When the autumnal sun sets over the Piazza Santa Maria Novella in Florence it paints the 14th-century buildings around the irregular shaped space with shades that are reminiscent of a soft Sancerre rose. And there comes a moment when, like the wine itself, the buildings seem to become fluid, ready to wash themselves down the Via Cavour into the River Arno and under the Ponte Vecchio.
At that instant anything seems possible. One can imagine a giant picking up the Santa Maria Novella Basilica, complete with its fine lattice work frontage from 1340, and turning it upside down to create a crenulated table for a beanstalk palazzo.
This is the way that Florence has reshaped the imagination of artists for centuries. At dusk the Tuscan hills that surround the city look like a pack of sleeping dromedaries in purple livery and there is a caravanserai magic in the air. In the city where Lippi, Rubens, Raphael and Michelangelo all created masterpieces one comes to expect something special and, for those who love interiors, the Palazzo Pitti recently had a treat in store - one that will soon make its way to Hong Kong.
The Palazzo was built in the 15th century for Luca Pitti but his family's line was swallowed by doom before the building was complete. By the end of the century the palazzo had become the principal residence of the Medici family, who by 1605 had begun to use it as the main storehouse for their extraordinary collection of Renaissance art.
Until last month ago the palazzo's Sala Bianca (white room) had been used for an exhibition of photography called Le bellezze di Firenze, which featured the interiors of museums and galleries of art captured on film by Massimo Listri, a master image maker who had been making pictures of famous interiors for more than 30 years.
Next month, as part of a collaboration between the cities of Florence and Hong Kong, the exhibition will arrive here. The setting for the exhibition will not be as grand as the Palazzo Pitti but the message will be the same: that there is much that designers of beautiful homes can learn from the interiors of Florentine galleries and museums.
Conveying this message has been Listri's mission for several decades. Prior to creating Le Bellezze di Firenze he published nine previous collections of photographs featuring the interiors of homes and palaces all over the world. His own home was originally the annexe of a 16th-century palazzo in Florence. The space is full of pieces Listri has collected from all over the world, each one a motif signifying some aspect of style or elegance. In this sense Listri loves the spaces in galleries because he believes a home should be a place where the owner displays all the various aspects of their personality, and there is no better way to do that than to place cherished objects on almost every surface.
