Museo di Palazzo Davanzati

This guide to the Museo di Palazzo Davanzati opens in 1838, when Carlo Davanzati, the last of his family in this house, climbed to the top-floor loggia and ended nearly three centuries of one lineage under one roof. It follows the decades of neglect that came after, as the palace was carved into rented apartments and its frescoes plastered over, until an antique dealer named Elia Volpi bought the wreck in 1904 and set out to remake it as his own vision of a medieval merchant's home.