Tours / Villa and park of the Stibbert Museum: exclusive nineteenth-century private collection in a refreshing shaded garden!

A visit to the Stibbert Museum is a meeting with a nineteenth-century collector who hosts us in his house and in his park.

A secluded place, where you can feel the relief from the summer heat, outside the mass tourist routes. Even today we perceive that this building in the time of the owner of the house was not limited to being a museum, reserved for the visit of a few selected guests, but was above all the house inhabited by the family. It is the ideal museum for families, as there are objects to satisfy the curiosity and interests of all ages and where it is possible to spend, before or after the visit, a few hours in the shaded park, embellished with streams, games of water and Hellenistic and Egyptian temples.
Frederick Stibbert was born in Florence in 1838 to an English father and a Tuscan mother; he was sent to study in England where he stood out for his indiscipline and bad conduct, so much so that he had to interrupt his studies several times and then abandon them definitively.
He came from a military family, his grandfather was the English governor of Bengal in India and all the family's wealth came from his grandfather, which the young Stibbert inherited as soon as he came of age.

Stibbert was among the first in the world to take an interest in Far Eastern armoury, managing to put together a collection of armour, sabers and helmets that is unique in the world.

All this is visible inside the museum, where between the bedrooms that have remained intact and the rooms where Stibbert organized memorable parties, there are also environments built with the desire to recreate atmospheres referable to specific historical periods, such as the "Empire Room" or the “Louis XV sitting room”.
In addition to weapons and armour, the museum houses a very important series of portraits and paintings, including many Flemish paintings, two canvases by Luca Giordano, one by Bronzino and even a Madonna attributed to the school of Botticelli.
Worthy of particular note is the exhibition of precious clothes, ranging from the 16th to the 19th century: oriental robes, Turkish costumes and the exceptional suit worn by Napoleon Bonaparte when he was crowned king of Italy.
The enormous park surrounding the villa, designed in the nineteenth century by the architect Poggi, is a typical example of a romantic English park, dotted with architectural furnishings, stone animals designed and built by Stibbert himself. Rare plants imported from the East or from the numerous floral exhibitions in which Stibbert loved to participate are still preserved here today.

Rare pearl, absolutely not to be missed!