Museum sights in Florence
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Giardino di Boboli
Despite the volumes of visitors and a slightly shop-worn mien, the Boboli gardens remain both a marvel of Tuscan Renaissance landscape architecture and, in its further reaches, a fine escape from the tourist hordes. Perhaps its most impressive feature is the stately VialedeiCipressi, a grand, cypress-lined avenue that leads down to Isolotto, a marvellous ornamental pond adorned with a marble Neptune and nymphs and, in warmer weather, fragrant citrus trees. Nearer the Palazzo Pitti, a fleshy Venus by Giambologna rises from the waves in the Grotta del Buontalenti, a fanciful grotto designed by the eponymous artist. Don’t miss the haunting ‘face’ sculpture (1998) by Polish s…
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Museo del Bargello
Crowds clamour to see David, but few rush to Michelangelo’s early works in the Bargello. The artist was just 22 when a cardinal commissioned him to create the drunken Bacchus displayed in the ground-floor hall. His large roundel of the Madonna and Child with the infant St John, known as Tondo Pitti, portrays the halo-bare pair in a very human light. However, the collection’s most illustrious member is another David. Donatello’s bronze version from the 1440s, the first freestanding nude to be sculpted since classical times, is elegant and slenderly androgynous – a curious contrast from Michelangelo’s he-man version. These are just a few highlights of an extraordinary c…
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Museo/Chiesa di San Marco
Endowed generously by Cosimo il Vecchio, this former Dominican monastery was an important font of early Renaissance art thanks mostly to its most famous resident, Fra Angelico. The attention to perspective and realistic portrayal of nature have lead critics to call Fra Angelico’s Deposizione di Cristo (Deposition of Christ; 1432) one of the first true paintings of the Renaissance. Fra Angelico was commissioned to produce this painting only because the original painter died. The early-Renaissance architecture of Michelozzo, especially his Chiostro di Sant’Antonio (1440), is also impressive. However, it is the monks’ cells that are most haunting. At the top of the stairs …
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Museo dell’Opera del Duomo
Light, airy and surprisingly overlooked by the crowds, the Cathedral Museum, behind the cathedral, safeguards works that once adorned the Duomo, Battistero and campanile. The museum begins with a history of the Duomo told in the best English-language signage in Florence. Under the glass-topped courtyard you’ll find the original version of Ghiberti’s awe-inspiring masterpiece – the Porta del Paradiso (Doors of Paradise). Designed for the Battistero, the doors took 27 painstaking years to complete and are considered a seminal work of the early Renaissance for their naturalism and innovative use of perspective. Other masterworks in the museum include Michelangelo’s P…
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Museo dei Ragazzi
Based in Palazzo Vecchio, this museum organises activities and educational workshops for kids here and in the Museo di Storia della Scienza and Museo Stibbert. Budding historians and their parents can hang out with actors dressed up as Cosimo I and Eleonora de Toledo - kids are invited to dress up as their kids (Bia and Garcia) and play with the kinds of toys the two grand-ducal imps used to enjoy.
Other activities include building and taking apart models of the Palazzo Vecchio and of bridges (for those children with an engineering bent), and peering through a remake of Michelangelo's binoculars. Another possibility is to follow around Giorgio Vasari (or rather a lookalik…
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Museo di Santa Maria Novella
Hidden off to the left of the Santa Maria Novella’s facade, the Chiostro Verde (Green Cloister) takes its name from the green earthen base used for its frescoes. The best are by Paolo Uccello, including the outstanding Il Diluvio Universale (Great Flood), from the 1420s. Nearby, the Cappellone degli Spagnoli (Spanish Chapel) is crammed with well-preserved frescoes by Andrea di Bonaiuto from the 1360s. They tell a complex and abstract allegory covering everything from civil law and Pythagorean geometry to the triumph of the Catholic Church.
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Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce
The Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce features a Crucifixion by Cimabue, restored to the best degree possible after flood damage in 1966 when more than 4m of water inundated the Santa Croce area. Other highlights include Donatello’s gilded bronze statue St Louis of Toulouse (1424), originally placed in a tabernacle on the Orsanmichele facade; a wonderful terracotta bust of St Francis receiving the stigmata by the della Robbia workshop; and frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi, including The Last Supper (1333).
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Galleria del Costume
Few visitors make the effort to visit the Pitti’s Galleria del Costume, thus missing its absolutely fascinating, if somewhat macabre, display of the semi-decomposed burial clothes of Cosimo I, his wife Eleonora di Toledo and their son Don Garzia. Considering their age and the fact that they were buried for centuries, Eleonora’s gown and silk stockings are remarkably preserved, as are Cosimo’s satin doublet and wool breeches and Garzia’s doublet, beret and short cape.
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Museo Archeologico
Skip the middling collection of artefacts from around the ancient world and head straight to the museum’s Etruscan collection, gathered largely from the region around Florence. Poor labelling and clinical glass-front cabinets feel dustily Victorian, but the collection of statuary, ceramics and jewellery is excellent. Look out for the monstrous bronze Chimera – a part lion, part goat and part snake cast in bronze and considered one of the masterpieces of Etruscan art.
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Museo di Storia Naturale
Four sections of the Natural History Museum are scattered across one of the central university campuses. The ticket office is in the paleontology and geology section, a musty old museum replete with skeletons of ancient beasts, models of same, prehistoric tusks and glass cases laden with fossils. The equally ancient botany (visits by appointment only) and mineralogy sections are in separate buildings a short way down the same drive from the faculty street entrance.
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Museo di Storia della Scienza
Perfect tonic for the art-jaded tourist, this museum is dedicated to Tuscany's men of science, particularly Galileo Galilei, whose telescope, lens and finger are on display. In his memory, Florence founded an Academy of Experimentation and you can see early thermometers and barometers invented by the group, as well as gadgets and innovations, including a mechanical calculator, from around Europe.
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Museo Stibbert
Florence's most bizarre museum, housed in a crumbling 14th-century Victorian-decorated palazzo, contains the legacy of Federico Stibbert (1838-1906), fan of military paraphernalia and hoarder extraordinaire. Expect everything from a Botticelli painting and magnificent 16th- to 19th-century armour to quaint, curious and useless junk. There's a nice shady garden to rest and regain your composure.
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Museo Horne
One of the many eccentric Brits who made Florence home in the early 20th century, Herbert Percy Horne bought and renovated this Renaissance palazzo, then installed his eclectic collection of 14th- and 15th-century Italian art, ceramics, furniture and other oddments. There are a few works by masters such as Giotto and Filippo Lippi. More interesting is the furniture, some of it exquisite.
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Museo Casa Buonarroti
Though Michelangelo never lived in Casa Buonarotti, his heirs devoted some of the artist’s hard-earned wealth to the construction of this 17th-century palazzo to honour his memory. The little museum contains frescoes of the artist’s life and two of his most important early works – the serene, bas-relief Madonna of the Stairs and the unfinished Battle of the Centaurs.
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Museo Zoologico La Specola
This charmingly fusty zoological museum is a taxidermist’s dream, with room after room of stuffed animals of every shape, size and origin. The strong of stomach should not miss its macabre collection of wax sculptures of human bodies dissected and in various states of disease. The hall of horrors was created to train 19th-century medical students.
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Museo dell'Antropologia e Etnologia
Italy's first anthropology and ethnology museum is housed in the Palazzo Nonfinito (Unfinished Palace), which was started by Buontalenti in 1593 in the Mannerist style. It was established in 1869 and exhibits unusual goodies such as Ecuadorian shrunken heads and obscure musical instruments collected by roaming Italians.
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Museo Casa di Dante
The Museo Casa di Dante was built in 1910 above the foundations of Dante's dwelling. Up the road, 11th-century Chiesa di Santa Margherita , dubbed Chiesa di Dante, is where the poet first spied muse Beatrice Portinari and wed Gemma Donati; both women are buried in the church.
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Il Genio di Leonardo
Odd how two such museums have landed in Florence. This one is very similar to Le Macchine di Leonardo though slightly less complete and a trifle more expensive. As in the other, you can see life-size models of Leonardo da Vinci's big ideas, from a glider to a tank. Whatever you do, do not visit both museums!
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Museo di Firenze com’Era
Tucked behind Brunelleschi’s dome, this melancholic little museum tells the story of Florence through a series of paintings from the Renaissance through to the 19th century. A newer annexe also displays prehistoric, Etruscan and Roman artefacts, including a diorama of the city as it looked in Roman times.
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Opificio delle Pietre Dure
Founded in 1588 to support the Florentine art of pietre dure (mosaic-like inlays of marble and semi-precious stones), this charming little museum explains how the works are created and includes remarkable examples of the craft, from portraits and trompe l’oeil tabletops to panoramic landscapes.
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Museo delle Porcellane
Housed in the airy casino at the top of the Giardino di Boboli, this museum contains a varied collection of fine porcelain, including fine pieces from Sèvres, Meissen and Vincennes, collected down the ages by illustrious tenants of Palazzo Pitti.
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Macchine di Leonardo
Pop by here for a squiz at some grand-scale models of some of Leonardo da Vinci's more far-fetched ideas, silly things like flying machines, a bicycle, a glider, a tank and other objects that were, actually, centuries ahead of their time.
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Museo Marino Marini
Influenced by ancient Etruscans as well as modernist peers, the bronzes of Marini fill the bright nave of a former church, into which architects have smuggled a mini–brutalist museum. Exhibitions of contemporary art are first-rate.
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Museo degli Argenti
The ground-floor Museo degli Argenti often has no silver on display. Go figure. Come instead to see the elaborately frescoed audience chambers, which host temporary exhibitions.
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