In Livorno, the precious cargo was loaded onto a British frigate and promptly dispatched to Sicily, out of Bonaparte’s reach – for the time being.Īn art lover and a patriot, Puccini had spent months plotting the escape, mindful of the scourge that had struck the peninsula’s other città d’arte since Napoléon first crossed the Alps in 1796. Among them was a marble statue known as the Venus de’ Medici, a staple of the Grand Tour that had caught Napoléon’s eye four years earlier. The secretive convoy, commissioned by Tommaso Puccini, the head of the Uffizi art gallery, ferried 75 crates stacked with some of the finest sculptures and paintings from the Florentine museum and the city’s ducal palace.
In October 1800, as Napoléon’s armies approached the gates of Florence, a most unusual convoy slipped out of the Tuscan capital, sailing down the River Arno to the seaport of Livorno.