Museo Ugo Guidi

In a house on the Vittoria Apuana seafront, everything is where the sculptor Ugo Guidi left it: tools, palettes, plasters and marble studies fill the rooms where he worked until his death in 1977. The museum keeps both the man's hands and his career visible, from the first marble experiments to the totemic late figures.

Why it matters

Ugo Guidi taught sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Carrara and lived and worked in this house by the sea, receiving painters and writers including Ottone Rosai, Ardengo Soffici, Carlo Carrà, Ernesto Treccani and Giovanni Papini. After his death there on 10 July 1977, the house survived as an atelier and opened as a museum in 2005. It is now part of Tuscany's Case della Memoria network. The studio preserves the conditions in which a twentieth-century sculptor worked with Apuan stone.

What to notice

The collection includes around 600 sculptures, drawings and temperas, according to the regional portal, and spans Guidi's career. It includes marble works from the 1940s, tufo pieces from the 1950s, cycles devoted to horses and motherhood from the 1960s, and late, totem-like figures carved from tall marble blocks. The tools are exhibits too: the easels that held clay, the mallets and rasps, the palettes, inks and brushes are preserved in place, so the studio reads as a portrait. The domestic scale of the rooms contrasts with the ambition of the late monoliths. Temporary exhibitions of established artists and academy students extend the studio's artistic context.

Context and history

Guidi was born in 1912 in the Versilia hinterland and built his career between the quarries, the Carrara academy and this shore; the municipal portal records his first solo show in Florence in 1956, organised by Rosai, and a later exhibition presence that reached the Hermitage, Palazzo Pitti and Rome's gallery of modern art, with one hundred drawings donated to the Uffizi's drawings cabinet. After his death in the house in 1977, the effort to protect the atelier gathered pace: the Ministry of Culture's listing records that the casa-atelier entered a museum programme in 2005, promoted with the province and local tourism boards. In 2007 the association Amici del Museo Ugo Guidi was founded for its promotion and protection, and the museum began hosting contemporary exhibitions. The digitalisation project launched in recent years has photographed the collection and produced video documentation, extending access beyond the house walls.