Museo Ivan Bruschi & Casa Vasari
While day-trippers queue for the frescoes, a pair of beautifully preserved Renaissance houses sit almost unvisited just minutes away — the home of Giorgio Vasari, father of art history, and the private collection of antiques dealer Ivan Bruschi, whose obsessive eye filled an entire palazzo with Roman bronzes, medieval ivories and Etruscan ceramics. Together they offer an intimate, crowd-free windo
Casa Vasari
Giorgio Vasari — architect, painter and author of 'Lives of the Artists' — designed and decorated this house on Via XX Settembre himself between 1542 and 1548, covering the ceilings with allegorical frescoes that serve as a kind of autobiography in paint. The Camera della Fama e delle Arti is a riot of trompe-l'oeil and portraiture; Vasari painted himself into the composition with characteristic immodesty.
The house is managed by the Polo Museale della Toscana and is often empty of other visitors even on busy weekends — a genuinely surreal experience given the quality of what's on the walls.
Museo Ivan Bruschi
A five-minute walk away, the Palazzo Alberti houses Bruschi's personal collection: over 10,000 objects spanning Egyptian shabtis, Greek red-figure pottery, Romanesque sculpture, Renaissance medals and 19th-century scientific instruments. The hang is dense and cabinet-of-curiosities in spirit — exactly how a passionate collector would arrange things at home.
The museum also hosts the administrative offices of the Fiera Antiquaria, so on market weekends the ground floor buzzes with dealers and you can sometimes watch new acquisitions being catalogued. Admission is a bargain at €5.
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