Architectural, Cultural sights in Italy
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Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi
High Renaissance meets high risk at this 16th-century palace, which for centuries has served as the city’s casino. This might seem like an odd place to convalesce, but composer Richard Wagner was no stranger to drama, and chose to retreat here in 1882–83 to recover from an apparent bout of heart trouble and complete the 20-year effort on this Ring cycle. He succeeded, only to die of a heart attack here within a few months. You can wander into the ground-floor area during casino hours, but unless you’re staying in a high-end hotel that offers free passes, you’ll have to don formal attire and pay to see the gaming rooms. Three of the salons Wagner occupied have been set…
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Museo Revoltella
Baron Pasquale Revoltella (1795–1869) would be pleased. He not only left his three-storey neo-Renaissance mansion to Trieste, but also his private collection of then-contemporary art. With this and a hefty financial bequest from Revoltella, the Museo Revoltella was born in 1872. The city expanded the collection into two neighbouring buildings. Revoltella’s house retains the atmosphere and furnishings of the baron’s time. The baron’s flamboyant taste fills the gaudy rooms, with their chandeliers, gilded plaster, silk wallpaper and gold curtains. His collection of 19th-century Italian paintings and marble sculptures of nudes is on show here. The modern section, Palazzo…
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Albergo dei Poveri
Not impartial to a spot of PR, Bourbon king Charles VII built this giant poorhouse at a main city entrance to promote himself as enlightened and compassionate. In the process of a slow restoration, it currently houses 85 families, by now the descendants of needy families housed there after WWII. According to locals, they share the place with a number of luminous ghosts.
Charles's gesture was grand indeed - the Albergo dei Poveri (Hostel of the Poor) is Europe's largest public building. If all had gone according to architect Ferdinando Fuga's plans, though, it would have been bigger. His original designs called for a facade 600m long, with five internal courtyards. When…
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Palazzo Nonfinito
Bernardo Buontalenti started work on this residence for the Strozzi family in 1593. He and others completed the Palladian-style 1st floor and courtyard but the upper floors were never completely finished, hence the building's name. Buontalenti's window designs and other details constitute a mannerist touch that takes the building beyond the classicist rigour of the Renaissance. The obscure Museo dell'Antropologia e Etnologia is housed here.
It contains all sorts of oddments, ranging from ancient crania to arms, boats and other objects from various indigenous peoples around the world. The fusty displays are sorted roughly by regions (Africa, America, Asia, India and…
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Palazzo Labia
Now the Venice office of the RAI, Italy's national radio and TV organisation, this was once a grand 17th-century family residence. It boasts several frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo, but you must phone to arrange a visit (when open).
The Labia family had arrived from Spain and planned to make a hit among the local aristocracy. The frescoes are said to represent Tiepolo's greatest secular commission.
The grand ballroom, a two-storey-high space characterised by a gamut of architectural trompe l'oeil trickery, is the framework for two giant frescoes depicting the meeting of Anthony and Cleopatra and Cleopatra's banquet. In the latter fresco, Tiepolo included a portrait of…
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Villa Rosebery
In an area famed for its blue-ribbon real estate, Villa Rosebery is a star resident. Built in the 18th century, its history is both romantic and epic. It was used by Luigi of Bourbon in the early 19th century for his trysts with the dancer Amina Boschetti, and it was from here that King Vittorio Emanuele III left Italy in 1946 after the abolition of the monarchy.
The complex consists of three buildings - the Palazzina Borbonica, the Piccolo Foresteria and the Cabina a Mare - surrounded by lush, extensive waterside gardens.
During the Maggio dei Monumenti, the estate is sometimes open to the public, who flock here in droves to see what their taxes can buy.
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Casa di Puccini
Just north of the Piazza Cittadella is Casa di Puccini, the modest house where one of the 20th century's greatest composers was born in 1858. He lived there until studies at Milan's music conservatory beckoned him aged 22.
Inside, everyday objects tell the tale of the composer's life. Specs and pen lay poised on the desk next to the Steinway piano on which Puccini, the last in a line of celebrated Lucca musicians, wrote much of Turandot (1926) while staying at his seaside villa in Viareggio in 1921. The opera, unfinished when he died, was the last before throat cancer got the better of him after last-ditch surgery in Brussels failed in 1924.
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Palazzo Fortuny
The not-so-humble home studio of outrageous art nouveau Spanish-Venetian designer Mariano Fortuny y Madrazo features three floors swagged with Fortuny’s printed textiles, mood-lit with his signature patterned glass lanterns. Today these sumptuous halls host rotating exhibits by modern artisans, inevitably upstaged by Fortuny’s preserved top-floor studio and 1910 sketches of bohemian goddess frocks that could rule red carpets today. If these salons inspire decor schemes of your own, check out Fortuny Tessuti Artistici in Giudecca, where wall coverings are still hand-printed according to Fortuny’s top-secret methods.
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Chiesa di Sant'Anna
Opposite the Complesso del Calvario complex is the Chiesa di Sant'Anna, connected to the Capuchin friary in Palazzo Sannicandro. Padre Pio, canonised after his death in 1968, lived here for six months before moving to San Giovanni Rotondo. Apparently he relocated for health reasons, and because his nocturnal battles with demons kept the other brothers awake.
You can visit his bedroom - a spartan affair comprising a narrow cot, a writing desk, and cloths and gloves stained with blood from his stigmata wounds. There's even a vial of his pleural fluids on show.
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Palazzo Mirto
Just off Piazza Marina is one of the only palazzi open to the public, Palazzo Mirto . Considering Palermitan extravagances, the palazzo is actually pretty modest. Its walls are covered in acres of silk and velvet wallpaper, and vast embroidered wall hangings, while its floors are paved in coloured marbles and mosaics.
The real extravagance, however, is the tiny Salottino Cinese (Chinese Salon) full of black lacquer, silken wallpaper and a rather conceited ceiling painting of European aristos viewing the room from above.
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Casa Rodolfo Siviero
This shady mansion on the Arno was until 1999 the house of the family of Rodolfo Siviero, an art collector of eclectic taste and, during and after WWII, a key figure in the recovery of art stolen from Florence by the Nazis. The collection is a hodgepodge, ranging from Renaissance church furniture to Roman busts, from Etruscan objects to paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, a personal friend who on the back of one work wrote that the painting was a gift but that Siviero had to pay for the frame!
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Duomo
The outstanding feature of the pink-and-white 12th-century Duomo is its three-tiered marble facade, combining Romanesque and Gothic styles on the lower and upper tiers respectively. Much of the upper level is a graphic representation of the Final Judgment and heaven and hell (notice the four figures clambering out of their coffins). Astride a pair of handsome lions at the base squats an oddly secular duo, mouths agape at the effort of holding it all up.
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Villa dei Misteri
On Via Consolare takes you out of the town through Porta Ercolano. Continue past Villa di Diomede, turn right, and you'll come to the Villa dei Misteri, one of the most complete structures left standing in Pompeii. The Dionysiac Frieze, the most important fresco still on site, spans the walls of the large dining room. One of the largest paintings from the ancient world, it depicts the initiation of a bride-to-be into the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine.
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Casa di Giulietta
Just off Via Giuseppe Mazzini, central Verona's main shopping street, is the Casa di Giulietta. Never mind that Romeo and Juliet were fictional characters with no resemblance to Veronese nobility, and that there’s hardly room for two on the narrow stone balcony. Romantics flock to this 14th century house to add their lovelorn pleas to the graffiti on the courtyard causeway and rub the right breast of the bronze statue of Juliet for better luck next time.
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Palazzo Municipale
Linked to the castle by an elevated passageway, the 13th-century crenellated Palazzo Municipale was the Este family home until they moved next door to the castle in the late 15th century. Nowadays, it’s largely occupied by administrative offices but you can wander around its twin courtyards. The entrance is watched over by copper statues of Nicolò III and his less-wayward son Borso – they’re 20th-century copies but nonetheless imposing.
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Palazzo Cervini
The Renaissance Palazzo Cervini was built for Cardinal Marcello Cervini, the future Pope Marcellus II. The unusual U-shape at the front - most palazzi have austere, straight fronts - also incorporates a courtyard into the façade design and appears to have been another Sangallo creation. A few blocks further along on the left, is the Chiesa del Gesù, bleak brick outside and elaborately Baroque within.
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Pinacoteca
From the internal courtyard of Palazzo Comunale, climb the stairs to the Pinacoteca, which features paintings from the Sienese and Florentine schools of the 12th to 15th centuries. In the main room, the great poet Dante addressed the San Gimignano’s council, urging it to support the Guelph cause. The room contains an early 14th-century fresco of the Maestà by Lippo Memmi.
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Museo Amedeo Lia
La Spezia’s star attraction is the Museo Amedeo Lia, a fine-arts museum in a restored 17th-century friary. The collection covers the 13th to 18th centuries and includes paintings by masters such as Tintoretto, Montagna, Titian and Pietro Lorenzetti. Also on show are Roman bronzes and ecclesiastical treasures such as Limoges crucifixes and illuminated musical manuscripts.
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Poggio Imperiale
From Porta Romana a straight boulevard, Viale del Poggio Imperiale, leads directly to this once-grand Medici residence, the 'Imperial Hill'. The neoclassical appearance is due to changes wrought in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is now home to a high school and girls boarding school. If you turn up alone you will probably be able to wander around this somewhat neglected site.
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Palazzo Tolomei
North of Loggia dei Mercanti on Banchi di Sopra, the 13th-century Palazzo Tolomei dominates Piazza Tolomei. Further north, Piazza Salimbeni is bounded by Palazzo Tantucci, Gothic Palazzo Salimbeni (prestigious head office of Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank), and the Renaissance Palazzo Spannocchi, from where 29 finely carved busts stare down at you from beneath the eaves.
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Arte dei Giudici e dei Notai
Dating to the 14th century, with Roman foundations, this building was once home to the judges and lawyers' guild. One of the city's premier restaurants, Alle Murate, is lodged beneath wonderfully restored frescoes. By day you can visit the place as a monument, possibly combining with a light lunch. By night you can dine beneath the ceiling frescoes in romantic style.
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Juliet's House
Romeo and Juliet may have been fictional, but at Juliet's House (Casa di Giulietta) you can swoon beneath what popular myth says was her balcony or, if in need of a new lover, approach a bronze statue of Juliet and rub her right breast for good luck. Others have made their eternal mark by adding to the scribbled love graffiti on the courtyard walls.
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Casa del Fauno
Turn into Via Stabiana to see some of Pompeii's grandest houses. Turn left into Via della Fortuna for the Casa del Fauno, Pompeii's largest private house. Named after the small bronze statue in the impluvium (rain tank), it was here that early excavators found Pompeii's greatest mosaics, most of which are now in Naples' Museo Archeologico Nazionale.
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Pinacoteca Nazionale
Named after the diamond-shaped ashlar stones on its facade, the Palazzo dei Diamanti was built for Sigismondo d’Este late in the 15th century. Regarded as the family’s grandest palazzo, it is now home to the Pinacoteca Nazionale and its interesting collection of paintings from the Ferrarese and Bolognese schools.
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Casa Galleria
An unexpected sight in moody medieval Florence is this Art Nouveau townhouse, built by Giovanni Micheluzzi in 1911 in a rare moment of original 20th-century Florentine architecture. The striking and curvaceous façade is liberally laced with glass and iron - one of the few buildings of its genre in Florence that hasn't been pulled down.
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