Out of Town: the Bandini Museum in Fiesole

Just a few minutes by bus from Florence, there's a small gem of a museum, entirely dedicated to medieval and Renaissance sacred art. This is the Bandini Museum in Fiesole, founded in 1795 by Angelo Maria Bandini, a canon and librarian of the Laurentian Library in Florence, as well as a scholar and a great collector.

Bandini purchased what was then the church of Sant'Ansano to create his museum of sacred art. Upon his death in 1803, Bandini donated his precious collection of works, dating from the 13th to the 15th century, to the Chapter of Fiesole.
In 1913, this collection was moved to the new building constructed by Giuseppe Castellucci behind the Cathedral, where it is now housed on two floors.

The ground floor displays inlaid furniture, bas-reliefs, paintings, and sculptures, including the polychrome terracotta depicting the Madonna and Child attributed to Filippo Brunelleschi, and a large collection of Della Robbia glazed terracotta sculptures created by the Della Robbia family.

The first floor is entirely dedicated to paintings from the 13th to the 17th centuries, including refined gold-ground paintings and sacred art produced in the workshops of Florentine and Tuscan painters.

A small museum of great cultural value, with works that chronicle the transition from the Gothic to the early Renaissance. It remains relatively unknown and is definitely worth discovering!