Hidden in the very center of Florence, Casa Martelli was for centuries (and until 1986) home to the ancient noble Florentine family of the Martellis. The apartments are adorned with elegant furnishings and precious works of art, such as the “landscape room” and the “pergola room” on the ground floor, the elegant staircase, the picture gallery and the ballroom on the main floor.

Since the seventeenth century, the palace was the residence of the Martelli family which, starting from the 1400s, gained power and prestige in Florence thanks to the close ties with the Medici family, both for their banking businesses and for their common interests in the fields of science and the arts.

Purchased by the Italian State in 1998, it was inhabited until a few years earlier by the last descendants of the family, and then opened to the public in 2009. This is why Martelli palace still preserves the atmosphere of the noble family’s domestic environment, according to the shape and style given to the building during the big renovation works begun in 1738 by the architect Bernardino Ciurini.

On the first floor, a suite of reception rooms show frescoed ceilings by late Baroque painters such as Vincenzo Meucci and Tommaso Gherardini, and a picture gallery is displayed on the walls: among the paintings, the Adoration of the Child by Piero di Cosimo, two panels by Beccafumi, two large canvases by Luca Giordano and Salvator Rosa stand out. Important works by Donatello and his workshop were once in the palace, including the famous San Giovannino and the large Martelli coat of arms, both now in the Bargello National Museum.

Once part of the summer apartments on the ground floor, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, two rooms are truly peculiar to the building: the “woodland room” painted by Niccolò Contestabili with a romantic woodland landscape and with a bathtub decorated with ruins, and the winter garden, or “bersò”, painted by Gaetano Gucci with a graceful trompe-l’oeil pergola.