Fondazione Cerratelli, Costume museum in Villa Roncioni, San Giuliano Terme, Italy.
The Fondazione Cerratelli is a museum housed in the historic Villa Roncioni that preserves stage and film costumes, containing one of the largest such collections in Europe. The building holds thousands of garments worn by performers in famous productions.
The Casa d'Arte Cerratelli was founded in Florence in 1914 by the baritone Arturo Cerratelli, one of the first singers of Puccini's La bohème, who gathered stage costumes of his era in a palazzo near the Teatro della Pergola. From 1939 the workshop made its first film costumes, for Alessandro Blasetti's Un'avventura di Salvator Rosa, then worked with designers such as Gino Carlo Sensani, Piero Tosi and Danilo Donati. The Fondazione Cerratelli was created in 2005 by Floridia Benedettini of the Carnet tailoring house in Pisa to safeguard the archive, which moved to Villa Roncioni in Pugnano on 3 December 2011.
The collection preserves costumes worn in major opera houses and theaters, showing how stage art evolved through the clothing performers used. Visitors can see how costume design and theatrical production changed across different eras.
The museum occupies Villa Roncioni in Pugnano, a hamlet of San Giuliano Terme, not Rigoli. It opened there on 3 December 2011. The villa lies in the plain between Pisa and Lucca, reachable by car or local bus along the road to Pugnano.
Franco Zeffirelli is honorary president of the Fondazione, set up in 2005 by Floridia Benedettini of the Carnet tailoring house in Pisa to safeguard the archive. Among the holdings are costumes Renato Guttuso designed for La Giara (1939), with choreography by Aurel Milloss.
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