The story
The room most visitors remember is the Cavalcade Hall. A procession of armoured riders, European and Islamic, sits on life-size horses, and the parade of twelve Italian and German suits at its heart was designed in 1880 by the architect Cesare Fortini. It sets the tone for the whole house on the Montughi hill above Florence.
The man behind it was Frederick Stibbert, born in Florence in 1838 to an English father and an Italian mother, a financier with an inherited fortune. In the 1860s he began rebuilding the villa his mother had bought, once a property of the Davanzati family, and spent nearly fifty years filling it. Armour was his passion, but he also bought costumes, paintings, porcelain, tapestries, furniture and bronzes, and arranged them room by room like a stage set of history.
The Japanese rooms are the other surprise. Four of them hold around 95 suits of Japanese armour, with helmets, swords, lacquer and costume, among the most important such collections outside Japan.
Stibbert died in 1906 and left everything to the British government, naming the city of Florence as the alternative heir. Britain did not take it up, and in 1908 Florence opened the villa and its garden as a public museum, with tens of thousands of objects still in the rooms he arranged.
