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.

Born in Livorno in 1804, Guerrazzi earned his degree in law in 1824 at Pisa, where he had the fortune of encountering Byron. Interested in historical themes, he composed various works such as plays and novels; because of his ardent republican stands he was first banished to the border at Montepulciano and then imprisoned at Porteferraio, Elba. Guerrazzi was triumvirate of the Florentine Republic in 1848 together with Mazzoni and Montanelli and after that elected dictator. At the moment of Italian Unification he was named senator, but he withdrew from political life ten years later.
 In the locality called La Cinquina, three kilometers from Cecina on the road that leads from San Pietro in Palazzi to the sea, you find the beautiful residential complex of Villa Guerrazzi. In 1868 Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi purchased the farm from a man of Livorno and here is where he led the last years of his life and where he died in 1873. The complex is made up of, in addition to the manor itself, various annexes, once used as granary, storehouses, stables, all immersed in a vast estate. Guerrazzi adored the farm, which he transformed into a villa thanks to a series of extensions and structural changes, even having changed the route of the road that originally passed right across the front of the house and straight on.
The descendents and successive owners continued making small variations to adjust the villa to their needs until 1975 when the City of Cecina bought it from the last owner. In over twenty years the complex has been completely restructured and now hosts the Etruscan Roman Archeological Museum, the Peasant Culture Museum, the City School of Music, the “Artimbanco” School of Theatre and a multi-purpose hall for exhibits and concerts.

Giotto di Bondone (1266-1336) was one of the great innovators of Italian painting. Active in Florence, Rome, Assisi and Padua, among his splendid works are the most famous frescoes in the Chiesa Superiore di San Francesco in Assisi and the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua. Giotto was much admired by his contemporaries and was recalled by Dante as well as Boccaccio, who recognized his great modernity and admired his profound realism.
In the township of Vicchio del Mugello there is what is believed to be, according to common tradition, the home of the great Painter, who was native of this area. Originally it was probably part of a vaster manor.  
The home was restored in 1840, but suffered damage in the late IX century and then again during the 1919 earthquake; then it was left to ruin and considered only an agricultural annex. In 1975 it was purchased by the City and allocated as a museum.
Recently the setup was completely reorganized so that the visitor finds himself along a virtual path through the works of the great painter. For this reason the tour is particularly suitable for didactic purposes. In the museum there are also didactic laboratories on the art of frescoes.

Agnolo Firenzuola was born in Florence in 1493, earned his degree in Perugia and then entered into the Vallombrosian Order. He was often in Rome and befriended some of the major men of letters of that period, among which Pietro Aretino and Annibal Caro. Following several vicissitudes, among which a severe illness, he was released from his vows and returned to Tuscany, where in 1538 he was nominated the “usufructuary and administrator of the monastery” of Vaiano. In this capacity he showed himself diligent and far from the merely speculative spirit that moved some of his predecessors, which had strongly damaged the monastery itself. These were happy and productive years during which he wrote his most well-known works, such as La Prima Veste dei discorsi degli animali and  I Dialoghi delle bellezze delle donne. After two years his title of administrator was removed, but he still remained pensionarius of the Abbey, fact that guaranteed him a life annuity, though modest, until his death in 1543.

Inside the Abbey the apartment that may still be visited is the so-called residence of the Abbot. Among the various books and documents exhibited, there are a few volumes of Agnolo Firenzuola, like the first editions of Prose (1548) and Rime (1549). For the rest the monastery visit is articulated as a path to illustrate the daily life of the monks in past centuries.

It is situated in the beautiful Mondagli Square, surely one of the most beautiful parts of the old town centre of Saluzzo. The building dates back to the Middle Ages and was built just outside the enclosing walls dated 1280. The bearing structure consists of four pointed arches that are fresco decorated. The building was later raised in the 16th century, with the addition of loggias on the top floor, which are now walled up. Another storey was added in the early 19th century: it consisted of a closed loggia with terrace at the same floor of the square, over which the elegant Neo-classical lounge overlooks with its fine and elegant decorations. The famous patriot and writer Silvio Pellico was born on 25th June 1789 in the small apartment on the first floor, and he spent there his childhood. His kept love and thankfulness for his hometown throughout his life: for him it was a literary place of affection and happy memories. Nowadays, after the recent restorations made by the City Hall, his personal objects, his manuscripts and his works are on display in the “House-Museum”.

Situated at the right foot of the Spanish Steps, the Keats-Shelley House was the final resting place of John Keats, who died here in 1821, aged just 25.
From the outside, the eighteenth-century building is almost as it was when Keats arrived in Rome in the vain attempt to stop the fatal effects of tuberculosis. Open to the public in 1909, this house museum contains a generous collection of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, objects and first editions of volumes by Keats and his fellow Romantics Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
The collection also includes a scallop shell with locks of hair of John Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a wax Carnival mask once belonging to Lord Byron and manuscripts by Jorge Luis Borges, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and Joseph Severn, Keats’ faithful friend and travel companion.
In addition to the exhibition rooms, there are two spacious terraces boasting stunning views, a book and gift shop, and a small cinema room where visitors can watch an exclusive introductory film about the Romantics and the history of the Keats-Shelley House.
Group visits and talks are available by booking, and the rooms of the House and its terraces are also available for private hire by contacting us.

Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci 1452 - Amboise 1519), the natural child of notary Ser Piero da Vinci and of a woman named Caterina, is one of the most celebrated and interesting figures in human history. As a very young man, he started his activity in Florence as an apprentice painter in Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop, one of the most famous masters of 15th century. Leonardo, considered one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, is also renowned for his studies in the fields of science and technology, in particular for his experiments on the human flight

Only three km from the town of Vinci, at Anchiano, stands the house that is the traditionally recognized as his birth house, set amid the stunning scenery of the Montalbano hills. In 1950, Count Giovanni Rasini di Castelcampo donated the building to the Town of Vinci. The restoration of 2012 has kept with the well-established image of this place, which has become the symbol of the memory of Leonardo, visited by ‘cultural pilgrims’ from all over the world. The new layout, carried out thanks to the most advanced multimedia technologies and to the high-resolution reproductions of Leonardo’s paintings, allows to learn about his life and art in an unusual and fascinating way. The birthplace in Anchiano, together with the Museo Leonardiano and the Biblioteca Leonardiana, is a must-stop destination on an itinerary dedicated to Leonardo in his home town.