The story
The most theatrical room in Palazzo Mansi is a bridal chamber. Behind a carved and gilded alcove designed by the architect Raffaele Mazzanti, the walls are hung with Brussels tapestries telling the story of the Roman emperor Aurelian and Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, woven in the workshop of Geraert Peemans.
The Mansi, a Lucca merchant family, acquired the palace in the late 17th century and remodelled it as a showpiece in the Baroque taste. In the Salone della Musica, the Bolognese painter Giovan Gioseffo Dal Sole frescoed scenes from Virgil's Aeneid inside painted architecture by Marcantonio Chiarini. The family sold the palace to the Italian state in 1965, and today it is a national museum, half residence and half picture gallery.
The pictures arrived in 1977, when Lucca's Pinacoteca moved here from the Ducal Palace. Its core is a gift made to the city in 1847 by Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, when Lucca was joined to his state. The rooms run from Tuscan painting, with Beccafumi, Bronzino and Pontormo's Portrait of a Young Man, through Venetians such as Veronese and Tintoretto, to Salvator Rosa and Luca Giordano. On the first floor, volunteers of the Tessiture Lucchesi association still work historic hand looms, weaving traditional Lucca fabrics.
