Official Tourism Board for the valley of Mugello welcomes you in Mugello, Tuscany, where you can spend your holidays next to Florence.

Villa Pecori Giraldi - Borgo San Lorenzo

Villa Pecori GiraldiGalileo Chini (1873 - 1956) had a brilliant intuition when in 1896 he decided to found a factory of artistic ceramics, including himself in person in an open debate which at that time interested the future of decorative art. With the name “Ceramic Art ” his family produced china and useful objects of “a modern ” taste inspired to the most modern English and French artistic tendencies rather than getting into the track of the tradition of Italian ceramic. “The Ceramic Art ” had a relatively short life as a result of a disagreement between Galileo Chini and the other partners. But in 1906 a new factory was opened in Borgo San Lorenzo by the same Galileo who was the artistic director and by his cousin Chino Chini (1870 - 1957) to whom the technical management was entrusted. Galileo, engrossed by various commitments, provided only the designs for the outlines and the decorative products which were then carried out under the accurate direction of Chino who became a consignee of secret formulae. The new production covered the art of glass - making and abandoned the redundant shapes of the Liberty Style, to take up more rigorous geometries from Austria or to explore the possible offers of the new fashion of “the primitive ”. Thus the hand-made articles which were characteristics of the <<Kilns of San Lorenzo>> were born. There were big vases or “cache” pot on which a figure from nature; a May-bug or the eye of a peacock feather was stylized to the point of becoming unrecognisable, or where a series of repeated shrubs and fawns in cobalt - blue on a natural background of stoneware effects of rocky paintings.

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Another source of inspiration to which Europe had been leading for nearly two centuries emphasizing always different characters was the East to which Galileo had got acquainted personally by staying in Bangkok (1911 - 1914) to decorate the royal palace of the Siamese king. Vegetable braiding and flat figures in the bi-dimension surface of vases and panels in strong contrast colours or glittering, shiny metals characterize this type of decoration. Besides these products the “ Kilns San Lorenzo ” never stopped producing neo-mediaeval and neo renaissance ceramics. The innumerable ornaments of the Della Robbia style that adorn our altars and the lunettes of the churches are an evidence of this. Sometimes they are real mouldings interpreted again in modern terms thanks to the adding of decorative geometric subjects drawn out from the fluent production. In this match we can read the relationship of Galileo Chini with the tradition which he never repudiated or imitated passively but rather made it his own. An outstanding feature that rightly qualifies the Chini activity in the Liberty culture besides the stylistic consideration is the overall idea of decoration. Nearly all the members of the Chini family, among whom Galileo, Chino and his son Tito (artistic director of the factory since 1925) were all decorators and so when they intervened in a place they were able to make the pictorial decoration, the ceramic parts, the large glass windows and sometimes to design the furnishings. The town hall of Borgo San Lorenzo, whose interior decorations including doors, seats and lamps designed by Tito Chini in 1931 is a remarkable example. Another example is the shrine of St. Francis which is next to the parish church to which Chino, author of the design, made his sons Tito as a painter and Augusto as a sculptor work on it. Once again we can see the Chini presence in the “Oratorio della Misericordia ” which was originally adorned only with the painting “Madonna with Child ” by Galileo in the bowl shape apse in 1908 and later through the years by the ceramic ornaments and glass windows by Dino and Pietro Chini.

The museum itinerary

The roots of the presence of the Chini in Mugello is particularly evident in Villa Pecori Giraldi where the Museum of the Chini Manufactures is put up in spaces and rooms which are characterized by decorative elements on the walls and ceiling or by ceramic tiles of a particular colouring quality.
The expositive ties (the subdivision in small and medium size rooms of one's own house) have been converted in the same number of stages in the narrative tour that prepare the visitor to the reading of the objects, manufactured articles and diagrams arranged in adjoining rooms in a way to allow the visitor to value the differences and similarities as far as to cause amazement in front of the exceptional piece.
The tour starts on the ground floor in the space once used as a kitchen where the covering of the walls in tiles from the Chini factory give us an idea of the original spirit desired by the founders. The first expositive sections have a documentary character: the genealogy of the Chini, the artistic ability of every member of the family from the premise to arrive to the foundation of the furnaces in Borgo San Lorenzo and to craft experiment where creative imagination and technical skill succeed to produce a multiform series of objects and manufactured goods (from drafts for architecture to furnishings in ceramic, stone, glass) designed both for the middle class as well as for the common class.
The articulation of the Chini experience is underlined in the decorative cycle of the representation hall of the Villa Pecori Giraldi, which can be considered a "museum within a museum". Among the painting decorations of the hall there is the description of St. George, where the pleasant legend is restored by means of fine writing, precious colours and the attention given to the details which send us back to the aristocratic imagination of the pre-Raffaello.
The multiform and diffusion of the Chini works are shown in the following sections .
Here the ceramic tiling of the fire-place placed at the end of the room comments the significant pictures chosen to recall the decorative artistic world of the Chini which make up the visual point of the expositive tour.
In the next room there is the reconstruction of the working places of the Chini Manufactures; it is about an episode when technical tools, material ingredients and finished products referred to the production of complements for buildings are being presented.
From this section the museum tour allows the progressive approach to the most excellent artistic objects of the collection. They are findings made by using different substances through which it is possible to read the experimental and qualitative valency which characterized the artistic craft of the Chini ceramic factory.
In this way we pass from small vases in stoneware with architectonic decorations to special pieces like the extraordinary glazed balusters made both for civil and sacred architecture, the many coloured elements found in the altars of the church of San Silvestro in Barberino di Mugello which collects more than an example of the eclectic versatility of the Chini.
The art furnishing represented by numerous vases in ceramic and stone and rare multi-coloured glass make up the most significant group of the collection for each one an expositive solution has been thought of in order to evolve the place where the objects gave decorum, comfort and value.