Florence, Pitti Palace to host new carriage museum

Florence is preparing to welcome (or rather, re-welcome) a museum: the new Carriage Museum of Palazzo Pitti, which will be set up in the palace’s northern bastion, which is undergoing some cleaning and consolidation work. Inside the bastion, located under the theater of the Rondò di Bacco, are large rooms covered with vaults: these are the former Lorraine stables (which after the Unification of Italy were used as warehouses and were gradually abandoned to decay) and will house the exhibition itinerary of the new museum. “These are beautiful spaces,” says Eike Schmidt, director of the Uffizi Galleries, on which Palazzo Pitti depends, "that will offer visitors the opportunity to appreciate an extraordinary new museum dedicated to the Galleries’ collection of historic carriages, in which will also be placed prestigious works of art related to the subject, such as the sumptuous Corteo of Prince Giovan Battista Borghese’s carnival float for the 1664 Fat Thursday masquerade by Johann Paul Schor, purchased at the last Biennale dell’Antiquariato at Palazzo Corsini."

“Everything can be found here,” Alessandra Griffo, curator of the collection of tapestries, imperial and royal apartments at Palazzo Pitti, curator of eighteenth-century painting, and head of the future Carriage Museum, declares instead: “from artifacts closely related to the carriages to the decommissioned materials of the Rondò di Bacco theater that lived its moment of prestige in the cityscape between 1975 and the early 1980s, from the materials also accumulated by those who lived in the apartments pertaining to the Pitti complex to the stone artifacts, the nature and origin of which are still uncertain, and which will now be moved to more suitable environments for their preservation and cataloging.”

Renovation work on the rooms that will house the museum will take at least a couple of years. The entrance to the new museum will be from Piazza Carlo Levi: it is the small square, located to the left of the Rondò di Bacco looking at the Palace, which last spring was dedicated to the great painter as well as author of the celebrated novel Christ Stopped at Eboli, written in a house overlooking Piazza Pitti and published in 1945.

Pictured: Johann Paul Schor, The procession of Prince Giovan Battista Borghese’s carnival float for the Shrove Thursday masquerade of 1664 (1664; 122 x 317 cm)

Florence, Pitti Palace to host new carriage museum

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