Description
The Museo Stibbert is the house-museum of an English collector with a Tuscan mother, on the hill of Montughi, in Florence. Inside are over 50,000 objects: armor, weapons, paintings, porcelain, fans, even buttons, in an imaginative 19th-century villa, left just as he wanted it.
It is not a film set, even if it looks like one: a procession of knights in armor parades through the rooms, samurai with their katana, Ottoman warriors in a Moorish room. The neo-Gothic and neo-Renaissance rooms were decorated on purpose to host each piece.
The heart is the arms and armor, almost 16,000 pieces, mostly from central Europe, but also from the Middle East and Japan. Italian and German knights, above all from the 16th and 17th centuries, parade with all their equipment. The Ottomans, from the 16th century, stand in a room decorated with Moorish inlay.
Don't miss the Japanese collection, with the katanas and the armor of the last samurai, bought in the late 19th century. Among the paintings are Botticelli, Crivelli and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and there is also antique furniture, 15th-century chests and leather tapestries.
Outside is the English-style park, with paths that climb and dip through the woods, a little lake with a small neo-Egyptian temple and the ruins of a Venetian Gothic courtyard in white marble, with a handsome wellhead.
Frederick Stibbert was born in Florence in 1838 to an English father and a Tuscan mother, and grew rich on the railways in his own country. He devoted his life to the villa in Montughi, which he restored and enlarged, collecting everything.
Some accused him of being a forger, because his armorers completed the armor with a great deal of freedom. On his death, in 1906, he left everything to the city, with one condition: that the order he had devised be respected. Since 1908 the museum has been open to the public.
It was his way of saying thank you to Florence: the city's large English community, at the end of the 19th century, made up a good slice of the population.
It is not a film set, even if it looks like one: a procession of knights in armor parades through the rooms, samurai with their katana, Ottoman warriors in a Moorish room. The neo-Gothic and neo-Renaissance rooms were decorated on purpose to host each piece.
The heart is the arms and armor, almost 16,000 pieces, mostly from central Europe, but also from the Middle East and Japan. Italian and German knights, above all from the 16th and 17th centuries, parade with all their equipment. The Ottomans, from the 16th century, stand in a room decorated with Moorish inlay.
Don't miss the Japanese collection, with the katanas and the armor of the last samurai, bought in the late 19th century. Among the paintings are Botticelli, Crivelli and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and there is also antique furniture, 15th-century chests and leather tapestries.
Outside is the English-style park, with paths that climb and dip through the woods, a little lake with a small neo-Egyptian temple and the ruins of a Venetian Gothic courtyard in white marble, with a handsome wellhead.
Frederick Stibbert was born in Florence in 1838 to an English father and a Tuscan mother, and grew rich on the railways in his own country. He devoted his life to the villa in Montughi, which he restored and enlarged, collecting everything.
Some accused him of being a forger, because his armorers completed the armor with a great deal of freedom. On his death, in 1906, he left everything to the city, with one condition: that the order he had devised be respected. Since 1908 the museum has been open to the public.
It was his way of saying thank you to Florence: the city's large English community, at the end of the 19th century, made up a good slice of the population.