By Camilla Sarra. Cover image Virginia Landi IG courtesy
Florence is best discovered by stepping slightly off the main paths and following those who truly live it. Beyond the postcard views, there’s another map—made of museums, archives, and cultural spaces that reveal Tuscany’s deeper story.
To explore this side of the region, we met Virginia Landi, journalist and editorial director of The Weekend Magazine, who guided us through her four favorite places. Four very different destinations, connected by a shared way of looking at the world: through experiences, contemporary culture, and the present moment. Founded as an independent online publication dedicated to culture, travel, and lifestyle, The Weekend Magazine was born from a clear editorial vision and the desire to offer carefully curated, accessible, high-quality content. It’s a space where a genuine passion for storytelling turns into cultural insight, and where the weekend is understood as time to inhabit—through a journey, an exhibition, a place, or a story.
Sometimes that means revisiting well-known places, other times discovering something new. The goal is always the same: to add a fresh perspective, highlight a detail, and suggest new ways of reading the present.
These are the four places Virginia chose to share with us—her personal map for curious weekends.
1. San Giorgio Library in Pistoia: Kiefer in the Reading Room
In Tuscany, art often finds its way into everyday spaces, becoming part of the landscape. This is exactly what happens at the San Giorgio Library in Pistoia, where a monumental work by Anselm Kiefer has been on view since 2007.
The library occupies a former factory transformed into a bright, welcoming space designed for daily use, with large reading rooms and more than 350,000 volumes. Here, Die Grosse Fracht (The Great Cargo) is installed on the back wall of the Departments’ reading room, creating a direct dialogue with the architecture around it.
2. Villa Rondinelli, Fiesole: Where Pietro Porcinai’s Landscape Vision Lives On
The Pietro Porcinai Archive tells the story of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century landscape design. Pietro Porcinai (Fiesole, 1910 – Florence, 1986) is considered the greatest Italian landscape architect of the modern era, with over 1,100 projects to his name—gardens, urban parks, industrial areas, even highways. His work shaped the way people relate to nature, turning landscape into a cultural language.
The archive brings this vision to life through drawings, watercolors, photographs, books, and documents that reveal his thinking and creative process. It is housed at Villa Rondinelli in Fiesole, a residence Porcinai purchased in 1954 and used as his workspace until 1986. The materials preserved here reflect a life devoted to landscape as an idea, a project, and an experience. Porcinai’s approach combined deep knowledge of plants and design with research, sensitivity, and bold vision—creating landscapes that still feel alive today.
3. La Specola, Florence: Europe’s Oldest Science Museum Where Curiosity Comes Alive
Crystals, minerals, rare animals, and scientific collections that span centuries of research. La Specola is one of the oldest science museums in Europe and the first to open its doors to the public, as early as 1775. Walking through its rooms feels like stepping into a time machine: Medici collections of fossils, exotic plants, and animals sit alongside the famous anatomical wax models, celebrated for their realism and scientific value. It’s not just a museum—it’s a story of human curiosity, of the desire to understand nature and our place within it.
Housed in the historic Palazzo Bini Torrigiani, just steps from Piazza Pitti, the museum reopened in 2024 after an extensive renovation. Today it offers an experience shaped by knowledge, wonder, and history—where every display feels like a new discovery waiting to happen.
4. Livorno’s Villa Mimbelli: The Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum You Can’t Miss
Just a short walk from the sea and the Terrazza Mascagni, Villa Mimbelli is one of Livorno’s most elegant 19th-century residences—and today it hosts the Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum. Built for grain merchant Francesco Mimbelli and designed by Vincenzo Micheli, the villa is a neoclassical jewel complete with frescoed rooms, eclectic furnishings, the famous “Arab Room,” and a formal Italian garden. The museum was moved here in 1994 from Villa Fabbricotti, turning the villa itself into a “living” part of the collection.
Spread across three floors, the museum houses 136 works from 19th- and early 20th-century Tuscany, with a strong focus on Giovanni Fattori (1825–1908), leader of the Macchiaioli. On the second floor you’ll find some of his most famous masterpieces, including Carica di Cavalleria a Montebello (1862), Assalto a Madonna della Scoperta (1868), and Mandrie maremmane (1893), alongside intimate “tavolette” portraits and vivid character studies like Bersagliere and Terza Moglie.
The ground floor is dedicated to religious and historical paintings by Enrico Pollastrini and earlier masters such as Cima da Conegliano and Neri di Bicci. The first floor showcases the Post-Macchiaioli movement, featuring artists like Plinio Nomellini, Mario Puccini, Raffaello Gambogi, and Leonetto Cappiello, with a divisionist detour through Benvenuto Benvenuti and refined portraits by Vittorio Corcos and Cesare Bartolena.
This is a top-level pinacoteca for lovers of the Macchiaioli: Fattori’s bold, synthetic brushstrokes and “macchiaiola” light anticipate Impressionism, and the whole experience feels like a total work of art inside a villa-museum.
