Museum Review: Museo delle Terre Nuove (Museum of New Towns)

Review of the Museo delle Terre Nuove (Museum of New Towns) located in San Giovanni Valdarno and inaugurated on 21 December 2013. The Museum of New Towns is housed in the prestigious Palazzo di Arnolfo in the town of San Giovanni Valdarno, 20 miles southeast of Florence, Italy. Its thirteen galleries introduce the public to one of the most fascinating developments in medieval urban planning: the foundation of new towns during the three centuries following the demographic and urban renewal that occurred ca. 1000. The curators who successfully responded to the challenge of designing such an exhibition were David Friedman of MIT and Paolo Pirillo of the University of Bologna, the two best-qualified experts on the subject and the authors of numerous publications on the late medieval city. Their collaboration has resulted in a fully bilingual exhibition that employs multiple media, including drawings, video installations, and models produced specifically for the museum. The center of San Giovanni, founded by the Florentines in 1299 to increase their control within the eastern region of Tuscany, is itself an example of one of these new towns (Figure 1). The first gallery is devoted to the museum’s home, the Palazzo di Arnolfo, which was originally built as the town hall and attributed by Giorgio Vasari to the architect Arnolfo di Cambio. This installation aims to reconstruct the history of the palace through the examination of archaeological artifacts unearthed during the recent restorations.