The way I most like to experience the museum is to forget about seeking out the “name” painters and focus on paintings I like — only afterward checking the booklet to see who created them. In that way you can more deeply appreciate work with which you are only vaguely acquainted; on this visit, I was profoundly moved by the canvases of Annibale Carracci, who was one of Caravaggio’s rivals. Better yet, you can discover artists with whom you are entirely unfamiliar but whose work speaks to you in a very personal way, as does the setting in which they are shown; this time, I was particularly struck by the gentle landscapes of Herman van Swanevelt and by Filippo Napoletano’s lurid vision of demons and monsters in hell.

The smallest, by far the strangest, and in my experience, the least likely museum in Rome at which you are likely to meet another visitor is the Museo delle Anime dei Defunti, alternately known as Museo delle Anime del Purgatorio, in Sacro Cuore, said to be the city’s only neo-Gothic church. On the banks of the Tiber, not far from the Castel Sant’Angelo, the church borders the residential Prati neighborhood, which I like for the Parisian ambience of its stately apartment buildings and for its specialty grocery shops where you can join the Romans deciding between varieties of artisanal honey and salumi brought in from the provinces.

The museum’s name can be translated roughly as the museum of souls in purgatory. The legend is that in 1897 the church suffered a fire in one of its chapels, after which the priest saw the face of a soul in pain — an image that the flames had scorched into the wall behind the altar. (A photo of this image can be viewed in the museum.) The priest naturally came to the conclusion that the face belonged to one of the unquiet dead desperate to get in touch with the living, and he began to make a collection of objects that proved his theory. The tiny collection (an exhibit occupying one wall of a side chapel) offers documentary evidence of cases in which the dead used fire to make their wishes known — to persuade their family and friends to say more prayers for them and thus hasten their release from purgatory. Included in the collection are hand- and fingerprints scorched into a variety of humble objects: a sleeve, a chemise, a prayer book, a pillow, a nightcap, an apron. There is also a photocopy of a 10-lire bank note left by a deceased priest to pay for extra Masses to be said for his soul. Wall texts, translated into several languages, explain the particular circumstances that surrounded each of these unearthly visitations.

One online tourist site describes the museum as “of oddball interest only.” But I find this intimate and peculiar collection to be powerfully affecting and touching. And it will certainly give you something to tell your friends at home, who may have visited the Sistine Chapel but are far less likely to have discovered the Museum of Souls in Purgatory.