Word: batini
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After 20 years of interviewing the city's rich and noble families for La Nazione Italiana, Journalist Giorgio Batini, 37, became haunted by the splendor of the private collections that ordinary people were never allowed to see. One day he approached the Contessa Bianca Cavazza, president of the women's committee of the Florentine Red Cross, with a plan: Why not stage a huge public exhibition for the benefit of the Red Cross? The journalist and the contessa started making the rounds, and one by one the Corsini, the Ginori, the Serristori, the Antinori, the Pucci...
Last week, in 16 rooms and the art gallery of the Borghese Palace, some 600 of the "Secret Treasures of the Houses of Florence" went on display. It was, said Batini, "Florence behind the fagade," and it turned out to be a spilled cornucopia of ancient masterpieces and oddments. There was everything from brilliant primitive paintings to snuff boxes shaped like glass slippers, 14th century Tuscan ceramics and the red-fringed picnic basket that an 18th century Corsini cardinal once took into the Vatican conclave from which he emerged, basket on arm, as Pope Clement XII. The Serristori loaned their...
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