Casa Museo Rodolfo Siviero

Siviero’s name is mainly associated with the recovery of Italian art heritage that disappeared during World War II. Mainly, he was responsible for tracking down and returning artworks that had been illegally exported from Italy from the 1930s to the 1980s.

During the Nazi occupation, Siviero was an agent for an Information Service that collaborated with anti-fascist forces under Allied military command and, as part of the general intelligence effort, he also gathered information on Nazi art theft. After the liberation of Florence (August 1944) Siviero collaborated, on behalf of the Ministry of Education, with the Allied Fine Arts and Monuments Commission to protect and recover Italian artworks. In April 1946, the Italian government officially established the Ufficio Recuperi (Recoveries Department) directed by Siviero. In October of that year, he was put in charge of the Italian diplomatic mission to the Allied military government in Germany responsible for handling the return of artworks stored in collecting points located on German territory.

From the 1950s until his death in 1983, Siviero headed the Restitution Delegation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dealing not only with the recovery of stolen works in Germany but also with other artworks that had disappeared from Italy.

The house museum is located on Lungarno Serristori, in a neo-Renaissance-style villa built in the 1870s. In 1919, the Castelfranco-Forti family turned it into a cultural salon frequented by literati, artists and intellectuals, including Giorgio De Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio. The patrons of the house also included a young Rodolfo Siviero (Guardistallo 24 Dec. 1911 - Florence 26 Oct. 1983)

During the German occupation from 1943-44, it became the operational base for a group of partisans under the direction of Rodolfo Siviero, who sought to counter the Nazi looting of artworks. The Siviero family purchased the building in two separate phases: the first floor in 1944 and in the rest of the house in 1963.

Siviero became Minister Plenipotentiary in 1946. From that time until his death, he operated as head of the Delegation for the Restitution of Works of Art, a body within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that dealt with the return to Italy of masterpieces taken by the Germans during the occupation, or which the fascist regime had donated or sold to Nazi Germany in breach of the Italian law for the protection of cultural property, in effect since 1939.

The artworks preserved in the house are those purchased by the Siviero family and by Rodolfo. They reflect the tastes of a bourgeois family of that time and, more importantly, portray the episodes of his life as head of the Restitution Delegation.

The collection includes an important nucleus of 20th-century works that Siviero acquired from artist friends such as De Chirico, Soffici, Manzù and Annigoni, paintings and sculptures from the medieval Renaissance period, archaeological finds from the Etruscan and Roman periods, furniture, ceramics and domestic and ecclesiastical furnishings from the late Middle Ages to the 19th century.

The rooms on the mezzanine floor of the house, purchased by Siviero in 1963, preserve the spirit that Siviero himself wanted to leave to his house, stating in his will that the interior design be done by his friend, restorer Alfio Del Serra. The rooms give an insight into Siviero’s deep passion for art and for the refined, eclectic taste typical of the bourgeoisie between the 19th and 20th centuries, reflected in Florence in the collections of Horne, Bardini and Stibbert.

On the first floor is the apartment where the Sivieros lived from 1944. This is where the most intimate memories reside, together with family scenes, immortalised by iconic photographs of artworks recovered and exhibited in the house with his parents, and shots of him “posing” with his sister Imelde, who lived in the apartment until 1999.