Museo Archeologico ★

The 4C BC Chimera di Arezzo at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze.

This embarrassingly rich collection of exquisite antiquities from around the world is overlooked by most Florence visitors who are in full-throttle Renaissance mode

A room in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze

The Florence National Archeological Museum should be a major sight... and it would be, were it in any other city, one not so overwhelmingly devoted to the riches of the Renaissance.

It conserves Egyptian artifacts, Roman remains, tons of Attic (Greek) vases, and an important Etruscan collection. Parts of it have been undergoing restoration and rearrangement for years and are closed indefinitely.

The relics to be on the lookout for start in the first ground-floor room with an early 4th-century BC bronze Chimera ★★, a mythical beast with a lion's body and head, a goat head sprouting from its back, and a serpent for a tail (the tail was incorrectly restored in 1785). The beast was found near Arezzo in 1553 and probably made in a Chiusi or an Orvieto workshop as a votive offering. The legend that claims Benvenuto Cellini recast the left paws is hogwash; the feet did have to be reattached, but they had the originals to work with.

Ground-floor room III contains a silver amphora studded with concave medallions, a work from Antioch (ca. AD 380).

In room III on the upper floor is an extraordinarily rare Hittite wood-and-bone chariot from the 14th century BC.

An Etruscan sarcophagus cover.

Room XIV upstairs has a cast bronze Arringatore, or orator, found near Perugia. It was made in the 1st century BC and helps illustrate how Roman society was having a great influence on the Etruscan world—not only in the workmanship of the statue but also in the fact that the Etruscan orator Aule Meteli is wearing a Roman toga.

Room XIII contains the museum's most famous piece, the Idolino ★. The history of this nude bronze lad with his outstretched hand is long, complicated, and in the end a bit mysterious. The current theory is that he's a Roman statue of the Augustan period (around the time of Christ), with the head perhaps modeled on a lost piece by the Greek master Polycleitus. The rub: Idolino was originally probably part of a lamp stand used at Roman banquets. The male torso displayed here was fished out of the sea near Livorno. It was made in Greece around 480 to 470 BC—the earliest known Greek bronze cast using the lost wax method.

The horse's head also in this room once belonged to the Medici, as did much of this museum's collections, and tradition holds that it was a source of inspiration for Verrocchio and Donatello as they cast their own equestrian monuments. It was probably once part of a Hellenistic sculpture from the 2nd or 1st century BC.