Villa Corsini or ‘I Rinieri’ (after the name of the sixteenth-century owners), situated on the western outskirts of the city of Florence in the Castello district, was purchased in 1697 by the Counsellor to the Grand Duke Cosimo III, Filippo Corsini on account of its closeness to the Medici Villa of La Petraia. The renovation of the villa was entrusted to Giovan Battista Foggini (1652-1725), architect and sculptor to the Grand Duke, as well as Director of the court manufactures.

In 1968 the villa was donated to the Italian State by Galliano Boldrini, and since 2006 has become part of the Special Commission for the Florentine State Museums. Since the end of the 1980s the Villa has housed a repository of archaeological pieces belonging to the Tuscan Archaeological Commission and originating from the former Central Topographical Museum of Etruria, which was destroyed by the flood in 1966, while awaiting the new organisation of the National Archaeological Museum of Florence. The building has been subjected to a campaign of renovation directed by the Commission for the Environmental and Architectural Heritage of Florence, which began in 2000 with the large salon and the internal courtyard, except for the eastern side. Thanks to the contribution of the Ente Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze, it has been possible to organise the lighting of these areas and in 2006 to complete the rehabilitation of the courtyard, the salon and the long Gallery on the upper floor.

Some of the most important marbles from the collection of the Archaeological Museum have been set up in the salon, including the extraordinary statue of the Sleeping Ariadne, a Roman copy of an original made at the beginning of the second century BC in a workshop of Pergamon or Rhodes, which belonged to the collection of Cardinal Ferdinando dei Medici; the statue of the unfortunate daughter of Niobe who had dared to challenge the gods, a replica of an exemplar displayed in the Uffizi Gallery; the colossal bust of Hercules previously in Palazzo Portinari Salviati in Via del Corso.

Set along the walls of the courtyard are numerous Etruscan sarcophagi in nenfro – volcanic rock from Tuscania – originating from the ancestral tomb of the Statlane, dating to the third and second centuries BC, as well as a very precious feminine sarcophagus from Tarquinia, decorated in bas-relief with figured scenes charged with symbolic value which allude to cults and rites of spiritual salvation.

The display is conceived not so much as a standard museum layout, but rather as a way of rendering visible works which have been housed for years in the repositories, with the idea of stimulating a broader debate on the role of the Archaeological Museum in the city of Florence and the prospects for its renewed design.