The great composer’s birthplace has become a historic house museum in the heart of the city of Lucca; here the Maestro spent his childhood and youth before moving to Milan.

The museum conserves the original furnishings, precious items belonging to the musician, including the Steinway & Sons pianoforte on which he composed Turandot, autographed scores, letters, paintings, photographs, sketches, memorabilia and valuable documents.
Outstanding among the bequests is Turandot’s costume, patterned on a design by Umberto Brunelleschi and worn by Maria Jeritza for the first performance at the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 1926.

Two rooms, nos. 33 and 34, and a corridor that runs above the open gallery to the reception rooms: this is the space that the picture gallery in Palazzo Mansi in Lucca dedicates to the twentieth-century collection in a recently renewed display.

Here on show are the city’s leading painters, starting in the first years of the century with the innovator Alcide Campriani, the youthful “Divisionists” of the Pro Arte Lucensi (Giuseppe Lunardi, Arturo Daniele, Giuseppina Cristiani), and the master Ezio Ricci. The years between the two wars are illustrated by the Classical-styled Synthetism of Raffaello Isola, Bruno Cordati and Giuseppe Ardinghi and by the unorthodox Expressionism of Lorenzo Viani. The evolution of sculpture is traced from the plasters by Alfredo Angeloni up to the relief Inaco Biancalana created in the 1960s, the chronological apex of the exhibition.

The Foundation was set up in 1984 following a bequest to the city of Lucca of the photographic archives and library of the historians and art critics Licia and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti.

A patrimony reflecting the interests of the Ragghiantis in contemporary art, it has been expanded over time by other important bequests of books and archival items (from P. C. Santini, A. Geri, S. Coppola, G. Bertolli, D. Selli, R. Carrieri, M. Tobino, and A. Salvadori).

The Foundation today also promotes the art of the twentieth century through an outstanding exhibit, the project Artisti Lucchesi del XIX e XX secolo (Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Artists of Lucca) — a didactic programme specifically focusing on contemporary art — and through a cycle of meetings with scholars and museum curators. It holds a huge collection of works, about 800 of them, begun by Ragghianti himself and composed almost exclusively of donations by artists born in the first half of the twentieth century: works not usually exhibited to the public, except for the sculpture section (featuring, among others, Cascella, Guerrini, Giò Pomodoro, Vangi and Tavernari) that decorates the two cloisters and the interior of the library complex of San Micheletto, seat of the Foundation.