museological institution opened by the fledgling revolution. All original samples came from Julio Lobo's collection, a sugar industry tycoon who once owned more than a dozen sugar mills in Cuba. Mr. Lobo had gathered those objects and artifacts since an early age as his father urged him to read and delve into about Napoleon's life, empire and time in history.

Now, the personal liking of a long gone well-to-do man illustrates the collective taste of those who want to reach out and touch history with their own hands.