Villa Tintori is situated in the northern outskirts of the Province of Prato near the town of Figline. The building, dating to the early XX century, was purchased in 1935 by the artist and restorer, Leonetto Tintori, when he was married to Elena Berruti and it was his residence until his death in July 2000.
The estate, buildings and everything contained therein is owned by the City of Prato following a deed of gift dating 1988.
Outside it is surrounded by a park where about three hundred sculptures and reliefs have been installed. They are made of ceramics, cement, terracotta and bronze and were created by Tintori and other XX century Tuscan artists. Inside are preserved about five hundred pieces of archeological finds and ancient and modern art. Among the sculptures in the park there is one representing Noah’s Ark where the ashes of Leonetto Tintori and his wife are kept.

Behind the villa, in some annexes separate from the principal structure, specialized didactic activities are carried out concerning techniques of mural painting and the art of ceramics, as well as research activities for the preservation of mural paintings. Research activities are done in collaboration with many other international scientific bodies and are coordinated by the Getty Conservation Institute - Los Angeles (U.S.A.).

The Villa del Mulinaccio, home dedicated to the memory of Filippo Sassetti, was recently purchased in its principle nucleus by the City of Vaiano, which immediately began to enhance its value from an historic and architectural viewpoint, moving towards its use as a museum testifying its history and as a location for cultural events and state rooms for the city administration.
From an historic and architectural viewpoint, the villa with its gardens and annexes is a series of buildings of various periods and styles well harmonized in a way that it constitutes a coherent and unitary architectural complex. The villa was for centuries the center of an important farm and agricultural business that gradually grew into one of the largest farm businesses of the Val di Bisenzio. With its more than thirty-six farm units, it is the most vast and includes the largest number of farms. The renaissance nucleus of the villa is tied to the memory of Filippo Sassetti (1540-1588), who was navigator of the West Indies and had an adventurous life. Sassetti was owner of the villa and farm of Mulinaccio and addressed many of his letters there to his family. He wrote from India expressing the impressions of his travels in the elegant Tuscan tongue.
At the death without heirs of one of the Sassetti family, the Mulinaccio property went to Giovanni Strozzi: the Strozzi family was replaced by the Vaj family in 1660, which kept the agricultural estate up to the middle of the last century. The Vaj family made the extensions in XVIII and then the XIX centuries that have given the complex its current architectural and artistic appearance.

Jacopo Carucci, called Pontormo, (Pontorme, Empoli 1494 – Florence 1556) is among the greatest artists of Italian art: the emblem of that extraordinary season that Giorgio Vasari called the “modern manner”. He was born in Pontorme in the immediate vicinity of Empoli. The series of misfortunes that afflicted the outset of his life influenced and disturbed his whole existence. However, literature may have insisted upon the pathologies of his psyche too much. Certainly his expressions reflect (in terms of the highest poetry) his aloof meditation. His works, audacious and anti-conformist, are among the absolute apexes of the XVI century.
The home that was identified as being the birthplace of Pontormo by ugo Procacci in 1956 is now at an advanced stage of restoration. The City of Empoli, who owns it, intends to make it a commemorative place. The interior decoration will be evocative of the epoch in which Pontormo lived. There will be on exhibit objects and works that may recall the expression of the maestro; including, for example, facsimiles of the drawings done in preparation for the painting of the two saints for the altarpiece in the nearby church of San Michele in Pontorme. There will be a beautiful edition in facsimile of the famous Diary of the artist, desired by the City of Empoli. It will also be possible to view the archeological finds that were discovered during excavations for restoration work on the building. A room will be allocated to the use of modern didactic instruments and computer systems.
Last of all, in what was once the residence of Jacopo Pontormo there will be – to give it new life – an international center for the study of VI century art in the province of Tuscany.

Giovanni Pascoli (San Mauro di romagna, 31/12/1855 – Bologna, 06/04/1912) was one of the leading poets of the italian decadent, and one of the most representative figures of the Italian literature in late 1800 and early 1900.

He passed in Castelvecchio, a place very close to Barga, the quitest time of his life.

Carrara-Cardosi's country house (XVIII century), in Caprona Castelvecchio, is the arrangement that the poet chose in 1895 as a residence for himself, his sister Mary and Gulì the dog. He called it “a hovel with a bit of garden and forest aroud” in a charming valley, full of voices, colors and lights. While staying in this house, between 1895 and 1912, the poet cultivated his love for Italian and Latin poetry, and here Primi poemetti (1897) saw the light, together with Canti di Castelvecchio (1903), Poemi conviviali (1904), and Nuovi poemetti (1909). This period coincided with the official recognition, rendered to the poet by the critics, as an innovator of Italian poetry.

He liked to see the happy country people such as sharecroppers and housewives, he studied their usages and analized the social and emotional problems of migration. He absorbed the migrant's language, which was frugal and rich in metaphors, and transferred it into his poetry with vivid incisiveness, in a brilliant synthesis of continuity and break with the classical tradition. The images of the usual farm work such as plowing, harvesting and sowing, in Pascoli's poems become events that transcend space and time. The sorrounding nature turns into memory, recollection and emotion, and the most common sounds like the Bear River's lapping waters, the Castelvecchio's spring bubbling, the voices of the countryside, the time marked by the Tower of Barga, become word, music, color, revealing unsuspected sensations and feelings. The house preserves the structure, the furniture, the layout of the rooms as they were at the time of Giovanni Pascoli's death, which took place in bologna on the 6th of April in 1912. Mary Pascoli preserved his property with deep affection for forty years and now rests next to her brother in the chapel of the villa. She bequeathed the property to the town of Barga which takes care of the buildings, the archive, which contains about 76000 papers, the poet's library, which consists of 12000 volumes. The museum house was declared a national monument and the natural environment that sorrounds it, a particularly interesting landscape.

The Pascoli house has been a national monument since 1924. The poet Giovanni Pascoli was born here on 31 December 1855 and spent the early years of his childhood in this so loved home. The family moved to the “Torlonia” estate for a short period and returned to the house after the death of Giovanni's father. Further misfortunes forced the family to sell the house. The poet was always very attached to this house where he spent his youth. Dated back to the 700, the house, was damaged during the II World War and later renovated, respecting the original structure, and transformed in a museum of Pascoli memories.

Morandi’s house was built at the end of the fifties and has become a museum when Maria Teresa Morandi, Giorgio’s younger sister, donated it to Grizzana Municipality, provided that it would be kept in its state and made visitable. She died in this house in 1994.
Nowadays it is a small museum where everything is left unchanged: family things, holy pictures on the walls, clothing in the wardrobes, paintbrushes, color tubes, jugs, cans and several postcards: among them, one written by Sandro Pertini ( the future Italian Republic President) in 1960.
This two-flat house has been designed taking Veggetti-House - the opposite one - as a landmark. Morandi’s family had been hosted there since 1913 and Giorgio’s loved landscape was at a stone’s throw: just opening the window, one could admire the woods and Campiaro haylofts.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) had three sisters: Anna, Dina and Maria Teresa. He stayed in Grizzana for the first time in 1913, after his sister Anna felt ill and the doctor advised to spend some time in a salubrious place.
Therefore, Morandi’s neighbours in Bologna, the Veggetti family, invited him and his family to spend the summer in their holiday home in Grizzana. There, Anna recovered from her illness and Giorgio felt in love with that landscape. Apart from some short stays in nearby places, Morandi’s family started to spend the summers in Grizzana, always as a guest of Veggetti family.
During the Second World War, between 1943 and 1944, they spent an year as evacuees in Grizzana, where they thought they would find a quieter situation than in town. Actually, the Direttissima railway was heavily bombed and in July 1944 two massacres also took place (Piandisetta and Bolzo); these were the anticipators of Montesole mass murder. Consequently, at the beginning of September they went back to Bologna.
After the war, they didn’t go back to Grizzana for some years but the call of this place was too strong. For this reason, at the end of the '50 they decided to build their house in a piece of land that previously belonged to the Veggetti family: the place where the artist loved painting.
By that time Giorgio Morandi had already become very famous (thanks to his fame he had also obtained the chair of “Engraving Technique” at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna) and therefore could afford a more luxurious house. Despite that, he wanted to design it exactly as it is: very simple and essential, as the objects that he loved to paint. Inside Morandi’s house, the library, the studio and the bedroom are very interesting.
The library allows to understand Giorgio Morandi’s literary preferences and several books also contain dedications by the authors to Giorgio or his sisters. These are evidences of Giorgio’s frequent contacts with leading figures of the cultural world. On the walls, there are photolithographs of some of his aquarelles. It is interesting to notice the vases with the typical shapes that the painter liked so much and, inside the cupboard, the glasses and the bottles left exactly as they were at that time.
As the library, the dining room shows essential but elegant furnishings: on a furniture a portrait of Giorgio, Anna and Dina; beside it some objects, some shells and further books and magazines speaking about the artist.
On the ground floor of the house there are Giorgio's sisters bedroom and the kitchen, where one can still find objects of the everyday family life.
On the second floor, there is a further bedroom that also belonged to his sisters. In this room, one can still find the wardrobes containing the original clothes and linen.
On the same floor, there are Giorgio's bedroom and studio. Here the studio and the bedroom are separated, differently from his house in Bologna.
As the entire house, the artist’s bedroom is evidence of the modesty of his life (only the small table is an intrusion and has been placed in the room by his sisters, with the purpose of increasing the available space in this essential house). The bed is exceptionally small for such a tall man and under the mattress there is a copper slab still to be carved. In the drawer of the writing desk it is still possible to find his paintbrushes (some of them with bristles snipped with the aim to realize a particular brushwork), his oil-colours (branded Windsor & Newton, from London), one book by Giotto and another by Masaccio, some cigarettes and a coin purse.
The studio-laboratory shows the artist’s daily working tools as well as many other objects (vases, jars and jugs) from that he took his inspirations and that were subjects of his famous Still Lifes, characterized by pale colours and lit by an impalpable light. The studio is left unchanged since the last summer that Morandi spent in Grizzana, in 1963. In this room there are also frames, canvas, paintbrushes. A travel easel is left in a corner together with the bag for colours, while a studio easel is placed in the windows light. From these windows, Morandi painted the haylofts and the Houses "La Sete" and "Le Lame".
It is interesting to notices the jars of Ovaltine that Morandi used to repaint before using them for his Still Lives as he was certainly fascinated by their very simple and essential shape.
On the basement, in the garage, there was still the gray FIAT 850 used by the family. Now it is exposed in the garden of the House, completely restored.
Many of the places painted in Morandi’s Landscapes are near the House-Museum and it is still possible to walk through the ways covered by the artist to reach different positions immersed in nature, and hiding away from prying eyes. Indeed, he used to go out early in the morning with everything necessary for drawing and painting, setting off for solitary paths and dusty ways.

A House made of rooms that becomes invention and project, experience and memory, an infinite perspective of Maria Montessori's thought. Place of the story - the woman, the mother, the scholar, the traveler, the scientist, the pedagogist - that connects Chiaravalle to the world.

Birthplace, museum house, community in the community, virtual and real at the same time, the whole House is exhibited as a place of broad and unconventional knowledge, of meditation and contemplation, of dissemination.

Represented with contemporary tools and languages, the life and work of Maria Montessori are returned as traces, finds, inspirations, multicultural dialogues, connections between languages, geographies, worlds and disciplines.

Nicolò Machiavelli (1469 - 1527), secretary of the Florentine Republic in the years between 1498 and 1512, is one of the greatest and most interesting figures of the Renaissance. A versatile and cultivated writer, he reserved most of his interest for politics, which he was the first to consider a science in itself.
The “Casa di S. Andrea” in Percussina, fraction of San Casciano, along with several farm complexes, was owned by the family of the Writer. It was here that he fled after his exile from Florence in 1512, when the Medici returned to the city. The farm, attached with the tavern called “the Albergaccio”, is described in one of his most famous letters, the one addressed to his friend Francesco Vettori, dated December 10, 1513. In this letter he describes his days divided between the occupations regarding the management of his properties and his evenings spent in the tavern playing tric-trac  with the host and the local butcher. However, in the nighttime he would withdraw to his library and pass the hours reading the classics, which inspired him to write the treatise, written straight off in a few months, entitled De Principatibus: The Prince, the work to which he owes his fame. After his death the home went to his heirs and along the hereditary line it came to be part of the heritage of the noble Florentine family, the Serristori. For the last few years it has belonged to the Gruppo Italiano Vini, which has some of its best vineyards here and has had it carefully restored. The premises of the villa and the splendid cellars may be visited and, through an underground gallery, also the tavern described by Machiavelli himself. This has also preserved its atmosphere intact through the centuries.