Fondazione Salvatore Romano

In the old refectory beside Santo Spirito, a collector's gift from 1946 became one of Florence's most personal museums. The Fondazione Salvatore Romano sets sculpture and fragments from Roman times to the seventeenth century in the collector's own symmetrical arrangement, with his sarcophagus at its far end.

Why it matters

Florence's civic museums include one that is also a tomb. The Fondazione Salvatore Romano preserves the collection that the antiquarian and collector Salvatore Romano, originally from Campania, donated to the City of Florence in 1946, to honour his origins and thank the city that had welcomed him; he directed the museum until his death and lies buried in the sarcophagus at the end of the refectory. The setting is the convent's old refectory on Piazza Santo Spirito, and the city's own museum description notes that its core of medieval sculpture is rivalled for scale and variety only by the Museo Stefano Bardini. The collection presents Florence's sculptural past in a single room, arranged as its founder intended.

What to notice

The arrangement is central to the collection's character. Romano displayed his pieces for balance and symmetry, pairing and contrasting them by similarity of form, subject and function; capitals, column stumps and pieces of antique furniture act as supports beside plain wooden bases. Many pieces are fragments of dismantled monumental complexes, displayed with their damage and wear visible. The collection spans ancient Roman times to the seventeenth century: sculpture, fragments of architectural decoration, detached frescoes and furnishings. The sarcophagus at the far end is the founder's own grave; the ensemble was conceived as a single composition.

Context and history

Salvatore Romano assembled his collection in the first half of the twentieth century and chose the refectory of the Santo Spirito convent as its home, giving the works to the City in 1946 on the condition, recorded in the museum's presentation, that they remain perpetually in the arrangement he devised; the municipality committed to their immovability. He led the museum until his death and was buried there, closing the circle between collector and collection. The museum entered Florence's civic museum system. Its medieval sculpture collection is among the most substantial in the city.