Museo Casa vasari

Beautiful vegetable gardens in the village of San Vito, in the best air of the city

“[…] I began by buying a house in Arezzo in the suburb of S.Vito, where you can breathe the best air in this city […]”: with these words Vasari described his house, purchased in 1541, now home to the museum of the same name.
Giorgio Vasari (1511 – 1574), art historian and multifaceted artist, author of The Lives, an essential source of artistic historiography, was always very attached to his hometown, as shown by the important and numerous works scattered throughout the Arezzo area.
Although he only stayed there for short periods, his thoughts often turned to the house in Arezzo, considered a refuge where he could relax on his return from his many commitments.
The painter personally created the decorations of the rooms on the main floor which testify to the intention of launching a precise iconographic program of celebration of the role of the artist, using mythological, biblical and allegorical references, reproposed in the panel paintings that decorate the walls of the house.
The works exhibited in the picture gallery set up at the beginning of the 1950s come largely from the collections of the Florentine Galleries, a collection of 16th century paintings belonging in particular to the ‘studiolo painters’, i.e. those artists who around 1570 collaborated with Vasari on the decoration of the Studiolo of Francesco I de’ Medici in Palazzo Vecchio. These include Alessandro Allori, Perin del Vaga, Giovanni Stradano, Santi di Tito and others from Arezzo and Florence.
Next to the house is the Italian-style roof garden, which was originally more extensive and included vegetable gardens.
Inside Casa Vasari, excluded from the museum itinerary and not open to the public, there is the precious Vasari Archive containing the artist’s correspondence and documents such as Ricordanze and Zibaldone.