Museo internazionale e biblioteca della musica di Bologna

In 1776, in London, Thomas Gainsborough painted the composer Johann Christian Bach, youngest son of Johann Sebastian, and the canvas was sent to Bologna. It was meant for Padre Giovanni Battista Martini, a Franciscan friar and one of the most respected music teachers in Europe, who had taught Bach years before and was assembling a gallery of the musicians he knew and admired. Today the portrait hangs in Bologna's International Museum and Library of Music, on Strada Maggiore, in rooms of the Palazzo Aldini Sanguinetti decorated with Neoclassical frescoes.

The museum opened in 2004, but its core is Martini's 18th-century collection. Alongside the paintings, many of them commissioned by him, are his printed music and manuscripts, letters to and from composers and thousands of opera librettos. In the same room as the Bach hangs a portrait of Mozart dated 1777, a reminder that Mozart studied with Martini as a boy in 1770. Farther on are more than 80 historic instruments, among them a harpsichord built in 1606 by the Venetian maker Trasuntino and the Pleyel piano that belonged to Gioachino Rossini.