Palazzo degli Alberti

In one room of this Prato palace hangs a Crucifixion by Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian master, painted around 1500. The cross stands in an open landscape, and at its foot lies a Jewish cemetery, its gravestones scattered in the grass. By the 17th century the panel was already in Florence, in the palace of the Niccolini family, which is how a Venetian picture came to settle in Tuscany.

The building was for many years the headquarters of the Cassa di Risparmio di Prato, the town's savings bank, which gathered art tied to the city and its region. The bank later passed to Banca Popolare di Vicenza, and after that bank failed, Intesa Sanpaolo, which took over its business, restored the palace over about three years. It reopened as a gallery in March 2022, with free entry.

About 90 of the collection's 142 works are on view. The route opens with frescoed street tabernacles from the early 1400s and passes a Madonna and Child by Filippo Lippi, the friar-painter who spent years working in Prato. It continues into the 17th century and ends with marble sculpture by Lorenzo Bartolini, born in the hills above Prato in 1777.

The other famous picture is a Crowning with Thorns, closely related to a version in Vienna. It was long taken for an old copy until a restoration in 1974 removed later layers of varnish, and it was then given to Caravaggio himself. Some scholars still see the hand of a close follower, and the attribution remains debated.