Museo Casa Rodolfo Siviero

Born in Guardistallo near Pisa in 1911, son of an officer in the Carabinieri, Rodolfo Siviero was raised in Florence, where he studied at the University of Florence and fell in love with Italian art and culture. Handsome, suave and sophisticated, he dabbled in poetry.

He joined the Fascist party and began to work as a secret agent in the Italian Army's Servizio Informazioni Militare, when he was charged with finding out about Hitler's plans for invading Austria. In 1937, he was given a scholarship to study art history as his cover for being in Germany.

Siviero began to privately question the rise of Nazism and its racial policies, and hated the way the German High Command (notably Hermann Goering) went about stripping Italy's churches and museums of their masterpieces to enrich their private collections.

He changed sides and became a partisan with the 8 September 1943 Armistice between Italy and the Allies, and made saving Italy's art his focus when the German High Command's Kunstschutz ('Art Protection') corps began to systematically remove works of art to 'protect' them by transporting them to Germany. Using this house (now the museum) on the banks of the Arno, then owned by the Jewish art historian Giorgio Castelfranco, as the operations centre, Siviero's partisans did all they could to foil the Kunstschutz.