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 the costumes of the Far East. Especially intriguing, in this singular context, is the clear testimony to Stibbert’s late l9th- century eclectic taste provided by the theatrical arrangement of the objects in rooms themselves evoking different styles et 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), which reconstructs a life-size model of a military parade of l5th through l7th century European and Islamic mounted troops; ether rooms contain analogous reconstructions of the splendid armour of the Islamic world from North Africa to central Asia, and India moghul. The armory 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. Stibbert’s interest in fashion, spoken to in his precious publication, with its many illustrated plates, which appeared only in 1914, expressed itself in his acquisition of a vast number of military uniform and about a thousand pieces of European and Oriental civil clothing, quite rare and therefore of considerable interest: Ct particular note among those on exhibit is the petit costume worn by Napoleon for his coronation as Ring of Italy, consisting of a short cape in green velvet and a gold-embroidered white velvet waistcoat; one of the gems in the Oriental rooms is the figure of a young Chinese woman dressed in a Qing Dynasty (late l9th century) wedding costume from the Shanxi province in embroidered polychrome silk, her hairdo adorned with gold, silver, semi-precious stones, and freshwater pearls.
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