The Museum “Casa Carducci”, inaugurated in 2003, is located in Santa Maria a Monte, in the house where the Carducci family lived from 1856 to 1858. Here lived Dr. Michele, a village surgeon, with his wife and children. Giosuè, the eldest son, at the time held the chair of rhetoric at the High School in San Miniato.
As evidence of the stay on the Tuscan blooming hill, as the poet defines it in his verses, remains the correspondence between the family and the Municipality of Santa Maria a Monte, which today is kept at the Municipal Historic Archive.
It was in this house that the Carducci family’s tragedy unfolded: on November 4, 1857, the second-eldest son Dante died under circumstances that have never been clarified. The head of the family Michele himself fell ill, dying a short time later, on August 15, 1858. Both were buried in the old cemetery, today's Literary Park at the Campo della Rimembranza (Memorial Field), Via Grazie.
Since 2007 the house has hosted the permanent collection Tenero Gigante (Tender Giant) by Antonio Possenti, who dedicated his paintings to the works of the great poet. Characterized by a style suspended between a dreamy gaze and a meticulous attention to the surrounding reality, the works give an image of Carducci from a particular perspective, from which family affections, loves, intimate vision of nature emerge.
