Museo Stefano Bardini

This eclectic collection of art and architectural fragments was left to the city in 1922 by the great antique dealer and Risorgimento veteran Stefano Bardini, and has recently been restored to its original appearance, including the striking (and often imitated by other museums) blue walls, that provide the perfect background to the art when Bardini ran the palazzo as an antiques showroom.

Bardini built his rather lugubrious palace, re-using bits of the church and convent of San Gregorio della Pace that once stood here, along with doorways, Venetian and Tuscan coffered ceilings from the 15th-17th centuries, and stairs that he salvaged from the demolition of the Mercato Vecchio and other buildings in central Florence during the mid 19th-century Risanamento di Firenze overseen by Giuseppe Poggi.

San Gregorio’s crypt came in handy to install his collection of tombs and altarpieces (there’s an especially fine one by Andrea della Robbia). Another highlight is the largest painted Crucifix in Florence, by Bernardo Daddi, which until the 1400s hung in the Duomo, and an oval spinets, one of only two in existence, by Bartolomeo Cristofori, who invented the piano in the court of the Medici.