Villa Corsini (known also as Villa Rinieri, after the previous owner) stands at the gates of Florencein the town of Castello. Being close to the Medicean villa of Petraia, it was acquired in 1697 by Grand Duke Cosimo III's advisor Filippo Corsini, who entrusted the reconstruction to the court architect and sculptor Giovan Battista Foggini. In 1968 the villa was donated to the Italian state by Galliano Boldrini and today the hall preserves a collection of sculpture and ancient epigraphy, originally from the National Archaeological Museum of Florence.
Here you can admire pieces of Greek and Roman sculpture, including the extraordinary statue Ariadne Sleeping, a Roman copy of a Greek original carved in a workshop in Pergamon or Rhodes at the beginning of the 2nd century B.C.E; it belonged to the collection of Cardinal Ferdinando dei Medici. Another standout is the statue of an unfortunate son of Niobe, a woman who dared to boast to the gods about her fourteen children, which is modelled on an example in the Uffizi and the colossal bust of Hercules.
Along the walls of the courtyard were found a number of Etruscan sarcophaguses in Nenfro volcanic rock from Tuscania. These come from the elegant tomb of the Statlane family, dating back to the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C.E.There is also an extremely precious feminine sarcophagus from Tarquinia, decorated in bas-relief with figural scenes that are loaded with symbolic value and allusions to cultic rites and sacrifices.
