The Palazzo degli Oddi, previously the residence Marini Clarelli, now the House Museum, is located in the heart of Perugia, an area of the city occupied by the family as early as medieval times. Today, it is still one of the most important streets leading to Perugia’s main square. The Palace was built around the middle of the 16th century and was inhabited until 1942. The last owner, the Marchioness Barbara Marini Clarelli (Perugia 1929-2007), a painter, restorer and local historian, declared in her will the desire to establish a foundation that would combine his name with that of her beloved husband, a celebrated art historian, Francesco Santi (Perugia 1914-1993). Her vision was to ensure the Palace remained accessible an a place to study for the history of the degli Oddi family, one of the oldest Italian noble families that had a significant influence on the history of Perugia.

The Giorgio de Chirico House-museum is located on the 4th floor of Palazzetto Borgognoni, 31 Piazza di Spagna, Rome. The artist moved there, together with his second wife, Isabella Far Pakszwer, in 1947 where he lived until his death in 1978.

His move to Palazzetto dei Borgognoni marked an important change for the artist: after years of moving around and living in various Italian and foreign cities, he decided to finally settle down in “the centre of the centre of the world”, a stone’s throw away from the Spanish Steps.

Spread over three floors – two of which are open to the public – the apartment’s first floor features an entrance hall, two living rooms, a dining room and the Foundation’s offices, which, in times past, once contained the kitchen. The second floor is more intimate and creative in nature, owing to the location of Giorgio and Isa’s separate bedrooms and the artist’s studio.

A visit to the de Chirico House-museum provides the visitor with the rare opportunity of experiencing the following three facets of the artist’s life:

Intimate and familiar: the house is filled with original furnishings and personal belongings;

Artistic: the first floor features a permanent exhibition of his paintings and sculpture dating from the 1930s onwards;

Creative: the reconstructed artist’s studio gives the visitor a taste of where and how de Chirico worked for over 30 years. Original picture frames, paints, brushes, antique casts, books – all illuminated by the overhead skylight which provided a direct source of light for the artist whilst painting – successfully revoke the atmosphere in which he worked.

Giosue’ Carducci (Valdicastello 1835 – Bologna 1907) was one of the most famous and admired poets of the Italian Ottocento. He actively participated in the cultural life of his times as critic, scholar, and professor. Carducci was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his poetry.
The museum is located in the home where the Carducci family lived between 1856 and 1858. In this home the great tragedy of the Poet’s family unfolded: the death for unknown causes of the second-born Dante and, a few months after that tragic event, the death of his father. They were both buried in the old village cemetery, today called “Campo della Rimembranza”. The Poet recalls the event with the famous verses: "O tu che dormi là sulla fiorita collina tosca e ti sta il padre accanto" (Oh, you that sleeps there on the flowered tuscan hillside and your father beside you). In this frame the town council has created a guided path along the family life and the socio-cultural context of Carducci in that period through photographs, reproductions of documents, books and figurative material ad hoc.

Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 – Berlin 1924), son of father from Empoli and mother from Trieste who were both excellent musicians, received a careful musical education at an early age. A well-known pianist, he lived abroad for many years between Germany and the United States. During World War I, Busoni fled to Switzerland.  He is considered one of the major personalities of contemporary music. Busoni composed four operas, compositions for orchestra, piano, lied singer, organ, and choir.
In the home where the musician was born is the seat of the Center for Busonian Studies. The building dates to the eighteenth century and is two stories high. Each floor holds three rooms. On the main floor is the Center for Busonian Studies and the museum is on the top floor.
The center administrates an archive, the museum and the library, which contains important texts. In the museum on the top floor there are mementos and heirlooms of various types, some donated by the family: a piano on which the Maestro supposedly practiced, a marble bust, manuscripts, original librettos and some autographs. In the museum there are also concert programs and posters of Busonian music festivals.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 1375), along with Dante and Petrarch, is considered the initiator of the Italian Literature. His works are many, the most important being The Decameron, a frame narrative of 100 novellas. Its taste for adventure and games, the exaltation of human intelligence and cunning, joined with a high sense of the language, make it one of the masterpieces of all times and the first great work in prose of the Italian literature.
The home, an austere little palazzo in terracotta brick, is situated in the middle of Via Boccaccio. The plain façade is interrupted by a graceful loggia opening upon the stupendous panorama of the Valdelsa hillsides sweeping all the way to San Gimignano. The home is now a museum. The main hall at the entrance holds exhibits regarding the life and works of Govanni Boccaccio, his period and the village of Certaldo. In the rooms on the ground floor there are rare and precious editions as well as the autographs of great men that have visited the Boccaccio Home. On the ground floor you may also see an audiovisual about the life and works of the Great Man of Certaldo and about the activities of the Giovanni Boccaccio National Institute that administrates the museum. Going upstairs one finds the large library; open to scholars, it hosts a unique collection of works dedicated to Boccaccio in the Italian language and in various other languages. A selection of these may be seen by all and are shown in a case situated in the frescoed room. This is the heart of the home. Here is the large fresco by Pietro Benvenuti, neoclassic painter, commissioned at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the marquise Carlotta Lenzoni dei Medici, who had the home restored and first donated the library, which has grown over the decades. On the top floor it is possible to visit the beautiful loggia that faces the stupendous panorama of the Valdelsa.

Raffaele Bendandi was born into a family of humble workers on October 17th 1893 in Faenza. He attended only primary level school before starting to work as a clockmaker. After a short while he changed his job by learning the art of wood carving. Self-taught, always eager to improve, day by day he enriched his library with tomes that are witnesses of his great effort and committment still today. Bendandi based his seismology on a single fundamental hypothesis: earthquakes are caused by the attractive forces exerted by planets on Earth and the additional effect of Moon’s gravitational pull. He was able to deduct the existence of other four trans-Neptunian planets beyond the already known planets of the Solar system. Already in the twenties he staged a “geodynamic” observatory, and, at the same time, he was building seismographs which he also sold abroad. Bendandi was following his dream: to be able to predict the happening of the, often tragic, natural calamities known as earthquakes. He also broadened his research field to the cosmic influences. He found out that the Sun, with its manifold radiations, is the ultimate regulator of the whole planetary activity and that it stands as the main cause and main regulator of every physical, electrical, etc. process. According to Bendandi it does exist a predominant solar influence on human health and a marked influence on brain cells of deviants and madmen. The latter, therefore, tend to become dangerous during periods of cosmic crisis in Bendandi’s opinion. He died on 1st November 1979 in his residence in Via Manara, Faenza.

The “Bendandiana” Association, created in 1983 to honour the memory of Raffaele Bendandi, includes in its aims:

- The promotion of initiatives aimed to foster the study and the valorisation of Bendandi’s work;
- To support research projects in geophysics and in every other scientific field pertinent with Bendandi’s own research;
- To collaborate in the proper functioning and activity of the Observatories;
- To organize any possible initiative aimed to attract young people toward scientific research topics.

The tour of the House is articulated in three thematic areas:

- The Bendandi’s Museum
- The permanent planetarium
- Earthquakes: information and prevention.

The Sigfrido Bartolini House (1932-2007) presents a mirror of this superlative, eclectic, and original artist: painter, engraver, and writer. This was the family home but first and foremost the studio and workshop for his many, varied activities, every room on the three levels of the house on Via Bigiano,5 is redolent of Sigfrido Bartolini. Arranged throughout the house are the Plaster Moulds (life-size) of Venus de Milo, the Aphrodite of Cyrene, and the Parthenon Frieze, attesting to his debt to classical antiquity; the collection of amphorae, coming from the various Italian regions to his admiration for the cultures of manual dexterity. The house became a Museum, allowing us to enter his world and that of Pinocchio, where the fairy-tale, illustrated by him in 309 black-and-white and coloured xylographies, mixes with concrete reality in the form of the artist's instruments: the chisels and gravers for wood-engraving; the work-bench with the wooden planks, printer's proofs, rollers, etc.; the model of the wooden puppet which he built, like Geppetto, in order to draw it; the objects which he depicted in the book to re-create the fantastic but very real world of Collodi's Tuscany; the press for copperplate- engraving and lithography. The Collection of paintings on the walls of the House is an intriguing and largely new itinerary through the artist's works: from large, detached Frescoes, to the fascinating Monotypes, from Xylographies and their related Stencil, to Oils; while also from maestri such as Sironi, De Chirico, Soffici, Maccari, Viani ect.. In short, the visitor is offered an original and fascinating permanent exhibition with nothing of the cold context of a museun display. The well-furnished Library, the Twentieth-century Magazine Collection, the Archive, and the Epistolary Archive of Sigfrido Bartolini offer both the curious visitor and the scholar a panorama and supporting records of that part of twentieth century Bartolini had a part in forming. Also on display are the 14 Modern Stained-glass Windows of Lead-bound Glass Tesserae which he created in 2005 for the Church of the Immacolata, some 200 metres from what is now his house and museum; they were to be the last large-scale project before his death.

In this “humble and glorious cottage” (according to the happy definition of the archivist and historian, Cesare Guasti), located in the still intact medieval village of Savignano, was born Lorenzo Bartolini on the snowy day of January 7, 1777.
At the age of twelve Lorenzo went to Florence to attend the Academy of Florence; at twenty he went to Paris then capital of the figurative arts. At the School of David, he befriended the young Ingres and received important commissions. In 1808 Elisa Baciocchi, sister of Napoleon, appointed him teacher of sculpture in the Academy of Carrara. When the empire fell, Bartolini moved to Florence. He was disliked for his past connections with Bonaparte and for his innovative character: sustaining the imitation of nature against the neoclassic academic taste. His most famous piece, Trust in God (1835, Milan Poldi Pezzoli Museum) was from this period: a reduced version of this work exists in the Cariprato collection (Prato, Palazzo degli Alberti Museum). He began teaching in the Florence Academy of the Fine Arts in 1837, where he resumed his anti-classics battle. By then famous, member of the Honour Legion and the French Institute for the Fine Arts, Lorenzo Bartolini was considered the real successor of Canova. His death in 1850 prevented him from finishing the monument to Columbus in Genoa and that of Prince Demidoff in Florence.
According to the narratives of Giorgio Vasari in his famous work, The Lives of the most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors, Bartolomeo della Porta was also born in Savignano in 1469, as a plaque placed byAntonio Marini in 1855 also recalls. Bartolomeo was a pupil of Cosimo Rossellini and a follower of the teachings of Girolamo Savonarola whose precepts of austerity influenced his artistic activities. (Text by Adriano Rigoli)

The marriage of Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett was carried out secretly in 1846, because of her father’s strong objections. The Brownings reached Florence when Elizabeth had already reached fame as a poetess, while her husband, who was several years younger, was as yet to become known. They were attracted by the history of the city, but also by the struggle for Italian independence.
The Brownings stayed in Florence for fourteen years, until the death of Elizabeth. They fit into the British colony of numerous ex-pats present there and befriended many famous Italians.
Elizabeth died in 1861 and was buried in the English Cemetery in Florence, which dedicated a plaque to her memory, describing her poetry as a golden band uniting Italy and England.
The home in Piazza San Felice was dubbed “Casa Guidi” by the writer herself to render the idea of a family residence. The Brownings purchased at a high price a few valuable pieces, but most of the paintings and furniture were bought at the Florentine secondhand stores. The décor was considered simple and functional.

The owners, Landmark Trust and Eton College, have attempted to maintain the original atmosphere and avoid that the apartment take on the appearance of a museum. Some of the furniture comes from the Barrett family and some from the Browning family, but on the whole the apartment remains as it was in the nineteenth century.

The XVI century  Palazzo Da Cepparello (later called “dei Da Verrazzano” and in the XIX century “dei Casamorata”), close in style to the type of buildings done by Giuliano da Sangallo and by Baccio d'Agnolo, was purchased in 1946 by the writer Piero Bargellini (1897 - 1980), becoming state apartments for fulfilling his literary and civic duties.
The Study is the most characteristic room, because it still has the ancient, remarkable dimensions and very high caisson ceilings. A magnificent cycle of six large XIV century frescos may be admired that were detached from the Chiesa delle Busche in Poggio alla Malva. However, it is not beauty that has made memorable these rooms, but the indefatigable activity of Bargellini. Appointed Councilor responsible for the Fine Arts from 1951 to 1956, Mayor of Florence in 1966, member of parliament for many years first in the Senate and then in the Chamber, his home was always open not only to friends, intellectuals and functionaries, but also to all Florentines who could ask him for advice or help. In the Study, where he worked up until the last day of his life, were written more than sixty books (Belvedere, I Santi del Giorno, Cento Tabernacoli a Florence, La Splendida Storia di Florence, Le Strade di Florence, I Medici), an incalculable number of essays, articles, prefaces, conferences, radio transmissions, and tens of thousands of letters.
For more than thirty years the Study was a stage for the encounter of writers and artists. Many were also personalities of cinema and theatre: Spadaro, Carla Fracci, Volonté, Rosi, Jean Gabin, René Clair, and Rossellini. In memory of this rich cultural life, in these rooms left unchanged, are exhibited hundreds of letters and inscriptions dedicated to Bargellini.