The Stibbert Museum is part attic, part armory, part atelier, part anthropological exhibit, and part art museum. Altogether, however, it is a prismatic reflection of its founder and nineteenth-century resident, Frederick Stibbert.

Born in 1838 and dying in Florence in 1906, Frederick Stibbert lived during Queen Victoria’s reign. He was educated first at Harrow and then Magdalene College in Cambridge, where he demonstrated little of the self-discipline and charm that later made him a successful collector. When he turned twenty-one in 1859 he came into the family’s enormous fortune. He immediately returned to Florence and began life as a quintessential Victorian gentleman: indefatigable in traveling the world to buy costumes, porcelain, and furniture; fearless in transporting enormous bureaus and hauberks (chain-mail tunics) as well as delicate teacups from the Far East; gluttonous in his appetite for new and old objets d’art. The world’s best drawing rooms welcomed him not only in London, but at least once a year also in Naples, Madrid, Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and Peking.

The tour starts in the Sala della Malachite (room #2), which displaysa microcosm of Stibbert’s style and collection. The room is named after the green-black semiprecious stone that decorates the fireplace and a central Empire-style table, made for Jerome Bonaparte, that Stibbert bought from the royal Demidoff family in 1880 when they sold off their antiques.  

The room exhibits a European cavalcade of mannequin knights wearing a composite of uniforms from 1510 to 1630, as well as some samurai foot soldiers. The trustees tried and failed to rationalize the room, as they could not imagine the West and East marching together against a common enemy. Stibbert could and did.

The private residence’s plethora of exquisite furniture and curios seems like merely gewgaws in comparison to Stibbert’s armor collection, which obviously fueled the effort and expense of his annual trips to the Far East. After his collection of spurs, Stibbert’s display of Japanese military uniforms at the top of the spiral staircase in the Sale Giaponesi (rooms #55–57) is the second feather in his eccentric cap and can claim to be the best outside of Japan and the Metropolitan Museum.

Outside, Stibbert’s park invites weary visitors to recuperate by walking along its landscaped paths. The garden combines Italian and English traditions that Gerolamo Passeri designed between 1859 and 1880, with Giuseppe Poggi adding such touches as the lemon house and Egyptian temple, as well as the artificial lake. The park extends naturally to the Villa Fabbricotti’s grounds.

The anatomical wax models in the Museo della Storia Naturale e la Specola, or just La Specola, reveal what we look like when stripped of skin, dimples, freckles, jowls, sloping noses, furrowing brows, hair, and fat. Underneath the decoration, we are sinewy, bony, well shaped, and vulnerable. The models’ exposed organs and skeletons nestle too closely to us, making us see ourselves as we would rather not, trembling in the details between beauty and beastliness.

La Specola refers to the astronomer’s tower added onto the museum soon after it opened to honor Galileo. The Observatory also encapsulates the experience of looking at full-sized anatomical models, for they look back at us. The sculptors did not work from imagination but from corpses.

The Dark Ages had swept methods of preservation, familiar to the Egyptians, out of the library of human knowledge. The Italian wax wizards fought against time and heat’s rot as they created and revised the scientifically perfect depictions of flayed humans. Their most inaccurate models are of the brain, which disintegrates more quickly after death than the other organs and sags into a milky mush. The modellatori worked feverishly to fill orders from Italy’s medical schools for the wax models, which would end the universities’ need to exhume corpses for anatomical studies.

La Specola declined from its mid-nineteenth-century zenith as Florence built other universities and scientific museums that had, by caveat, a more legitimate claim to La Specola’s books and objects. For example, the Museum of Science History (Museo di Storia della Scienza) now displays Galileo’s instruments, even though La Specola was built specifically to honor the astronomer and displays a sculpted tribute to him on the first floor. By 1924, universities and libraries had denuded La Specola of everything except the zoological collection (rooms II through XXIV) and the anatomical models (rooms XXV through XXXIV).

Behind the dissected humans and the largest collection of shells, insects, and vertebrates and invertebrates in Italy, in room XXXIII behind the exit room, La Specola quietly displays a few other spectacular yet unknown pieces by the father of the wax anatomical model, Gaetano Giulio Zumbo.

Born to an aristocratic Sicilian family, possibly the son of a slave girl named Zummo, Zumbo came in 1691 to Naples, where he made the first vignette of three scenes of the plague, titled The Theater of the Plague. The Triumph of Time and The Corruption of the Body (with the woman seated in the middle with her head in her arms) he created when in Florence between February 1691 and April 1694. (In The Triumph of Time, now known simply as The Burial, a later artist added a medallion of what has always been accepted as a portrait of Zumbo.) Cosimo III commissioned another teatrino, now in private hands, and bought The Plague outright, which made Nathaniel Hawthorne shake his head a century and a half later and claim, “They do him no credit, indicating something dark and morbid in his character.”

Also displayed in the Zumbo room are the fragments of Zumbo’s Syphilis that survived the 1966 flood. Finally, La Specola contains one of the seminal works for all realistic waxen images, from its own pieces of art to Madame Toussaud’s tourist baits, and that is what is called simply The Anatomical Head. It can also claim title to Most Macabre Piece in the Most Macabre of Museums, for Zumbo created it before he had perfected the techniques for anatomical modeling that he invented. In this first experiment, he simply poured wax over a human skull and molded the details around the empty sockets.

Once Giotto released the human figure from centuries of Byzantine rigor mortis, Florence and her environs gave literal physical birth to the artists who invented new rules: Filippo Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Alessandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Leonardo da Vinci, Benvenuto Cellini . . . on and on the list unfurls. The city lavished enough freedom and money on her enfants terribles to design buildings, paint portraits, and sculpt grand figures. They often never needed to leave home, despite the “foreign” princes’ bribes from Mantua and Milan.

As a result, the tourist lines to the Uffizi, the Academy, and the Pitti Palace also unfurl for blocks. Florence’s very fecundity as a mother of art condemns her visitors--as with all condemned souls--to suffer eternally in an uncomfortably hot and crowded place.

As a result, afternoons pass more pleasantly in Florence when one hides in its extensive gardens, the city’s most underreported diversion. The Boboli Gardens behind the Pitti Palace offer long manicured paths for either meandering exploration or an invigorating walk up the hill to the Porcelain Museum.

Even farther afield and across the Arno lies the long, winding Viale Michelangelo to Piazzale Michelangelo. While full of tour buses and their cargo, the piazzale nonetheless exhibits a panorama of Florence that stretches into one of the most beautiful 180-degree views in Italy. If you feel moved to see something other than a postcard picture, walk around the piazza’s periphery and examine the medieval town walls. Notice laundry hanging where the poor live. At night, the huge square tempts an after-dinner crowd escaping the city for cleaner and cooler air.

Or avoid the tourist- and Florentine-crowded summit and climb only partway up the Viale Michelangelo. Keep a sharp lookout for a rose garden, and benches under deeply shading trees, and even a fountain sparkling in the gloom. At any point that looks appealing, stop walking or get off the bus. (Of course, if you are not interested in walking back down, note the bus stops to return to town. The fountain, roses, and shade are at bus stop Michelangelo 2.) Smell the proverbial roses, unpack a lunch, and take pleasure in life. If imitation is truly the most sincere form of flattery, then the most sincerely flattering way to tour Florence is to adapt the citizens’ manner of leaving a few hours in the day for good food, fragrant flowers, and a well-deserved rest from all that beautiful art.