The House of Pamphili (often with the final long i orthography, Pamphilj) was one of the papal families deeply entrenched in Catholic Church, Roman and Italian politics of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Like the reign of his predecessor Pope Urban VIII (of the equally papal Barberini family), Innocent X's rule was littered with examples of nepotism.

Palazzo Pamphilj, by the architects Girolamo Rainaldi and Francesco Borromini, is located in the heart of Rione Parione, south of the church of Sant'Agnese in Agone in Piazza Navona, the Pamphili neighborhood of Rome, named for this reason Isola de' Pamphili.

From 1652, on Saturdays and Sundays in August, the piazza was turned into a lake to celebrate the Pamphili family, a festival that was suppressed in 1866.

In 1634 the Pamphilj bought the baronial palace in Valmontone, a town near Palestrina, outside (Rome): Camillo Pamphili was determined to create a sort of new “ideal city”, so the palace and the main church were rebuilt and decorated by important baroque artists, like the architect Mattia de Rossi (who rose to prominence under the mentorship of Bernini), and the painters Pier Francesco Mola, Gaspard Dughet, Guglielmo Cortese, Francesco Cozza and Mattia Preti.