Two years ago, I wrote a piece in these pages about my multi-year struggle to see Gianolorenzo Bernini’s greatest bust—possibly his greatest sculpture—his Constanza, which lives on the top floor of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the national sculpture museum. The Bargello, whose collection is better than any five museums in the Western Hemisphere, is only a second-tier museum in Florence, and the Constanza room is almost always closed.
Thanks to several strokes of improbable timing and good luck, I’ve been in Florence five times in the last decade. During my first trip, which was my first trip to Florence, Constanza’s room was open. During every subsequent trip I’ve made in the last nine years, her room has been closed—aside from ten minutes in 2014 where a guard saw me incredulously rattling the locked door to her room, and let me inside. Normally when I ask the guards at the Bargello when the room will be open, they shrug, say they don’t know, and gradually lose the ability to speak English.
