The house-Museum dedicated to Frederick Stibbert (1838-1906), an English citizen born in Florence who himself remodelled the house in the form of a neo-Gothic castle, offers the visitor a view of the extraordinary collections put together by its owner over the course of an intense life made of journeys and research dedicated to his interest in the exotic and the applied arts, in a variety that ranges from armour to porcelain to furniture and from European men’s and women’s clothing to Islamic civil and military costume and costumes of the Far East. Especially intriguing, in this singular context, is the clear testimony to Stibbert’s late 19^th-century eclectic taste provided by theatrical arrangement of the objects in rooms themselves evoking different styles of the past, from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic period; the park mirrors the house, with suggestive corners and many references to things ancient.

Of outstanding fame is the Sala della Cavalcata (Hall of the Cavalcade), then reconstructions of the splendid armour of the Islamic world, from North Africa to central Asia, and India moghul. The armoury section is completed by the elegance and colours of the Japanese warriors in the rooms that take their names, where the costumes and most significant objects from this refined culture create a nucleus which for the abundance and quality of its items is considered one of the world’s most significant.

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