Villa Museo Puccini

On the shore of Lake Massaciuccoli stands the house Puccini chose for himself: hunting lodge, refuge and workshop. Nearly every opera that made him famous was drafted here, his piano still faces the water, and in the chapel he rests among his family.

Why it matters

Torre del Lago, a fishing village on the lake between Viareggio and Pisa, was Puccini's chosen home from 1891, and the Villa Museo preserves it as he left it. Festival Puccini records that he bought the property in 1899 and rebuilt it around an older tower structure — the watchtower that gave the village its name — and that the house held him for about thirty years while Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Fanciulla del West, La Rondine and Il Trittico took shape inside it. His son Antonio converted the house into a museum in 1925, keeping its original appearance, and in 1926 the composer was laid to rest in a chapel converted from one of its small sitting rooms, where he rests today with his family. The house combines the roles of residence, workplace and family chapel.

What to notice

The rooms are small and domestic, and include the Förster piano at the centre of the ground floor, the portraits of the composer, the funeral mask, and the Japanese folding screen — a souvenir of the obsession with Madama Butterfly's world that filled these rooms. The walls carry paintings by his Macchiaioli friends, with canvases by Ferruccio Pagni, the painter-companion of his hunting summers, singled out on the Festival's page. The Fondazione Simonetta Puccini per Giacomo Puccini maintains the historical archive of Puccini's correspondence, photographs and music. The Auditorium Simonetta Puccini, a concert and conference hall, was inaugurated on 3 August 2021.

Context and history

The house's biography follows the composer's arc. Puccini arrived at Torre del Lago in 1891, aged thirty-three, drawn by the lake, the marshes and the shooting; the Festival's history records how he first rented rooms and, after the money from Manon Lescaut and La Boheme, bought the old tower property and rebuilt it, securing part of the lakefront from the Marchese Ginori for a garden. In 1921, after a peat-extraction company bought part of the lakeside and disturbed his retreat, he moved to his new villa in Viareggio, where he died in 1924. The lakeside house became a museum the following year by his son's initiative, and the 1926 translation of his remains into the improvised chapel closed the circle: the refuge became a shrine. The Festival Puccini has been staged on the lakeshore since 1930.