Casa Martelli

Casa Martelli preserves a Florentine family residence with frescoed salons, a picture collection and painted garden rooms. The house museum connects works of art with the domestic spaces for which the Martelli collected and commissioned them.

Why it matters

The residence records the tastes of a patrician family whose history was closely linked with the Medici. Furniture, decoration and paintings retain a relationship with household life rather than appearing only as isolated gallery objects.

What to notice

Vincenzo Meucci and Tommaso Gherardini contributed to the reception-room frescoes. The picture collection includes Piero di Cosimo's Adoration of the Child, works by Domenico Beccafumi, and paintings by Luca Giordano and Salvator Rosa. In the ground-floor rooms, Niccolò Contestabili's woodland scenes and Gaetano Gucci's painted pergola create imaginary outdoor settings within the house.

Context and history

The Martelli lived here from the seventeenth century. Renovation under Bernardino Ciurini began in 1738, while the summer apartments received early-nineteenth-century landscape decoration. The house passed to the State in 1998 and opened as a museum in 2009. Its preservation reflects both family occupation and later museum adaptation.