Le stanze dei tesori. Meraviglie dei collezionisti nei musei di Firenze (The Treasure Rooms. Collectors’ Wonders in the Florentine Museums) is a thoroughly ‘spread out’ exhibition which takes place in numerous museums in Florence and also Fiesole.

The starting point is an exhibition in Palazzo Medici Riccardi dedicated to art collecting between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, when Italians and foreigners expressed their refined tastes through their unique collections.

In a city such as Florence, with numerous important museums, museums such as the Bardini, the Stibbert, the Horne and many others are somehow considered ‘minor’ even though they are full of masterpieces.

These museums were the result of a common passion for collecting which started with the Medici and then the Lorena. This same passion continued during the decades after the unification of Italy between the 1800s and the 1900s, with a handful of adventurous antique dealers and wealthy Englishmen and Americans, who chose to live in Florence, some simply for business, others for pure admiration, inspired by the ideal of beauty represented by the city’s artistic heritage.

A golden age for huge business deals, overwhelming aestheticism and nostalgia for an idealized past, that contributed to establish in Europe and across the Atlantic the myths of the Renaissance, of Florence itself and of the longstanding local tradition of excellent artistic craftsmanship.

The Treasure Rooms. Collectors’ Wonders in the Florentine Museums offers, with an overview in Palazzo Medici Riccardi, an exhibition distributed among the various Florentine museums which are the result of those collections: Bardini, Horne, Palazzo Davanzati in the historic centre, the Fondazione Romano in Oltrarno (Piazza Santo Spirito), the Stibbert in the Rifredi district and the Bandini ‘sacred museum’ in Fiesole.

A special card will allow visitors to discover and re-discover these museums, real gems rarely touched by the vast public.

From 3rd October to 15th April 2012.

Info www.piccoligrandimusei.it